Radio Broadcast (May-Oct 1922)

New Radio Net for Rogues 231 Mr. Fish in 1908 calling for the installation of wireless communication links between Martha's Vineyard and Boston, and for the construction of wireless long distance lines between Boston, New York, Buffalo, and Washington. The contracts were not carried out because the banking interests supplying money for the Bell Telephone Co. decided that the company was expanding too rapidly and revised their policy, in consequenceof which wireless telephony for commercial use was delayed for about a dozen years. Professor Fessenden describes the first transmission of articulate speech across the Atlantic, which was accidentally accomplished in Nov. 1906. Operators telephoning between Brant Rock and Plymouth were overheard on several occasions by his operators at Machrihanish, Scotland, who identified the voices of the men speaking and sent back several reports giving the exact words of the conversations, which were subsequently verified by the log books of the station. Since that time the inventor of the wireless telephone has been constantly improving upon it, developing and simplifying it so that it may be adopted for more general use. New Radio Net for Rogues William J. Burns Tells Some of the Plans of the Recently Established Bureau of Investigation of the Department of Justice. Radio to Play a Large Part By DONALD WILHELM TO BE recorded upon the all-pervading ether as a criminal, that," says William J. Burns, detective extraordinary and head of the Department of Justice Bureau of Investigation, "will be as good as landing behind the bars." The old-style rogues' gallery is now out of date; we are, Mr. Burns says, on the threshold of a system incom.parably more thorough, incomparably swifter, incomparably more discouraging to crim.e and criminals. "The Department of Justice Bureau of Investigation," he told me, "is soon to begin using radio." Radio, he explained, is to be used not only for the detection of criminals but for the prevention of crime. "V/e are trying to prevent crime," Mr. Burns said. "That will be our greater work." He added: "We are trying to make this institution function in the interests of the people — for the first time." He described how the Bureau of Investigation had been, in the main, a kind of service bureau for the Government, whereas now, in ways not heretofore revealed, its new aim is to serve the entire American public in its unprecedented battle against lawlessness — lawlessness, he points out, that is aided and abetted by new and swifter means of transportation, especially the automobile. His Bureau is now setting up a kind of national and international switchboard. It is to be called a bureau of identification. Its handmaid will be radio. It will use radio, Mr. Burns says, to broadcast even fingerprints! "We will have registered in the Bureau of Identification," he explained, "the fingerprints of any and every criminal, and of any other person who cares to put himself on record. We will have their photos and descriptions. We will be in touch with every police agency in the United States." Many police departments are establishing the use of radio — they asked for, and were granted by the Radio Conference, the use use of a separate band of waves, for their particular use, for city and state public safety broadcasting. Chicago has found radio useful in detecting stolen automobiles and automobile thieves. Philadelphia is coming into line. Berkeley, California, whose Police Chief, Vollm.er, is matching science against crime, has every policeman provided with an automobile and virtually every auto equipped with radio. And other city police departments are equipping not only their motor boats, cycles and automobiles, and even in some instances their patrolmen, with radio but are using it to link up fire department apparatus. The writer's view is that this is only the very beginning; war against common