Radio Broadcast (May-Oct 1922)

How Radio Came to Independence Kansas By THOMAS M. GALEY This is a typical story of how the rage for radio is spreading, community by community, throughout the United States. — The Editors. MAR WIBLE brought it. At least it was Omar who opened the gates to it when, on the fifth of last December, he heard over his wireless telephone, the services at the Calvary Church in Pittsburgh, Pa., and the local newspaper printed an account of his experience. The curiosity of the public was instantly aroused, and many local telephone inquiries kept Omar Wible busy vindicating the veracity of the local press. For about a dozen years before that, to be sure, Hubert Devore had been reading the big spark stations, and one evening about a year ago he was startled by the sound of a human voice in his receivers. It was the operator at the station on Catalina Island in California whom he heard talking, but that startling experience didn't get into the newspapers. So it was Omar Wible's hearing of the church services which gave the craze its first impetus. Independence is a prosperous town in southeastern Kansas. Its twelve thousand inhabitants are of average intelligence and education, but only half a dozen boys who owned little home-made sparkers had ever heard, until then, that telephoning without wires was a practical reality. But soon, the word "broadcast" began to be heard, and then the fact became public property that the East was already started on a rampage of radio. Kansas is generally about two months behind the East in experiencing a business boom or depression. This seems to be equally the case with radio, but by the middle of last February it appeared that everyone wanted to " listen in, " and by the end of that month the mysterious functions of a variometer or a grid-leak were becoming rather ordinary talk about town, especially where there was a small boy in the family. Omar Wible had played with electrical apparatus ever since he had attended school in Chanute, Kansas, a dozen years ago. He had constructed with his own hands, the receiving set with which he heard Pittsburgh, using jelly glasses, "Quaker Oats" cylinders, some wire, and an electric light bulb; at least, that is how the installation looked to a young business man who promptly called to see what sort of an apparatus could enable a man to hear church services 863 rniles away. Omar Wible, whose chief trouble at that time was that he had to make a living beating the drum in a moving picture show every evening during the very time when broadcasting fairly fills the air, went on and built himself a transmitter, using a generator from a junked automobile, so that the whole apparatus cost only about forty dollars. Then he broadcasted a concert by the Girls' Glee Club of Emporia College. Some of the members of the club slipped away to homes where friends, gathered around receiving sets, were eagerly awaiting the concert. The songs were pretty much garbled and the college cheer sounded like a dog fight, but everybody was delighted. Omar Wible's aerial was tied to the top of a twenty-foot post, and stretched its crooked length from the front curb to the alley. Independence has seen many aerials since, but it hasn't been able to get rid of that feeling of the supernatural, the impossible, which Omar's aerial caused in those who gazed upon it. Even the detector tube, which, after all, only translates the faint impulses caught by the aerial cannot exceed the wonder of it. About a dozen individuals promptly planned to put in transmitting sets, so they could keep in touch with relatives in Los Angeles or Cape Cod, but that wave of enthusiasm diminished as local knowledge progressed. It finall\' simmered down to the establishment of a real radio store and a rather costl>' i KW transmitter. To be sure, there is not much genius to transmit, but all the same it is planned to carry church services to ever\' farmhouse within a reasonable radius and occasionally Schumann