We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
"Ride to Riches With Radio"
Some GetRich-Quick Schemes that are All Bull and a Yard Wide By H. J. KENNER
Managing Secretary of The Better Business Bureau of New York
C summer the public was greeted by the lusty and hungry cries of newborn radio promotions in the latest infant industry of the United States. These companies had sprung up all over the country as a direct result of the sudden popularity of radio and the almost unlimited publicity gained by this fascinating product of many inventions.
The best known and most experienced radio engineers, who were plugging away at their scientific tasks, refused to get over-excited by the public furor, and were most reticent about the commercial possibilities in the manufacture of apparatus, but the professional promoters and stock* manipulators, who cared nothing for the scientific development of radio and who were merely determined to make this new art and industry pay them a tribute, were not slow to tell the public what would happen. This gentry moved by the scores and hundreds into the radio field, organized companies and began campaigns for funds to launch their own corporations. In New York, they had started many companies, had done most of the work in preparation for their stock sales campaigns and were already descending upon the public with small, select armies of hair-trigger salesmen and with advertising of the "do-it-now" ballyhoo type.
The Better Business Bureau of New York City undertook a survey of the radio field. It found the industry already infested with unsound financial organizations. If none of these companies had gathered in big sums of money from the public, it was because it had not had the time. In line with the policy of the Bureau
and the Truth-in-Advertising movement, it was determined to tell the public about the fake radio companies before they gained much headway.
Among the stock-selling radio companies the International Radio Corporation appeared to be the worst offender. It was capitalized for $4,000,000 and the stock was being sold by various small brokers in and around New York. The company had a large suite of offices. It professed to be a going concern and boasted a plant in Newark. The company's officials and sales agents talked very optimistically of its immediate future, saying, among other things, that the "I.R.C." had acquired several valuable patents, and that its officials were nationally known in finance and prominent in radio science. Immediately after the bulletin exposing the International Radio Corporation had been published, Charles Beadon, promoter of the " I.R.C.," brought complaint against the managing secretary of the Better Business Bureau for criminal libel, and two civil libel suits asking damages of $600,000 were filed against the managing secretary and the members of the board of directors of the Bureau.
The result of all this bluster was that the criminal libel case was thrown out of court and the other two suits were dropped. When the criminal libel suit came up for a hearing, Jerome Simmons, counsel for the Bureau, merely pleaded truth in defense of his client. Relying entirely on the testimony of former officials and employees of the "I.R.C.," Mr. Simmons proved that every statement made in the Better Business Bureau's bulletin was true.
Thus, according to the "literature" of the