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The March of Radio
281
"BY REQUEST" WJAZ GOT 4284 TELEGRAMS IN FOUR HOURS
Left to right: Mr. C, H. Handerson, WJAX, Cleveland; Mr. Raymond Walker, Manager of Bureau of Music Release; Senator Frank W. Elliott, WOC, Davenport; Mr. Eugene McDonald, Jr., WJAZ, Chicago; Mr. Paul B. Klugh, Executive Chairman; Mr. William S. Hedges, WMAQ, Chicago; Mr. J. Elliott Jenkins, WDAP. Chicago; Mr. C. B. Cooper, Department of Commerce Radio Committee; Mr. John Shepard, 111, WNAC, Boston; Mr. Powel Crosley, Jr., WLW, Cincinnati. Executives of the National Association of Broadcasters in their convention at the Hotel Commodore, New York, are examining the results of a test of the size of a listening audience at WJAZ. 4284 paid telegrams, averaging 75 cents each in cost were received in four hours. It is estimated that only one person in a hundred would be willing to spend this amount, and that therefore the number of listeners-in on that night may fairly be estimated at 400,000
while the inventor was working for them, the idea is theirs, not his.
Strange as this may seem at first, it is seen to be the only reasonable and just decision to make in cases of this kind. All of the company's secrets are opened for the instruction of their investigators — they pay him what is thought by them a reasonable salary in the hope and expectation that his brain will yield something worth more to them than the salary they have paid him while the idea was incubating. It is a kind of a bet they make on their experimenting staff; salaries are paid for years without anything of actual money value being turned out by the experimenter, but he is still employed in the hope that his direct, or indirect, contributions to the output of the factory will more than offset what he costs the company.
It is evident that if the court should rule otherwise than it did in this case, and as it always rules in such cases, it would be possible for an investigator to work for a company for a
year or two, learning all their secrets, drawing a salary, turning out nothing, and then, when a valuable idea came to him, sell his idea and services to a rival concern. Such would evidently be unfair procedure, and if it could be successfully carried out by technical workers, would do much to wreck the wonderful research organizations which many of our large companies have built up during the last decade.
In awarding a verdict for the Burgess Company the Court said: "The question here involved is not whether the invention was reduced to practice or whether it was merely an abandoned experiment, but whether it was 'made or conceived' during the life of Mr. Runoff's [the investigator whose transfer of association caused the suit to be brought] contract with the [Burgess] Laboratories, which contract was by its terms automatically continued in force until Mr. Ruhoff resigned to go with the French Company. If the con