Radio Broadcast (May-Oct 1925)

44 Radio Broadcast Company had handled more business over its cables in 1924 than during any previous year of the company's existence. The changing economic situation in Europe was reflected in a growing demand for cable service, and as for radio's encroachment on the cable's territory, Mr. Mackay says "on the contrary, the radio has actually stimulated the use of electrical communication between the continents, and of the new business so created, the cables are really getting more than their proportionate share." Mr. SarnofT As An Optimist SEVERAL times during the last decade the press has chronicled that someone had laid low Demon Static and that hereafter, by the application of some heavenborn device, radio was to be freed of troublesome atmospheric disturbances. Too well now, we know that these were all illusions. But now Mr, SarnofT, General Manager of the R. C. A., strikes an entirely different note when mentioning static. At a recent dinner he ventures the opinion that static, after all, is not an unmixed evil. I often wonder, whether the same minds saw the limitations of radio telephony because of the lack of secrecy, and now see a limitation of radio because of static, might not be disappointed to wake up some morning in the future to find that the static, which is all-pervading, represents a great and free gift of nature to man, who may yet learn to harness that energy, get it from the air, and make it do a great work for man. Not seeing through the same rosy-hued glasses as does the speaker on this occasion, we venture that the man who gets static out of the air, no matter what he does with it after he removed it from the radio realm, will already have done a great work for man. Incidentally, Franklin with his kite did show us exactly how to do this thing quite some vears ago, didn't he? Interesting Things Interestingly Said V\R WILLIS R. WHITNEY (Schenectady; director of research for the General Electric Company): "We are building a $150,000 laboratory to be devoted to research in the field of directional radio and short wavelengths. Our experimenters have obtained results on wavelengths on less than fifty meters. We can't yet explain why such waves travel as far as they do, with relatively weak impulses behind them, or why they should have passed, unaffected, through the belt of darkness produced by the eclipse, while the longer wavelengths were either accelerated or deflected. . . . We can look for the transmission of power by radio if we are satisfied to use 99 per cent, of our power in transmitting the other one per cent. It is a matter of cost. So long as it is cheaper to send power over wires, there is no incentive to send it over the air. The ordinary radio transmitter sends power through the air, though in relatively small quantities. It may be more economical to send power through the air for operating a powerhouse switch than to send a man to do it." "THE REV. FATHER JOHN HANDLY (SoA ciety of the Paulist Fathers, New York): "The thing that impressed me along the lines of my daily work in collecting money for the new Paulist League broadcasting station was the fact that our Divine Lord was describing a scene very familiar to me in the parable of the Sower and the Seed, because I was reared on a stony briar-choked farm down in Tennessee. . . . There are many who are doubtful about the value of radio as a means of teaching reH E. F. W. ALEXANDERSON Schenectady; Chief Consulting Engineer, Radio Corporation of America " There is a large and growing group of amateurs who pursue radio for the love of the art. The art to them is not the performance in the studio hut the technical art of radio itself. Radio has enjoyed a greater following of amateurs than any other branch of engineering, and it is the thought of these amateurs that moulds the future. They are one step closer to reality than the imaginative writers, like Kipling and Jules Verne, who give us glimpses of the future long before they can be realised. The amateur likes to anticipate what advances in the art may reasonably be expected within the next decade"