Radio Broadcast (Nov. 1925-Apr 1926)

22 RADIO BROADCAST NOVEMBER, 1925 HISTORIC WIRELESS APPARATUS This view was taken in the DeForest laboratory and shows some early experimental apparatus. At the left is an early model of a wireless telephone, using an arc instead of vacuum tubes for power. In the center is a model of a "picture machine" and at the right a crude receiver. A vacuum tube (inverted) can be seen on the top of the cabinet tained between widely separated farms, ranches, crossroad stores, etc. For the distribution of music, the radio telephone means an enormous increase of patronage among music lovers. It will very soon be possible to distribute grand opera music from transmitters placed on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House by a radio telephone." Such, in brief, is the tale of "The Lost Audion." The lamp which to-day, developed by engineering, makes it possible for your voice to span continents, for your ear to listen-in to nightly entertainments, or the spoken words of your president. The lamp which has made possible multiplex telephony or "wired wireless," the transmission of photographs by wire, the "talking picture," and a thousand and one other marvels of science and industry, eliminating the distance between nations and making us all one bigger human family. The first modest "audions" did their work quietly and well, and no one had the slightest inkling that the queer little bulb would some day expand radio, in all its branches, far beyond the sober plans of the Forest has invented a device which amplifies sound so much that if a fly were to walk across the transmitter, the noise at the receiver would shatter your eardrums!" Had these various gentlemen no prophetic inkling to stir their imaginations? Publicly the first radio broadcasting took place at Put-In-Bay on Lake Erie, July 15, 1907, at the regatta of the Inter-Lake Yacht Association, when the reports of the yacht race together with gramophone selections were reported by radio. Not many months later, audion bulbs were installed on the radio telephone receiving apparatus used by the fleet of Admiral "Fighting Bob" Evans in his noteworthy cruise around the world. Even as early as 1907, we had plenty of demonstrations of what might be accomplished in the transmission of news and music by radio. In May of that year the inventor announced: "Church music, sermons, lectures, etc., can be spread abroad by the radio telephone. In rural districts scores of individual radio telephone services can be main 2. ~a>rii: IN AMATEUR STATIONS I hree-element vacuum tubes are widely used. Years ago, in 1912, an employer refused Doctor DeForest #125 to renew his "audion" patents in France so the rights reverted to the French Government, and perhaps a fortune was lost. Klizabeth Zandonini, owner of station 3 cdq, Washington, is shown at her set. She is a radio aide at the Bureau of Standards IN THE EXPERIMENTAL DAYS A portable wireless telephone transmitter being tested in the fields near Newark, New Jersey. The operators were never certain in those days just how far their signals would travel; uncertainty was the one certain thing about wireless then. The outfit is one built by Doctor De Forest early radio experimenters. Now at last we may well sing with the poet of the Pacific: Flotsam Wave-borne, a fragile thing of glass and wire Past the grim reefs that guard a lonely land The audion drifted. Balked of its desire. The spent sea washed it on the level sand, But we can fancy countless days you watched the ships go by — The months, in idle drifting spent beneath a tropic sky!