Radio Broadcast (Nov. 1925-Apr 1926)

AS THE BROADCASTER SEES IT Drawings by Frankjyn F. Stratford How Radio Has Progressed E ARE so constantly bombarded with the idea of "progress," nowadays, that we are apt to conclude that it is a notion of universal validity, which has always existed. This is an error. Progress, as a matter of fact, was first boomed in earnest by the late Victorians. No doubt it existed before, but it was taken for granted, and no one got excited over it. Presumably a civilized Greek of the BC's realized that he was housed and fed better, and more comfortably situated in general, than his remote ancestors, but he did not feel the urge to deliver lectures on the subject. As for the mediaeval mind, the idea of progress was as remote from it as oil circuit breakers. The reason for this deplorable lack must lie in the fact that these people were not blessed and burdened with machinery. Their main concern, after the primal comforts had been taken care of, was with the things of the spirit. Hence they did not believe in progress, probably never even thought of it. For it can hardly be denied that as far as spiritual comfort is concerned, one age is no better off than another. If we assume that happiness is the aim of life — an assumption which holds good for me, and you are free to accept it or to make your own assumption, as you please — then certainly a man of this age has made no progress over a man of the age of Pericles or even Rameses. Or, if you like, go back further. These men were as free to learn, and to make love, and more free to get drunk, than we are, and they had less to worry about. I doubt if I am happier than they were, all the way back to Pithecanthropus Eredus. So much for progress in that sense. But when it comes to machinery, we face a different situation. As soon as machinery enters the door, progress breaks in at the window and sits down in the best chair. There are no perfect machines, and few good ones. Some, however, arc better than others. As soon as you start in on that line, you must follow it to the grave. If you build one machine, you must shortly build another and better one, or some one else will. And so Progress has you by the neck. Progress, therefore, is a specialized and narrow thing, valid only in certain applications. To us it seems universal, because we are interested only in the things to which the concept of progress is applicable. Of these things radio is one. Here is a field, taken by itself, in which the advances are evident to any one who has not been traveling in Tibet for the past five years. (The qualification may not be an apt one; by the time this gets into print, radio may have invaded Tibet.) Let us go back those five years. That, of course, is an arbitrary figure. As we have often emphasized in this place, radio was very much alive before 1921; even radio telephony was not a novelty to those "in on the know," and there had been stations properly describable as broadcasting stations before that time. But it was toward the end of 1921 that radio became a subject for public participation, rather than the esoteric preoccupation of a few engineers, operators, and amateurs. And, entirely aside from the "I did it first" claimants, that is when broadcasting as we know it had its beginning. Toward the end of 192 1 I was living up on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, not far from the beach where, in his day, Henry Thoreau paced the sands and declaimed Homer to the ocean waves; but my occupations were more prosaic. I was engaged in my trade of wireless telegraphy, together with about forty other men at a transoceanic-and-marine station. Some of the operators, at their homes in the evening, listened to broadcasting from Newark, New Jersey, and spoke to me about it. I was not much impressed, having often heard wireless telephone transmission before. The trouble with it, they said, was the interference; various ship and shore stations broke in continually while the children were listening to the bedtime story, and set them to yowling instead of putting them to sleep, and hashed up the phonograph music, which was otherwise grand. Reception, of course, was on headphones. The sets were oneand two-tube affairs, inductively coupled, with tickler regeneration. These sets were decidedly better than the average, having been built by professional operators with all the controls necessary to achieve the best results, and perhaps a few in addition. They were not selective enough, however, to achieve freedom from interference, aggravated by the distance of the broadcasting station (some 200 miles), and the relative nearness of the spark transmitters of ships rounding the Cape and sending on 300 and 450 meters. At this time a majority of the listeners were probably still in the skilled class mentioned above — commercial or amateur wireless telegraph operators having a little fun with telephone reception. Their number was limited, while the number of potential unskilled listeners was enormous. The latter were rapidly catching up and passed the first group very early in 1922. The receivers offered for sale to the lay public at this stage were very crude. Most of them were built for only one wavelength (360 meters), and the only variable element was to enable reception of signals of this frequency with various sizes of antennas. The best known of them was ? single-circuit crystal receiver in a small box, with switch taps for varying the inductance of a single-layer solenoid. The tuning was so broad that with a large antenna— and everyone tried to get as large an antenna as possible — it did not matter much where the switch was set; everything from 175 to 500 meters came through, more or less. Then there were some better sets, also of the single-circuit type, but with a variometer adjustment and a more scientific connection of the detector circuit to the antenna inductance (through a suitable tap arrangement on the latter) w