Radio and television mirror (Jan-June 1950)

Radio's pioneers: 1. to r., Lee deForest; Edwin Howard Armstrong; Dr. Frank Conrad; and David Sarnoff. W— 1 ** ^^f ' " p' >lf fsm OWN LIFE STORY 1901 to 1920: Nothing in the whole fabulous history of radio is more astounding than the fact that broadcasting for entertainment is barely thirty years old. Well within the memory of many people not yet middle-aged is the very first news broadcast, the first coast-to-coast hook-up, the first advertising on the air. Thirty years ago there were no networks. There were no sponsors. There were no paid entertainers. In 1919, there was only one regular broadcast of music in the entire United States. That came from Pittsburgh for two hours each Wednesday and Saturday evening, and it was devised for the amusement of only one hundred people listening through earphones. Forty-five years ago, the first broadcast of a voice was still to be made. Fifty years ago even the dots and dashes of the Morse Code had not crossed the Atlantic by wireless. This story of broadcasting will deal mainly with the great entertainers of radio rather than with the great inventors who made radio possible, though their stories are fascinating, for their discoveries set the stage for the biggest show on earth — the show that comes free to us for the turn of a dial — the show that fills the air that was empty and silent half a century ago. The story of broadcasting in this country starts on December 12, 1901, when the young Italian, Guglielmo Marconi, waited on the icy shores of Newfoundland for the sound of the signal his men in England were trying to send over more than two thousand miles of winter sea. Marconi must have held his breath as he waited in the little control room under the weirdly cumbersome wooden masts of his crude aerial as the time drew near. Then he heard it. Dot Dot Dot. Clear and hard, the prearranged signal crackled out from the tip of Cornwall, and rounded the curve of the world at the speed of light — 186,273 miles per second. Feeble and faint, but unmistakable, it was netted by the flimsy web of wire all the way across the Atlantic. Four hundred and nine years after that other great Italian, Christopher Columbus, heard the cry "Land ho!" Marconi conquered the ocean again. The day of radio was at hand. Broadcasting is not the invention of any one man. Scores of brilliant explorers of the ether contributed. Marconi, himself, was only part of the great stream of experiment. The presence of ether waves had been noted long before he was born. He is properly called "the father of wireless," however. He was the first to harness the thin ether for practical use when he built the first sending aerial in 1895 and picked a sound out of the air a mile and a quarter away — a miracle no man had done before. He was twenty-one years old, son of an Italian father and an Irish mother. The family was wealthy. The boy had been educated by tutors. In his teens, when he became absorbed in his wild surmise that the ether was another uncharted ocean waiting for its Columbus, his father gave him 5,000 lira or about $1,000 for pocket money with which to carry on his experiments. He is one of the few great inventors whose way was easy from the start. His genius won almost immediate recognition and quickly brought honor, fame and great fortune. There was one major set-back, however. When he succeeded in sending a Morse Code signal through the air to a station out of sight behind a hill, young Marconi knew that he had something of enormous value. Patriotically, he offered his discovery to the Italian government. The fantastic fact is that it was courteously but firmly refused as not important enough to deserve official consideration, and Italian ships continued to use homing pigeons to carry messages from ship to shore! Marconi's mother had influential connections in England so they took young (Continued on page 78)