Radio and television mirror (Jan-June 1950)

Guglielmo's "ether telegraph" to London, and he took out his first patent in 1896. Demonstrations were given for the proper people, including Queen Victoria. By 1897 a company had been formed. Marconi owned half the stock, had fifteen thousand pounds in his pocket, and wireless was headline news around the world. Sea-faring, fog-bound England put it to work immediately. What a wonderful thing for a maritime nation was this invention that could jump fifty, a hundred, maybe two hundred miles through dark and storm and warn ships of danger in thick weather. There was talk of ringing the entire rocky coast of Britain with wireless stations to supplement the foghorns of its countless lighthouses. By the time he was twentythree, Marconi was famous, well on his way to wealth, crowned with success. But he was not satisfied. If his wireless could reach two hundred miles, why not five? Why not a thousand? Why not set up a station on each side of the Atlantic so that a ship leaving England could keep in touch with its homeland to the middle of the ocean? Then, as it passed beyond reach of signals from behind, it could move into signals sent out from the shores of America. The thing was fantastic, absurd, ridiculous! Against all sober counsel, he set up a huge ring of wooden masts and wires in the little village of Poldhu in Cornwall. The masts were 170 feet high and covered nearly an acre. He powered his station with such a fierce force of electricity that a three-foot wooden lever was used to turn current off and on. Then he crossed the Atlantic to build his receiving station at St. John's in Newfoundland. By this time his plan had changed. He was going to cross the Atlantic by wireless in one leap! In December, 1901, all was in readiness. The savage winter storms had blown down the first masts that had held his aerials, but they had been replaced. On the other side of the Atlantic his generators were whirring and his staff was waiting. When they thrust the lever home, the world entered a new era. It was a world that would seem fantastic to us if we could spin back the dial of time and take a look at it. It was a world without movies. Not until 1903 would the first one-reeler with a story, "The Great Train Robbery," be produced. There were no electric refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, plastics, air travel. It would be two years before the Wright brothers would lift their plane into the air at Kitty Hawk and stay aloft for one minute. Automobiles were erratic toys that only the very rich could afford, and, outside of cities there were no paved streets for them to travel on. Pianolas were vying with Mr. Edison's phonograph — the one with the cylindrical records and the morning-glory-shaped horn. Many city homes were still lighted with gas, and kerosene lamps were the rule on farms. The Yellow Kid, Foxy Grandpa, The Katzenjammer Kids, and Happy Hooligan had just started and were seen on R Sunday only. The daily comic strip was not to begin until 1909 when Mutt and Jeff took the plunge. Vitamins? Not until 1913. Permanent waves, rayon, crooning, aluminum pans, pres78 Radio's Own Life Story (Continued from page 23) sure cookers, jazz — what were they? The newly born twentieth century was to see a rush forward on every scientific front, and discoveries in radio came in a tidal wave. Hundreds of men share the credit but above them all, two American giants tower: Lee deForest and the greatest of them all, Edwin Howard Armstrong. Without the inventions of these two there might be no symphony in the air today, no news round-ups from the ends of the earth, no sixty-four-dollar question, no Lone Ranger, no Sinatra — and very possibly no United Nations. Lee deForest was born in 1873 at Council Bluffs, Iowa, one year before Marconi opened his eyes on the fashionable world of Bologna. It would be hard to find backgrounds more dissimilar. A Congregational minister, deForest's father had left a comfortable home in Iowa when Lee was six years old to accept the scantily paid presidency of Tallageda College in Alabama. It was a school for Negroes. In those unenlightened days, that was enough to make the white community practically ostracize the family of the Reverend deForest. Young Lee had a lonesome and poverty-bitten childhood. His college years were not much better. He took his entrance examinations at Yale in a shiny suit, shoes a year old and a straw hat his father had discarded. He did not have enough money for most of the social activities at Yale. The laboratory became his main diversion. After he won his Doctor's degree, things were still hard. His first job paid eight dollars a week. Even after his sensational invention of the audion tube, his career was harassed for years by financial struggles, though the audion made him famous and brought broadcasting very near. It was the first practical vacuum tube, and what it did was pick up the weakest signals and magnify their sound enormously. It could make the ticking of a watch sound like a drumbeat. It could lift sounds out of seemingly silent air and make them heard. By 1906, many men were working on the possibility of sending the human voice through the air. The race was won by Reginald A. Fessenden, brilliant Canadian who had an experimental station at Brant Rock, Massachusetts. It was deForest, however, who led the way in the commercial development of our wireless telephone. The story they tell of his first voice broadcast is fascinating. In 1907 he had a laboratory in New York. It was devoted to the imorovement of wireless, but on the side he was carrying on a special experiment — the wireless telephone. One night friends came to inspect his workshop. With them was a concert singer, Madame Eugenia Farrar. DeForest asked her if she would like to be the first to sing over his new invention. Not quite sure whether it was a pretext to get her to sing, or the real thing, Madame Farrar stepped in front of the curious instrument. "Did anyone really hear me?" she asked when she had finished the last note of "I Love You Truly." Dr. deForest had to admit that he had no way of knowing, but over in the Brooklyn Navy Yard a wireless operator had torn off his ear-phones, aghast, convinced that he was ready for the booby hatch. He had been listening to the routine dot and dash signals of ships at sea when suddenly the loveliest singing he ever had heard came through. He lifted his ear-phones. All was quiet in the Navy Yard. He put them back on. The beautiful music came through clearly again. "Angels! Angels singing in the air!" he muttered, and, completely unnerved at being so close to heaven, shouted for his commanding officer who listened and then excitedly called the HeraldTribune. A bored night editor almost let the story die right there. Voices in the air? Silly. Half convinced that one of his reporters was trying to pull his leg, he refused to cover the story until he had called the Navy Yard back to verify the source. By the time his reporter reached Brooklyn, the singing had long since ceased. The faintly sceptical newsman wrote a brief account which appeared in the paper the next morning. Not until he read it did Dr. deForest know that his experiment was a success. Once again it was men of the sea who recognized the great potential of the new instrument. Six months later, twenty-four Navy ships steamed out of New York harbor on a round-the-world cruise, equipped with the new wireless telephones. Lee deForest is also credited with the first broadcast by remote control when Enrico Caruso's voice was carried by wire from the Metropolitan Opera House to the laboratory and from there put on the air. Even though the singing of one of the greatest tenors of all time had been heard 260 miles at sea, no one thought of radio as anything but a new method of communicating messages. Broadcasting as entertainment was undreamed of, though wireless was fast becoming a fascinating hobby for "hams." By the thousands these amateur operators began to set up home-made sending and receiving sets, and the air bristled with the clicks and cracks and dots and dashes of Morse Code. Since anyone ingenious enough to build a set could launch a wave on the unregulated air, their messages overlapped and interferred dreadfully. Worse yet, the gabby gossip of the amateurs began to jam messages from ship to shore to such an extent that Congress passed the Communications Act of 1912 — first federal attempt to deal with the airways. The act gave the Department of Commerce the right to license stations and assign frequencies. It did, but nobody paid much attention. The hams went merrily on their way, flooding the air with calls. Incidentally, the nickname "ham" which has confused so many people has a simple explanation. It originated in England. British sports writers' slang for amateur is "am." Cockney fans added a gratuitous "h" making the word "ham," and so it remains to this day. Not for one minute is it to be confused with the stage slang meaning a corny performer who chews up the scenery. In radio, ham is a proud title, deserving the respect of the nation as we shall see when we get to the record of service given in fire, flood and disaster by the amateur who stayed by his Morse Code