Men Who United the States : America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible (9780062079626)

by Winchester, Simon

  And Mr. Thiessen heard this clearly enough to understand it, and he did indeed telegraph back, though history remains silent about the snow. If this account is true, it was the first time that a human voice was ever transmitted wirelessly—by an employee of the United States government in a Weather Service experiment funded by the American taxpayer.

  Reginald Fessenden, a Canadian-born engineer with the US Weather Bureau, is generally given credit for making the first broadcast of voice and music over the radio. Until Christmas Eve 1906, ships’ radio operators heard only Morse code. Then, from his transmitter on Brant Rock, Massachusetts, Fessenden broadcast music by Handel and read from the Bible—changing the nature of broadcasting forever.

  A much more famous experiment took place six years later, by which time Fessenden had left the government’s employ (there had been a quarrel over the rights to his ceaseless blizzard of patents). This test was backed not by the taxpayer, but by a pair of wealthy Pittsburgh businessmen, men who were convinced that with his revolutionary technique of modulating a continuous radio wave, Fessenden was going to eventually outdo Marconi in making serious money out of wireless.

  The pair of them financed the setting up of the National Electric Signalling Company, NESCO. They first built a huge antenna for Fessenden on a remote eastern Massachusetts headland known as Brant Rock, a former island now connected to dry land and so named because it lies beneath a flyway for migrating brant geese and because the wearier birds once liked briefly to settle there.

  The headland—a place of great historic importance now, though seldom visited—is basically a low, wide mound covered with short springy turf and projecting into the Atlantic surf for some yards. Today it sports a few flyblown shacks; a century ago it was quite isolated from nearby houses and passersby. Its remoteness, as well as its proximity to the clever technical men of Boston, prompted the NESCO engineers to build their very tall experimental radio antenna there. It was slender, alarmingly fragile-looking, a confection of steel mounted on a layer-cake base of cement and insulating ceramics and rising 420 feet straight up. Sixteen guy wires held it steady against the Atlantic gales, and nearby were an engineer’s shed and the buildings that housed the transmitting and receiving apparatus.

  To make the experiments comprehensive, they also paid to build a second tower on the far side of the Atlantic, at the Scottish village of Machrihanish, in southern Argyll. Early in 1906, technicians reported success in using the Fessenden transmitter to send messages and receive replies, but with Morse code only. Two-way code transmissions had never been achieved before; for that alone, Fessenden would have made history. But he had rather more ambitious plans, for transmitting the kind of voice messages that he knew from his Cobb Island days could feasibly be sent. There were delays; technical problems to be sorted out; and repairs were needed after the Argyll antenna blew down in a gale. Moreover his two investors were getting cold feet and were starting to think seriously about the wisdom of their commitment.

  Their skepticism was necessarily short-lived. In mid-December their man announced that he was ready at last to begin a voice transmission. Word went out, by Morse messages sent over the conventional telegraph, to a number of ships then sailing on the Atlantic—most notably to a flotilla of banana boats owned by the United Fruit Company, which had been equipped with NESCO receivers—that they should be ready to listen to the broadcast. Late on Christmas Eve, it was blowing a full gale, the classic dark and stormy night, which only adds to the skeptics’ somewhat jaundiced view of the story—when Reginald Fessenden powered up his transmitters, stood before the microphone, and depressed the switch. As he recounted some years later:

  The program on Christmas Eve was as follows: first a short speech by me saying what we were going to do, then some phonograph music. The music on the phonograph being Handel’s “Largo.” Then came a violin solo by me, being a composition of Gounod called “O, Holy Night,” and ending up with the words “Adore and be still” of which I sang one verse, in addition to playing on the violin, though the singing of course was not very good.

  Then came the Bible text, “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to men of good will,” and finally we wound up by wishing them a Merry Christmas. . . .

  We got word of reception of the Christmas Eve program as far down as Norfolk, Va., and on the New Year’s Eve program we got word from some places down in the West Indies.

  The thought of the aria “Ombra mai fu,” or “Shade There Never Was,” being heard for the first time far out at sea, the idea of so resolutely landlocked a conceit as a Persian king’s contemplation of the cool shade under a plane tree being heard by seamen riding out a storm on the Atlantic Ocean . . . Whatever the timescale, whether this was the first or the second time (as some skeptics still claim) that voice broadcast had been demonstrated, whether or not this experiment was in the running at all, the very idea behind the Fessenden story has a magic about it that now positively urges us to believe it.

  Yes, the story may well not be entirely true. It is most decidedly odd, for instance, that no ship’s log that survives mentions a broadcast that would surely have set most navigation bridges a-hopping with excitement, for not once in the past would anyone aboard have ever heard a sound coming through the wireless receiver, other than that of a Morse tapper. And yet here suddenly there was a human voice and sweet music coming to them out of the thin air! To most it was quite incredible and surely worth mentioning in at least one shipmaster’s logbook.

  So maybe Fessenden is out by a year or so; surely no matter, really. What does matter is that sometime around 1906, inventions made by this great bear of a man made such things possible.

  It was an achievement that did little for Reginald Fessenden. His wealthy partners fought with him and sacked him from his own company. He spent fifteen miserable and costly years dragging them through the courts, without satisfactory results. Though eventually he got a cluster of gold medals for his work and was said by many great men and biographers to have been radio’s greatest pioneer, he became embittered, turned his back on his invention, wrote an obscure and little-noticed book on antediluvian civilizations, and died in Bermuda in 1932, largely unsung.

  His invention, however, went from strength to strength, and at an appropriate lightning speed. Initially the listeners—or perhaps hearers would be the better term, for what was received was in the early days the result of random and unplanned transmissions—were rank amateurs, “hams,” who saw the airwaves as a magical democratic free-for-all and began exchanging all kinds of information, usually in code, very occasionally by voice, from all kinds of sources to all manner of places, about all kinds of topics, commonplace and arcane.

  A small number had the patience, skill, and wherewithal to broadcast voice and music. Charles Herrold, a professor (in the Herrold College of Wireless and Engineering, which he founded in 1909) built a transmitter on the third floor of a bank building in San Jose and began a regular Wednesday-night program of songs and chatter, which he called the Little Hams Program. He had a wind-up Victor phonograph (complete with the little dog Nipper listening to “His Master’s Voice”), and he borrowed 78-rpm records from Sherman Clay, the local music store. Positioning himself carefully in front of the microphone, which, because it was wired into the same electrical circuit that caused the transmitting sparks, would get searingly hot, “Doc” Herrold would introduce the music—Sousa marches a specialty—and then read out columns from the local papers. And when he played music, he would tell his audience where he had bought it. The lines of customers outside the Sherman Clay store the following morning testified to yet another new and hitherto unimagined phenomenon: broadcast advertising.

  At first maybe fifty local ham operators listened in to his 9:00 p.m. hour-long show. But then in 1913, Herrold invited his young wife, Sybil, to be an announcer. That ploy, together with his adroit plan to stage contests and offer as prizes small galena crystals—which were known to be tunable to specific radio fr
equencies and so could be used to make the new “crystal set” receivers—led his listenership to mount steadily, until soon several hundred were tuning in. Most of his listeners were on the Peninsula; but on some atmospherically favored listeners as far away as Oregon and New Mexico were able to hear the music, interspersed with Sybil’s sweet made-for-radio voice, swooping and soaring above the crackle of static.

  Fan letters started arriving at the bank. Listeners would telephone to ask Sybil for their favorite tunes. Doc Herrold’s show, which ran for five years, unregistered, informal, but regular and reliable, was the first properly broadcast radio show in America and possibly the first anywhere.

  For a long while, however, code remained king. Young men in attics and garages from Maine to California, with their trinkets of galena and other tunable crystals, built crude radio receiving sets—and the bolder and cleverer ones made transmitters, too—and spent countless nights scanning the ether for streams of code, much as radio telescopes do today, hunting for signs of deep-space life. The tradition of ham radio was born, with scores, then hundreds of people experimenting, a brotherhood of radioheads chattering across the nighttime miles, their encrypted letters and numbers rattling through space by the millions, the invisible pixels of a huge unseen national portrait.

  The US Navy, which by now was also enthusiastically using Morse and radio telegraphy to communicate with its warships at sea, frowned on this sudden burst of landlubberly interference. Admirals protested, saying that safety at sea was threatened when urgent maritime traffic was made unintelligible by the constant racket of amateur gossip. Civilian enthusiasts countered the sailors by arguing that the newly discovered airwaves were a realm quite beyond the control or jurisdiction of the state. It was a realm that should be democratized, allowed to be employed at will by the people.

  The result of the inevitable standoff was inevitable too—regulation. Urged on by powerful naval lobbying, Congress passed the 1912 Radio Act, which suddenly required anyone operating a transmitter to have a license. And while the government could not refuse anyone who wanted one, it could from now on set time limits on transmissions, and it could order amateurs to cluster in certain corners of the frequency spectrum, while reserving the better ones—frequencies less troubled by whether it was night or day, for instance—for the armed forces.

  Then came World War I, and once America had joined battle, the entire world of amateur radio was ordered shut down. Doc Herrold and his small number of followers were told to cease and desist. Attics and garages were raided by police, who seized and destroyed the equipment of anyone whose signals were still bleating out into the night after the order had gone out. For more than a year, the American airwaves fell silent. Only the chatter of naval vessels and weather stations could be heard by those still listening in, hoping for nighttime music.

  But the moment the war was over, an enormous wave of enthusiasm swiftly gathered, and applications for new broadcast licenses poured by the hundreds into the Commerce Department. It was as though the country suddenly wanted to start talking to itself: magazines throughout the land began to hail the arrival of broadcasting—of the human voice, music, sounds of all kinds—as a new means of giving reality to the concept of nationhood. Radio was all of a sudden seen as a possible way to help further unify the country, to ensure that the stories of the Down Easter were made familiar to a listener in Nevada, that the accents and thoughts of a man from Alabama or a woman from Arkansas could be heard and appreciated by a listener with an entirely different manner of speaking up on the high plains of North Dakota or down among the sierras and the arroyos of New Mexico. Radio, one writer said, could give everyone into the fold; it was a democratizing influence that would give those isolated from the mainstream of American culture—“the farmers, the poor, the housebound, the uneducated”—a sense of communion. Radio was suddenly invested with an ideal—as a free, limitless site for a forum of ideas that could knit the nation together spiritually, intellectually, emotionally.

  That is not, however, quite what happened.

  MAKING MONEY FROM AIR

  Since the very notion of broadcasting has its linguistic roots in agriculture, in seed spreading, it is entirely proper that the oldest radio station in the nation is in Madison, Wisconsin, and that its first aerials were sited in middle of a nearby field of corn. The station, known at its beginnings in 1914 by the call sign 9XM, first transmitted weather forecasts to farmers in Morse code, mercifully switching over to voice broadcasts three years later.

  The era of officially sanctioned radio then got itself properly under way in 1920, when George Westinghouse’s company, the Radio Corporation of America, launched the station in Pittsburgh known by its all-letter call sign, KDKA. (9XM up in Madison was awarded an all-letter designation too, being reborn as WHA in 1922—coincidentally the same year that the word broadcasting entered the English language as a term of art for the new phenomenon.)

  And with this launch of a service that then began to spread inexorably to every corner of the country, the guiding philosophy of American broadcasting began to make itself clear. It was championed by such decidedly non-messianic figures as Herbert Hoover, who as secretary of commerce in the late 1920s directed a series of radio conferences that laid down policy for the medium’s regulation.

  American radio, the conferees agreed, was to be based from its start almost entirely on the perceived need to employ it to make money. Commercial stations, financed by advertising, and so purposely aimed at winning the best audience by providing programming directed at the spending masses, were to be central. Educational radio stations, and indeed any broadcasting that was deemed to be in the dreamily impractical role of promoting the public interest, were consigned initially to unattractive corners of the wireless spectrum, and given little help and generally short shrift by all.

  The American idea of broadcasting was born of the country’s firm belief—during the prosperous, economically vibrant 1920s, when all of this was unfolding, along with mass production and a seemingly inextinguishable blaze of consumerism—in the purity and sanctity of capitalism and market forces. Britain, which by the 1920s had already been eclipsed by America as the world’s leading economy, was in its approach to the medium still clinging to an almost mediaeval aristocratic model—a “mother knows best” approach, which has caused the BBC to be referred to, even today, as Auntie.

  America would have none of this. The idea of radio as being some kind of rallying point for the preservation of democracy was, in the view of Hoover and his government, dangerous quasi-Bolshevik piffle. To the radio bosses at NBC, CBS, ABC, and all the other networks that soon sprang up, the American audience was not a manipulable, educable herd of like-minded serfs, but was composed of consumers whose individual motivations were different and based on self-interest. They needed radio for entertainment and amusement and for a means to participate in the nation’s commercial and political life.

  American commercial radio did not have any high-minded wish to become a way to bring the country together: it was all about making money. Any notion that the medium might offer what had originally seemed most likely—point-to-point communication between people or communities—was swept away by the realization that radio was best in offering point-to-mass communication, one broadcaster talking to millions. For thirty years, beginning in the 1920s, radio networks skippered by men like David Sarnoff, the Russian immigrant who was deeply involved in directing an empire that both manufactured radio sets (RCA) and then broadcast programs to them (NBC), entered a truly golden age.

  Sarnoff had already suggested what he wanted: “I have in mind a plan of development,” he wrote in a famous memo in 1920, “that would make radio a household utility in the same sense as a piano or phonograph. The idea is to bring music into the home by wireless.” To show that he was as good as his word, he helped set up the NBC Orchestra and persuaded Arturo Toscanini to come over from Europe to be its principal conductor. Or maybe people would prefer swing,
he then remarked. Whatever they wanted, basically “we’re just the delivery boys.”

  He promised his customers he would deliver sport as well. Early on he staged a boxing match between Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier that had three hundred thousand listeners. Mass appeal was generated with extraordinary speed. In the 1930s twenty million people tuned in to listen each Sunday night to Walter Winchell, the opening of his acidic gossip show invariably the same: “Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America, from border to border and coast to coast, and all the ships at sea. Let’s go to press!” In 1938 the twenty-two-year old Orson Welles broadcast his radio version of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds. His adroit dramatization of imagined news bulletins announcing an invasion of Martians in suburban New Jersey startled millions, prompted a formal apology, and jump-started his long career as a director and actor. Fred Allen, Jack Benny, Amos ’n’ Andy, the Champion Spark Plug Hour, and the Bell Telephone Hour in the 1930s and ’40s were listened to by a country that was in this one sense entirely united—and united by a form of mass entertainment that could transfix millions, all at the same time. By the end of the Second World War, more than 80 percent of the American public was listening in regularly, to shows that had vast transcontinental audiences.

  The image of a family gathered around the radio set remains an enduring testament to the briefly unifying power of early broadcasting. Before long, the vast range of choices available meant that the family scattered, each to listen in private, to march to a different drum.