SCHOLAR ISLAND

"I discovered an Invisible Empire of the Air, intangible, yet solid as granite."

-Lee De Forest

"Radio has no future."

-Lord Kelvin 1897

"You could put in this room, DeForest, all the radiotelephone apparatus that the country will ever need."

-W.W. Dean (President of Dean Telephone Company), to American radio pioneer Lee DeForest, who had visited Dean's office to pith his audion tube, 1907

"What have you gentlemen done with my child? He was conceived as a potent instrumentality for culture, fine music, the uplifting of American mass intelligence. You have debased this child, you have sent him out in the streets….To collect money from all and sundry, for hubba hubba and audio jitterbug. You have made of him a laughing stock to the intelligence, surely a stench in the nostrils of the gods of the ionosphere: you have cut time into parcels called spots (more rightly "stains") where with the occasional fine program smeared with impudent insistence to buy or try. Some day the program director will attain the intelligent skill of the engineers who erected his towers and built the marvel which he now so ineptly uses."

(a letter to the Chicago Times from De Forest the Father of Radio)

"Just think of those shocks you've got

And those knocks you've got

And those blues you've got

From that news you've got

And those pains you've got

(If any brains you've got)

From those little radios."

Cole Porter  'Anything Goes'

"Radio is an enemy, a ruthless enemy marching irresistibly forward, and any resistance is hopeless; it force feeds us music....regardless of whether we want to heart it, or whether we can grasp it."

Schoenberg (1930)

"(It) is nothing but a conduit through which prefabricated din can flow into our homes. And this din goes far deeper. Of course, than the eardrums, it penetrates the mind, filling it with a babel of distractions-news items, mutually irrelevant bits of information, blasts of corybantic or sentimental music, continually repeated doses of drama that bring no catharsis, but merely create a craving for daily or even hourly emotional enemas."

Aldous Huxley

"I regard radio broadcasting as a sort of cleansing instrument for the mind, just as the bathtub is for the body."

David Sarnoff

"If a speech by the President is to be used as the meat between the sandwich of two advertisements, there will be no radio left! How can we allow so great a possibility for public service, for news, for entertainment, for education , to be drowned in advertising chatter?"

President Herbert Hoover

   "Not to be overlooked in any gauging of influence is the voice of announcer and commentator. The metaphysical dream of progress dictates the tone, which is one of cheery confidence, assuring us in the face of all contrary evidence that the best is yet to be. Recalling the war years once more, who has not heard the news of some terrible tragedy, which might stagger the imagination and cause the conscientious artist to hesitate at the thought of its depiction, given to the world in the same tone that comments a brand of soap or predicts fair weather for the morrow? There were commentators, it is true, who got the spirit of gravity into their speech, but behind them stood always the announcer, denying by his formula of regular inflection the poignancy of their message. The radio, more than press or screen, is the cheerful liar.

    Thus the broadcast of chaos comes in a curious monotone. This is the voice of the Hollow Men, who can see the toppling walls of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome without enough soul to sense tragedy. It is the tone of those dad to sentiment. But this is as we predicted; the closer man stands to ruin, the duller grows his realization; the annihilation of spiritual being precedes the destruction of temple walls.

   The radio is, last of all, a prime instrument for discouraging the thought of participation. It is the natural monopoly of communications. For turning whole populations into mere recipients of authoritative edicts, what better means could there be? A national radio hookup is like the loud-speaker system of a battleship or a factory, from which the post of command can transmit orders to every part. If we grant the assumptions of the materialists that society must conform to the developments of science, we may as well prepare ourselves for the monolithic state."

Richard M. Weaver

Ideas Have Consequences

Book: "Empire of the Air"

Book: Crystal Set Projects……www.midnightscience.com

Book: "Passport To World Band Radio, 2005 Edition" Ed. by Tony Jones et al.

Book: On The Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio ..by John Dunning

Book: "The Encyclopedia of American Radio: An A-Z Guide to Radio from Jack Benny to Howard Stern" by Ron Lackmann

Book: "Same Time....Same Station: An A-Z Guide to Radio from Jack Benny to Howard Stern" by Ron Lackman

Book: "The Golden Age Of Radio"" by J. David Goldin

Book & Tapes: The Best Of Old Time Radio Alfred Hitchcock: Smithsonian Legendary Performers

Book: "40 Watts from Nowhere: A Journey into Pirate Radio" by Sue Carpenter