Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, November 14, 1994 TAG: 9411260008
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOHN BARBOUR ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
A century ago the first man-made signals quivered through the air in a kind of invisible, electrical dance. Those signals, later translated into voices and pictures, changed our lives forever.
It began with a whisper, Guglielmo Marconi's simple signal, the Morse letter ``S,'' sent a little over a mile across his family estate near Bologna, Italy, in 1895.
At first it was discounted as a novelty.
It later brought the world into the nation's living rooms - President Franklin D. Roosevelt in his Fireside Chats during the Great Depression saying that all we had to fear was fear itself. It was Edward R. Murrow, standing on a London rooftop, describing the Nazi blitz.
``Radio was,'' says Ken Mueller of the Museum for Television and Radio Broadcasting, ``a unifying factor,'' at a time the nation needed it most, the decade between the Depression and World War II.
For the 106 million Americans then, he says, ``suddenly there was something they had in common. Prior to that they could read the newspaper, but they were all reading different newspapers.''
Columnist Walter Winchell, it was estimated, between his newspaper copy and his broadcasts, had an audience of 50 million Americans. Many more than that saw Neil Armstrong land on the moon and say across 250,000 miles that his first step was one giant leap for mankind.
The magical tube showed scenes of freedom marchers and snarling police dogs unleashed on children, campus violence, a president shot, another president resigning, helicopters on the attack in Vietnam, Marines landing on yet another sandy beach in Kuwait, Super Bowls, basketball championships and cherished old movies.
Now the long road through radio and television has reached another turning point. Aided and abetted by cable, the ``broadcast'' seems to becoming ``narrowcast,'' allowing viewers to choose their own programming, from cooking to old movies, from redecorating to college classes, from home shopping to political discussion, from wildlife to sex.
From Marconi's hands the research fell to a small coterie of electrical engineers who would free the wireless from the confines of dot-dash codes to the actual transmission of the human voice and then pictures. But it was a slow, step-by-step journey taking some 25 years before the complex equipment moved from the metal sulfide crystal of Marconi to the diode tube of radio broadcasts to Lee De Forest's electron tube that produced television pictures.
In the early decades of this century, scientists and amateurs fiddled with different configurations, some no more sophisticated than a wire coat hangar, and experimented with changing frequencies, different power levels.
In 1919, David Sarnoff established the Radio Corporation of America, funding research and legal support for such stormy geniuses as De Forest and Edwin Armstrong, who in the early 1920s was RCA's biggest stockholder. Sarnoff began as a telegraph delivery boy for Marconi's pioneering company.
In a nation trying to adjust to such rapid advances as automobiles and aircraft, the radio research was derailed by patent squabbles and shifty entrepreneurship. The patent problems became so severe during World War I that radio progress stagnated and the government moved in to put them on hold.
But soon broadcast followed the dictum, send it and they will listen.
Amateurs discovered that a cylindrical oatmeal box, a crystal, a spool of wire, an aerial and earphones could become their own receiver. As more sophisticated receivers came on the market, broadcast stations proliferated.
``Radio brought a sense of community, maybe a sense of nationality,'' Mueller says.
It was what people talked about over coffee and at work the next day.
With radio, says Ron Simon, a curator for the broadcast museum, ``they could all turn on Jack Benny, they could all turn on FDR's Fireside Chat.''
Mueller says history chose a president who was perfect for the role, a great voice, calling his countrymen friends. ``It was a guy speaking as if he were right there in your living room with you and letting you know this is what's going on and what I think we ought to do about it.''
Vaudeville was borrowed by radio, and the comedians brought it to the airwaves, just when the country needed a laugh and couldn't afford the movies. Amos 'n' Andy brought minstrel comedy to radio and some experts say were responsible for much of the surge in the sales of radios, 4.4 million in 1929.
And along came Eddie Cantor, the Marx Brothers, Fred Allen and his feud with Jack Benny, and of course George Burns and Gracie Allen.
``An interesting story is Jack Benny,'' Mueller says. One of his props was his basement vault, and whenever he visited The Vault, the listener heard traps going off and guards saying who goes there. But when they brought the vault to television, viewers wrote in saying, ``That's not the vault.''
``That was true of a lot of things you heard on radio, whether it was Fibber McGee's closet or whatever.
``Radio was the theater of the mind.''
Youngsters would lie in front of that cathedral of reveries, their minds re-creating Jack Armstrong and the Piper Hudson High boys, the dashing athlete who fought for the side of good.
Radio became the family clock. Children were admonished to save their questions until after Jack Benny, or told to go to bed when the program was over.
Today's soap operas were born on radio, but radio soaps were more morality plays, more small studies in religion and patriotism, more iterations of goodness triumphing over evil.
But nothing so stirred the nation, frightened it out of its collective wits, than Orson Welles' adaptation of H.G. Wells' ``The War of the Worlds'' for the Mercury Theater on the Air.
To a nation sensitized to the threat of war in Europe, Welles presented the invasion by Martians in such vivid terms that there was literally panic in the streets. It began ``Ladies and Gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from Intercontinental Radio News ...''
Radio took itself seriously. When Ted Husing auditioned for an announcer's job, his employer pointed to the picture of an American housewife and explained that for 11 hours Husing on radio was going to be a guest in her house. ``Do you have a tuxedo?'' he asked Husing. Husing said he did. ``Fine,'' said the employer, ``Before 6 you will have to dress for dinner.''
RCA's demonstration of television at the 1939 World's Fair in New York was supposed to jump-start the technology, but World War II got in the way.
After the war, ``so many of the formats, the programs, that started in radio, generated television shows,'' says television expert Ron Simon. ``Jack Benny and a lot of the vaudeville radio stars did. But also the format of `Ozzie and Harriet,' the first suburban comedy. `Dragnet,' known for its realism in police drama, began on radio with Jack Webb.''
After World War II, one show was dominant. The Texaco Star Theater with Milton Berle drew 90 percent of the viewing public.
The wave of quiz shows in the '50s was led by ``$64,000 Question.'' It ended with scandal on ``Twenty-One,'' when Charles Van Doren admitted to being fed questions.
``The quiz shows were sort of the last gasp of live television that was produced and owned by the advertising agencies,'' Simon says.
``Most of the great dramas that we associate with the '50s, `Marty,' `Twelve Angry Men,' as well as the variety shows, were produced by outside advertising agencies and then brought to television.''
The agencies bought the time slots. The television industry was merely a passive conduit for their programs. But the quiz show scandal forced the networks to re-invent their role. They turned to Hollywood to produce programs.
Norman Lear showed television how to blend comedy with social issues and the 1970s brought ``All in the Family,'' ``M*A*S*H,'' ``Mary Tyler Moore.''
But for all television brought us, the personal touch went out with old radio and never came back. No longer will we hear such sentiment as Eddie Cantor signing off with, ``I'd love to spend each Wednesday with you ...'' Or anything as personally simple as George Burns words:
``Say good night Gracie.'' And Gracie Allen saying demurely, ``Good night.''
by CNB