Whose Is the Air?

An Important Question Recently Brought Up by Developments in What is Known as Broadcasting

GEORGE S. CHAPPELL

A VERY grave danger confronts the American people. The air is getting crowded. Yes sir, the very atmosphere we breathe is becoming all clotted with songs, band-concerts, sermons, speeches and heaven knows what. And it has all come about through this Broadcasting business which, like a gigantic mushroom, has sprung into being overnight. Of course, you are familiar with it, this method of wireless radio-telegraphy which puts a town like Newark—of all places—into communication with the whole unprotected United States.

Before I point out the specific dangers of this particular menace let me say a few words about invention in general. We are proud of our American inventiveness. We claim that in that particular field we lead the world, and I very much fear we do. But ought not something to be done to curb and control this great gift? For mark what happens. No sooner do we get one invention set up and working nicely than along comes some bright lad with a new one that completely upsets it. The old models have to be scrapped and destroyed. This is both wasteful and nerve-racking. We have our motors and along comes the aeroplane. We have our various talking machines and records which seemed to bring a large part of the concert stage into our living rooms and lo! broadcasting springs up, a very monster of ubiquity.

There used to be a sweet old-fashioned charm in the words "There's music in the air"—but the words are filled with horror now. There is so much music and so much besides music that the old conception of the air has to be entirely revised. Isn't it rather terrifying to think that when you do your daily dozen in the morning and take deep breaths according to instructions, that you are filling your lungs with a mandolin solo by Edward Sitz of East Chicago? And when you stop your car at the "Free Air" sign on the comer and say "Just squirt a little in that hind tire, will you, Pop," do you realize that what Pop shoves into your tire isn't real air at all, but a glee club chorus by the Bethlehem Steel Company choir! In fact it's even worse than that. It is a chorus compressed to seventy pounds pressure. When you think of how the average glee club sounds when taken straight and then imagine compressing it—well, I don't wonder that so many tires blow out.

First Steps

THIS is all very well, you say, but you don't have to listen to it. True, but how unimaginative. For the thing is there! It is the horror beyond the closed door, the monster lurking in the silence, the menace behind the veil, the nigger in the woodpile. And this is but the beginning.

If present conditions ^re disquieting, then the future is ghastly. For where will these insatiable inventors stop. Countries will be linked up. Perhaps we are approaching a new form of Babel in which the whole globe will become one great chattering insane asylum. Already thousands of homes have installed the radio-receiving devices. The once proud victrola which modern art had developed to look exactly like an edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica is now thrust scornfully aside, into the limbo of our model entertainments, along with the photograph-album and the kodaks of father's trip to Mexico.

Enterprising builders are advertising that "these charming homes will be wired for radioconnection." Can we doubt that it will soon be no more possible to escape it than it is to get away from the telephone.

A large dance was recently given in the Terrace Garden of New York in which the music was received by radio. At the same time hundreds of other dancers were twirling about in other cities to the strains of the selfsame orchestra. Just think of it! And orchestral concerts are given which are listened to by 300,000 people.

Do we realize what this means? It means that 300,000 people who might go out to a concert or a dramatic performance—for has not Mr. Ed Wynn already given a radio performance—it means that the vast theatre horde stays at home. In the meantime 62,000 orchestra players, 78,000 ushers, janitors and stage hands and 40,400 taxi-drivers are thrown out of employment. Auditoriums, theatres and music-halls fail on every side. Managers stand in the bread line and surface transit receipts shrink alarmingly. It is a dark picture, but a true one.

The Moral Side

PRESUMABLY, however, we might adjust ourselves to this new situation. We could spare many of our theatres, I think, and our great orchestras are to be centralized it might very possibly result in an extremely fine quality in those which survive. But a most — perhaps the most—alarming feature of the situation is this, that a conflict has arisen between the government and the people as to just whose air this is which we breathe. It seems incredible but it is true. Here again our mad passion for invention gets us into difficulties. Not content with a slow controlled progress in these lines, companies must spring up all over the land. Amateurs by the thousands rush into the new game. Hardly a boy in America but knows perfectly well how to manufacture his own radio set, both for sending and receiving. And he does so. The jargon of our youths is that of watts, amperes, coils, amplifiers and wave-lengths, things as vague to me as the nebular hypothesis.

The result is confusion worse confounded. Once hooked up with the ether, we never know what we are going to get. It is all a matter of wave-lengths, it appears, but unfortunately several performers are apt to choose the same dimension. For instance Titta Ruffo may have a fancy for a wave-length of six feet two inches and the Buffalo University Banjo Club has voted unanimously for the same figure. The results are amazing. Ruffo might be fine if he had ever rehearsed with the Buffalo boys but he hasn't.

I spent an evening with some very refined Bostonians who had just put in a machine. According to their schedule which came from Springfield, Mass., they were supposed to hook-up with Beethoven's Fifth Symphony at 9:20 P. M. with the whopping wave-length of twenty feet. What we actually landed was the second act of The Demi-Virgin, a play that was almost too rough for New York. It came crashing into our little gathering, right on the crest of the wave-length and perhaps it didn't put a quietus on that party. Being the only New Yorker present I was in a rather embarrassing position. Somehow the distance between Beacon St. and Broadway seemed enormous. Try as he would my host could not get Beethoven on the wire and we finally settled back to listen to a lecture from some obscure spot on the life and habits of the deep-sea roach or the underground moth.

The Universal Confusion

THIS sort of mix-up works both ways, for it is naturally just as disappointing for the low-brows who are awaiting returns from the Comiskey-Lewis fight to be connected with Beethoven as it was for my Boston friends to be invaded by the atmosphere of New York's most reprehensible set.

The government proposes to stop all this by restricting certain wave-lengths to certain uses, by reserving certain hours of the day, and by other silly measures. But can you see the American people obeying any such injunctions as these? No, indeed. This comes perilously near invading the rights of free speech. Recent experience with constitutional amendments does not encourage the belief that repressive measures will in any way curtail the vast outpouring of voice which we may expect in the near future.

Instead of control I look for lack of control. Instead of less confusion we shall have more. Even silence will be stolen from us. By use of the enormous amplifiers which are being developed and which will be affixed to public buildings we shall be forced to listen whether we will or no. Filtering through our telephones, oozing out of our faucets and radiators, we will be surrounded by tumult and shouting, a new world-struggle for air-supremacy. A sample interval of what used to be, in the old days, a quiet morning will be something like this:

"O, Celeste Aida . . . Shut up you're on a busy wave . . . O Celeste . . . Hello . . . is this Los Angeles singing? . . . Brrrr . . . ik,ik, ik . . . a cello solo by . . . Go to Hell . . . Asleep on the Deep!! . . . Brrr . . . Dites moi . . . ik, ik, ik . . . blaah!—"

I should feel quite discouraged were it not for the comforting thought that just as the whole thing reaches its peak our inventors will run true to form and discover something else, so that, like small boys who pack away their electric trains and begin to save up for a saxophone, the radio menace will go into the closet of the past and our eager-eyed people will be off on some entirely new trail which will also have its horrors.