Radio Broadcast - 1925, February - 113 Pages ... - VacuumTubeEra

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Radio
Broadcast
ask some one in the house to keep quiet when
we are trying to pick up a distant station.
Even a low-pitched voice in the same room
gives quite appreciable interference. How
is it when the air is rushing by the listener at
the rate of 100 miles an hour and the guy wires
all singing notes of their own and the 1
50 horsepower
motor exhausting right at his side with
no muffler at all The combination of noises
is as bad as that in a boiler shop,
if not worse.
To overcome this excessive disturbance, the
radio listener must wear a padded helmet, in
the sides of which are fitted the ear-phones.
It is remarkable how much noise half an inch
thickness of leather and felt can shut out.
The rushing air becomes quiet and even the
roar of. the engine exhaust becomes a low hum.
Of course even with the best helmet obtainable
one needs a pretty strong signal for reasonable
audibility, considerably stronger than is required
by the ordinary listener. To assist
the helmet in eliminating engine noises, long
exhaust pipes were fitted to the engine of the
test plane, so that the exhaust actually took
place behind the cockpit, whereas general'y
it is right beside the pilot.
The antenna used was a long trailing wire
hanging through the bottom of the cockpit
and held reasonably vertical by a heavy lead
weight. The general scheme used during the
War was to have a loop antenna on the plane
and get compass bearings as a ship does today.
After landing at the end of his successful
flight Lieutenant Goddard said that it "had
not been necessary to keep an eye open for
landmarks at all." The radio signals enabled
him to find his way directly to the station
which was his destination.
In the same line of radio's progress we read
with interest the report of George R. Putnam,
Commissioner of Lighthouses of the United
States. His department, we learn, now has
twelve radio fog signal stations scattered along
the coast and is establishing new stations as
fast as funds permit. Commissioner Putnam
says that this country leads the world in this
form of relief. We were the first to give fog
signals successfully and now have more of
such stations than all of Europe put together.
Top Many Went to Fights by Radio
for the suc-
disseminates news and
GENERAL, radio is
praised
cess with which it
IN
entertainment, weather reports for the
navigator, market conditions for the farmer,
music for the dance party, and football narratives
for the college alumni or sports devotees.
Football games, especially, have been
well broadcast. An announcer like Graham
McNamee performs his task so well that we
can quite clearly visualize the mud-covered
combatants as they slosh around through
the mire of their battlefields. Judging by
the newspaper reports of the attendance at
these games, which at times have been as many
as 100,000 for a single contest, one may safely
come to the conclusion that football broadcasting
has not seriously interfered with the gate
receipts.
Another line of sport has apparently not
fared so well as a result of radio's publicity.
Tex Rickard, who makes a very good living by
matching prize-fighters, has just put radio on
his own Index. For the past three years bouts
have been fought before the microphone so
that the cheers and jeers, the gong, and even
the thud of blows could be heard by the radio
listener. And so vividly has radio portrayed
the fight that many have preferred to stay at
home, where there was no admission to pay,
and no crowd of a hundred thousand through
which to mill. So Mr. Rickard has decided
that hereafter radio and he shall part company;
the fight fan who wants to see two human
beings who consent to batter each other for
about $1000 a punch will have to go to the
scene and contribute his share of the gate
receipts.
How Electrons Are Heard
IS only a few years ago that scientists
dared to venture the idea of the electron,
ITfor before that the idea of the molecule
and then its small comrade, the atom, had
certainly stretched imagination to its apparent
limit. For example, in a piece of
cubical copper about one half inch on an edge,
there are one million million million million
atoms. To make a row of copper atoms one
inch long, about two hundred million of them
would be required. Imagine then the intrepidity
of the scientific worker who dared to
announce the existence of particles much
smaller than the atom, so small that it takes
one hundred thousand of them to make a mass
equal to that of one copper atom. Gifted
with a powerful imagination must be the
worker who deals with electron phenomena,
and especially is this true of the research
worker who is going to find out new facts
about the behavior of these infinitesimal particles
of electricity.