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

Radio
Broadcast
MANY PURELY COMMERCIAL CONCERNS
Have gone into broadcasting, presumably directly to influence their
sales. This photograph shows the bank of batteries used to run the station
which is maintained by a battery manufacturer
would resent any lavish expenditure for talent
on the part of a municipal broadcasting station.
City officials are not elected for the
purpose of giving nightly musical entertainments.
So, while municipal stations may
perform certain modest functions very capablv,
the people who sign "Irate Tax-payer" to
their letters "to the editor" can be depended
upon to sit on the municipal lid.
HOW GOOD A JOB
IS BEING DONE
C DUCATIONAL institutions, churches,
*-* national guard, chambers of commerce,
hotels, department stores, grain and feed
establishments, monument dealers, lawyers,
a chiropractic school, newspapers, musicstores
so runs the list of broadcasters.
Plainly, they are using radio to advertise
everything from the Gospel to "$2 Dinners
With Dancing."
Day after day and night after night these
stations pour forth programs. Take a pencil
and figure out the staggering quantity of stuff
that is
annually being pushed into the air.
Suppose each of the 550 broadcasting stations
operates two hours a day, and suppose that the
average length of each program number is six
minutes, or ten items an hour. Multiply
550 by 2 by 10. The answer is 11,000; for
this is the daily number of
program items required to
fill in the time of America's
Now
broadcasting stations.
multiply 11,000 by 365,
to get the annual number
of items. The answer is
4,015,000. If you're conservative,
cut this in two
and you'll find that at least
2,000,000 songs, dance
numbers, sermons, Republican,
and Independent conventions,
talks on the rubber
heel industry, and
bedtime stories have to be
gathered and disseminated
annually by the broadcasters.
The wonder is.
not that they do such a
bad job, but that they do
such a good one.
Broadcasting is still very
young.
It
began in September
K)2 In 1 . January,
of
1922, the licensed broadcasting
stations numbered
only 28 for the whole
United States. By fall, or
October i to be exact, the number had jumped
to 539. At that point the swiftly rising curve
flattened out and ever since then the number
of licensed
broadcasters has hung around the
550 mark. On July i, 1924, there were 549
stations; only ten more than on October i,
1922.
The mortality
is
heavy; as many as 80 stations
having been deleted from the list in a
single month. Twenty deletions is about the
average. Always, however, other new anc 1
hopeful advertisers have come along to throw
their waves out into the great unknown, so
that the total number of stations steadily
stays between 500 and 600.
Of the 549 stations which were licensed up
to July ist, last year, 224 were pretty definitely
advertising radio. That is, these 224 statior
included radio manufacturers, radio jobber,
radio stores, garages handling radio equipment
as a sideline, department stores featuring
radio sections (of which there were 20), and
music stores which were taking no chances on
having their phonograph and piano business
literally vanish into the air. To this classification
could be added stations 1 1
operated by
such concerns as the American Telephone &
Telegraph Co., the General Electric Co., the
Radio Corporation of America, and public