While doing some research on the Depression, (no, not the current Depression but the previous one) I happened across a 1931 article in Harpers Magazine titled, "The Battle of Radio Armaments". It was written by one Heber Blakenhorn and was sub-titled, "Broadcasting and International Friction".
I found it fascinating given that broadcasting was a mere decade old at the time it was written, yet it was more than obvious that radio had already changed the world in more ways than Marconi and the fathers could have possibly imagined.
There was even a none-too-flattering reference to the lowly radio amateur tossed in for good measure — but more on that later…
The author detailed the way that radio had quickly become recognized as an effective tool for government propaganda - and in the process, uncovered the naïveté of those who underestimated the power of the medium at their own peril.
Radio waves have absolutely no respect for national boundaries and where one nation installed a powerful new transmitter, a neighboring state would counter in a sort of Cold-War like escalation. The motto of the British Broadcasting Company may have been "Nation Shall Speak Peace Unto Nation" but the truth was that radio was broadcasting more war than peace.
In Europe, radio transmitters appeared along frontiers, facing one another as border fortresses used to do.
"Along the boundaries of Silesia four rival stations now stand within 40 miles of one another. It is hardly likely that these locations are the evidence of a pacifistic policy. When Germany set up the Muhlacker station on the Alsace border and France countered with the powerful Strasbourg transmitter, a sigh of relief went up in international radio circles because the French refrained from broadcasting the "Marseillaise" during their station’s inaugural ceremonies last Armistice Day."
It seemed obvious that these nations weren’t just speaking to other nations, but were beginning to shout. In Europe a technological race was underway to build the most powerful transmitter - three times the (then) American limit on transmitter input power. 50,000 watts soon became 120,000 and then 200,000. Not to be outdone, the Russians soon pledged $45 million dollars for the creation of their own 500,000 watt "super station" from which they would broadcast to the world.
Governments were becoming more and more particular about words. Propaganda was a recognized sin, deadlier than the old seven. Governments, that after a century pf printed journalism had hardly learned to tolerate freedom of comment in a foreign press and were similarly aghast over a single phrase in a foreign broadcast.
The world of international broadcasting also had to discover what radio amateurs had long since figured out: the world exists in a variety of seasons and time zones!
"The simplest problem of international broadcasting is time: a concert sent from New York at one o’clock Thursday on a spring night is heard in San Francisco on Wednesday night, in Poland on Thursday afternoon, in New Zealand on Friday, and in the Argentine in the autumn - all within one second."
Beyond the differences in nations that can and often do lead to war, there were cultural conflicts enough to fill volumes.
"The argument of technical difficulties is coupled with the broadcasters’ belief in the superior quality of the home program. Asking at a New York broadcasting headquarters "why so little Europe?" you are told "Americans are so accustomed to good programs that they will not stand for the inferior quality of European broadcasts." If you travel to London and ask broadcasters there why they have so few American or Continental rebroadcasts, you are told that the standard of British broadcasting is so far ahead that "we doubt our people do much listening now to foreign stations."
And the message wasn’t the only thing that brought conflict; there was no unanimous acknowledgement of the invention of the very medium itself!
"American listeners heard, after a nod to Marconi, principal credit (for the invention of radio) was confined to the research laboratories of the large American electrical companies. A British history of wireless contains mostly English names and the Marconi Company, Ltd. A French encyclopedia emphatically ascribes all the blessings of "le broadcasting" to a savant, modeste autant qui’illustre, un Francais, don’t le nom brille d’une gloire mondiale. German books hark back as firmly to Hertz."
American tourists were disturbed to find in three or four European countries bronze monuments to the inventor of the telegraph and telephone, all bearing foreign names. As if any American schoolboy could not name the Americans who invented those things, forgetting perhaps that Bell was born and trained in Scotland and Morse first designed his instrument on the ship home after a long stay in Europe.
Shortwave listeners will appreciate the whimsical description of the sounds from that age gone by and it should be no wonder that most radio amateurs baptism into the brotherhood began at the altar of shortwave radio:
"With a good set you can make fascinating journeys b y radio, though you find the air surprisingly crowded and ripped with government stations’ code messages to fleets and colonies. You can pick up the music box signal of Budapest, the nightingale note used by Italian stations, the shrill bell of Fecamp, or the deep boom of Strasbourg, the "Give akt" of Baltic stations, the "Hier sind" of German, the Dublin "Radio Ath Cliath e seo" and the "A-ah-hota see-a-ta" of Madrid."
Little has changed in the world when it comes to government mistrust of mediums of change like radio or more recently, the Internet. At the start government laid hands on the radio to control it, as in the past they also took charge of telegraphs and telephones, and frequently of railways, all "elements of the national defense."
Consider how the power of radio fanned the flames of revolution and stuck cold daggers of fear into the heart of the status quo.
"Fear was widespread last spring when the Spanish revolution succeeded. Not only were Mediterranean dictatorships opposed to broadcasting from Madrid, but in South America a panic of radio fears arose. That first exuberant broadcast of President Zamora to the United States was relayed also to the Argentine at the insistence of a Buenos Aires newspaper. In Madrid you could hear, relayed back, the cheers of the appreciative throngs in Buenos Aires. The Argentine government immediately suppressed the offending newspaper, and there were no more broadcasts there."
Of the medium’s power, governments knew enough to fear deeply. A revolution in Brazil was prompted by radio broadcasts unsympathetic to the government causing the president of that nation to attempt to censor radio - going so far as to send police to all the radio shops to get the names of purchasers of sets; the police then went to the homes of radio owners and took away the tubes!
When the revolution succeeded many vengeful listeners smashed and burned the shops of radio dealers who had "betrayed them".
Jamming undesirable broadcast propaganda was one tactic employed by governments and by radio amateurs with some success.
Europe probably had more reservations about Russia’s broadcasting practices than the United States in 1931 simply owing to proximity. Russian stations were famous for plopping down on any frequency, occupied or not, and broadcasting their own propaganda. You can’t really blame them - Russia wasn’t even invited to the first world conference in Washington where radio wavelengths and were coordinated.
And in Great Britain, the life-saving ring of radio marine signal stations around England (on which ships rely to steer) just so happened to transmit on a frequency that effectively jammed Moscow from being easily received in the United Kingdom.
Now here is the part you may have been waiting to read — the radio amateur is indicted as an effective "jammer" of propaganda:
"Finally there’s another element being heard from: the amateur. Hitherto he has constituted in every country much the most international element in broadcasting. But he, too, helped turn what might have been the most peaceful of occasions - the opening of the Vatican radio station by the Pope - into a bellicose affair. Deliberate interference was so widespread that the papal message was ordered repeated for a dozen countries, while Moscow was indicted as the marauder by a righteous world.
But it seems the interferences were various. Paris listeners, for example, found the Vatican wave jammed first by some distant northeastern station, second by a French station, and third by a French amateur (repeating the Morse letter "b" with good power) - all of which cleared out as the papal words ceased."
The article concludes with a prophetic warning from the author. Just two years after putting these words to paper, Adolph Hitler would begin his ascendency to power and before two more decades would pass, "science" would discover even more horrendous methods to distribute death and destruction to the masses:
"Radio in the hands of a dictator and the bureaucrat may become a means of oppression and a source of inflammatory propaganda. Threats and fears, hostile radio barriers and controversies promise little for human kind. "Science", which made for peace, devised the horrors, the gas, and liquid fires of the last war. The throttling of radio may bring about a result quite as hideous."
product line is a welcome change (and literally a sight for sore eyes) from our ( technically aged and challenged) Asus “Surf” EEE PC with it’s 4GB solid state drive and the oh-so-small display. The “Surf” is now in the process of being sold and we are looking forward to test driving and purchasing one of the new Netbook products from the “HP Mini” lineup.
I really love the hams from OH. They think big, think tall, and look for the most out of their antennas. Since they get hit too often with all that aurora stuff, they try and compensate with bigger, stronger, and better antennas.
