LURE OF RADIO

Hokitika Guardian, 24 July 1930, Page 7

LURE OF RADIO

WHAT IT HAS GIVEN US. NET IN 1 THE ETHER. KNIT THE WORLD’S PEOPLES,

If an Act of Parliament were suddenly passed making radio illegal there would be a riot. It is difficult to realise that this revelation, as we know it to-day in 'broadcasting, was virtually non-existent when the war ended. It was a magic mumbo jumbo for scientists; a safeguard for ships, each word being spelt out laboriously in dots and dashes. A modern radio set, if one could have been built, would have cost a king’s ransom. Good condensers cost anything Uip to .£2O, and valves, if they were obtainable, cost three or four pounds —such valves too. Born of the war and the child of such men at Marconi, Lodge, and Fleming, this rough and gawkish youngster was not received with open arms. People laughed at radio—laughed—and said it would never come to anything. Even the gramophone companies failed to recognised their best friend. But the youngster grew. Year by year money contributed voluntarily by the public provided better broadcasting stations. The pro-

grammes ceased to be amateurish improvisations. They were taken seriously and programme staffs came on the scene. The significant fact is that the present-day state of radio is due entirely to voluntary 1 contributions from a very shrewd public—from a public who would have voted down any political party who thrust a thirtyshilling tax on the nation for compulsory radio,

1 THE FIRST LURE. . Tlie first lure of radio was its weirdness. Jit was spectacular to , hear Prime Ministers speaking in one’s own drawing room. It was exciting to cast a net into the ether and see what strange fish it would produce. Then came the days of radio widowhood when strong but not silent men wrestled in backrooms with their magic box of tricks, while their wives patiently knitted in the front rooms. But there was, and still is, something more solid in radio than the lure of its weirdness. For one thing, radio even in the earlier days introduced its correct time, Greenwich time, or its sister, into homes which had never known the time. Unconsciously, the magic that is in music stole into homes where music - never was, before. Twenty years, ago “high brow” and “low brow” never met even in the newspapers. Tb-day they exchange views, often forcible, and learn to understand other points of view. -Men and women who never would have listened to a symphony or a concerto have biuilt up expensive gramophone libraries as a result of to do physical training at their radio sets. In the United States, indeed, men, it is said, get up at early hours to do phvsicinl tranhlg n-t their radio sets—a thing they would never have done at the bidding of their wives. Such, indeed, is the way radio has taken possesion of the home. THE OMNISCIENT.

However, music is but a sideshow of radio. It is the newspaper of the backblocks, the newspaper of men who help to run the Empire in those faroff places when the only music hitherto has been the ping of mosquitoes and the drum-beating of savage tribes. Deliveries of this Empire newspaper are made at the rate of 186,000 miles a second. The tap of a bat as it hits a cricket ball, the punch of a boxer, the gruntings of wrestlers, the opening of conferences, sweep out from their origins and are heard by the world before the audience actually present has itself heard the sound. Radio is more than Empire wide. It knows no boundaries : tariff barriers are no more obstacles to it than high mountains. A “hedger and ditcher” in Sussex can hear a Volga Boatman in full blast. A bargee on the Thames can hear the scrunch of feet on Wellington pavements. Whether we know it or not, magic such as this can but knit the people of the world. The little box of tricks in the drawingroom turned on and off by a snap of switch has made more people see round the corners of the world than books or music or poetry could ever hope to have done. But, above all, radio with all it? fascination is not the toy of a rich man. Tom, Dick and Harry have radio sots ns good—or better. They, tot), can snap on a switch and let the world talk and sing and joke to them. They can dance to a tune played in Sydney and laugh at n joke made in California.