HOW BROADCASTING CAME

Wairarapa Times-Age, 11 December 1939, Page 4

HOW BROADCASTING CAME

EARLY EFFORTS IN U.S.A. The American scientist, Dr R. A. Millikan is one of a group of six who held the first radio talk over any appreciable distance. That was at Easter, 1915, and the talk was from Montauk, Long Island, to Wilmington, a distance of 200 miles. In effect it was a broadcast from two points, two-way radio telephony, of course, being then unknown. In discussing the matter, Dr Millikan explained that the group at Montauk put its piece over the air—it was from the Gettysburg speech—then the instruments were changed over and Wilmington went on the air. Each group took a note of what the other said, and thus checked up later, Curiously, no one saw the great field of broadcasting that this experiment opened up. Dr Millikan explained, however, that he and those associated with him were thinking only in terms of telephone communication. They had been asked to devise some form of booster that would enable telephone communication to be established between New York and San Francisco in time for the opening of the San Francisco Exposition in 1915. “It is strange to look back and realise that it was six years after our success before the idea of broadcasting was conceived," said Dr Millikan. “Not even when, with more powerful tubes in use, we were heard by observers in Paris and Honolulu did the idea of broadcasting being of commercial value come to anyone. And when it was commercialised it was because one company with the right to manufacture the type of tube concerned found itself squeezed out of the general market. It needed a market badly, and, setting out to create one. it evolved the idea of sending out entertainment and information over the air into receiving sets in the homes of the people. Thus came broadcasting to the world of today."