Radio-Our Next Great Step Forward Also: Frank Condon - Samuel M. Vauclain-"Uncle Henry"- Ethel M. Dell-Wadsworth Camp Collier's, The National Weekly, April 8, 1922. Volume 69, Number 14. Entered as second-class matter, July 23, 1913, at the Post Office, at New York, N. Y., under the Act of March 3, 1879, and at the Post Office partment, Ottawa, Canada, by P. F. Collier & Son Company, 416 West 13th St., New York, N. Y. Price: 5 cents a copy, $2.50 a year; 10 cents a copy, $5.00 a year in Canada and Foreign Countries. Manufactured in U. S H News, entertainment, music, education come through the radiophone to families in city flats, village houses, and mountain cabins RADIO Our Next Great Step E went home last December and took the town a Christmas present. It did not cost much. A hundred dollars would have covered it. Other men in the train had bigger xes and packages. One by one, they got off at eir respective stations. Our man, and he is one of e best known manufacturers in America, left the ain at the smallest and dingiest station of alls home town. Only a handful of people live there. A few years o there was a saloon-a meeting place, of a kind, the men of the town. They usually went there the evening and exchanged ideas. When the oon was closed, no other meeting place remained not even a movie theatre. Its people have been cut from each other, and from the world. On Christmas Eve the man from the city uncked his radiophone and put it on the parlor table. the neighbors were invited to come in, and st of them did. Like the rest of us, they had ard of the miracle of radio. But their faces were eptical-until the box began to sing, to talk! It Dught them good music, that first evening. Since en it has brought important news, good lectures, and opera; President Harding has spoken to them; n and women who until now have been merely mes have come into their lives. It made me cry and I'm not ashamed to say so," If it is only a craze, it is the greatest craze the world has ever seen. But it is more it brings education and happiness and democracy with it By Stanley Frost said the man who did this. "I've worried about that lonely town, and my family and friends up there, for years. Now I'm through worrying. They are back in the swing of the world of thought and action." Such is part, and only part, of the miracle of radio. That is what it can do and is doing for every unhappy, isolated, lonesome person and family and town in America. Madame Galli-Curci is a great singer. She is accustomed to large audiences. The Metropolitan Opera House in New York seats 3,426 people. But the other night Galli-Curci sang to the biggest audience that has ever been reached at one time by a human voice. There were at least a hundred thousand listeners; there may have been twice as many. Vast as this audience is, impossible as it would have been two months ago, the record will stand for only a few days, if indeed it has not already been broken. Within a few months, and almost surely before snow flies again, that audience will have risen to millions. It is the audience that listens to the concerts and lectures that are broadcasted from the Radio Corporation-Westinghouse wireless telephone station at Newark, N. J. Its size, increasing daily by hundreds and thousands, is the most striking proof of the speed and power with which the craze for the new household utility is sweeping over America and making all previous crazes look weak and thin. It can be called a craze only because radiotelephony is hardly more than an amusement as yet. But it is fast becoming a public service of great value, and it has in it the promise of a new democracy of thought and culture and universal contact that will soon touch more people than have been reached by any agency except perhaps but only perhaps by the printing press. It is headed for a development beyond the range of prophecy. So this amazing craze is not a craze, and, amazing as it is, is bound to grow with increasing speed. Many dreams might be dreamed about its future, and the wildest of them would probably come true. But, on the basis of the known facts, it is certain that the new science will very quickly give us at great that the supply companies are working night and day, and one of them has increased its output of certain essential parts more than 300 per cents since the first of the year. Demands for more broadcasting stations, for more and better receivers, for more and different kinds of entertainment tad go out by radiophone, are piling up o executives' desks. The manufacturer pi have already taken measures to make of sure that the supply oat apparatus will soon br adequate. rit Scientists and Govern ment officials are trying to find solutions to that tremendous problems thi astounding developmen has brought about antr that are already hampere ing it. Great laborat tories are busy overtim trying to perfect an cheapen the instruments and to measure the posy sibilities of devices sig new that even the exh perts have not yet dis covered either their limi tations or their powers These devices are wonh derful almost past belief, Most of us know the sim ple principles of wireless how waves of electric er ergy are shot into th (Continued on page 181 COL Bot |