Read Online Time Travel: A History by James Gleick - Free Book Online
Authors: James Gleick
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named Max Beerbohm.
—
IN THE TWENTIES the future seemed to be arriving daily. News had never traveled so fast, and there had never been so much of it, with the advent of wireless transmission, and by 1927 Wells himself had already had enough. The technology of communications had reached maturity, he felt, with wireless telegraphy, the wireless telephone, “and all the broadcasting business.” Radio had begun as a glorious dream—the finest fruits of the culture, the wisest thoughts and best music, transmitted into homes across the land. “Chaliapin and Melba would sing to us, President Coolidge and Mr. Baldwin would talk to us simply, earnestly, directly; the most august in the world would wish us good evening and pass a friendly word; should a fire or shipwreck happen, we were to get the roar of the flames and the cries for help.” A. A. Milne would tell stories to children and Albert Einstein would bring science to the masses. “All sporting results before we went to bed would be included, the weather forecast, advice about our gardens, the treatment of influenza, and the exact time.”
Yet for Wells the dream had turned sour. Asked by the New York Times to assess the state of radio for its readers, he ranted bitterly, disillusioned as a child finding lumps of coal in the Christmas stocking. “Instead of first-rate came tenth-rate music, played by the Little Winkle-Beach Pier Band,” he wrote. Instead of the wisest voices, “Uncle Bray and Aunt Twaddle.” Even the static irritated him. “Across it all dear old Mother Nature cast her net of ‘atmospherics’ with a humor all her own.” He did enjoy hearing a bit of dance music after a long day—“but dance music only goes on for a small part of the evening, and at any moment it may give way to Doctor Flatulent being thoughtful and kindly in a non-sectarian way.”
His assessment was so harsh that the Times editors were clearly taken aback. They emphasized that Wells could speak of radio broadcasting only “as He Encounters It Abroad.” Wells was not only disappointed in the present state of radio. His crystal ball showed him that the whole enterprise was doomed to fade away. “The future of broadcasting is like the future of crossword puzzles and Oxford trousers, a very trivial future indeed.” Why would anyone listen to music by radio when they could have gramophone records? Radio news vanishes like smoke: “Broadcasting shouts out its information once and cannot be recalled.” For serious thought, he said, nothing can replace books.
His Majesty’s Government had created a “salaried official body to preside over broadcasting programs,” Wells noted—the new British Broadcasting Company. “In the end that admirable committee may find itself arranging schemes of entertainment for a phantom army of expiring listeners.” If any audience remained at all, it would comprise “the blind, lonely and suffering people”—or “probably very sedentary persons living in badly lighted houses or otherwise unable to read, who have never realized the possibilities of the gramophone and the pianola and who have no capacity for thought or conversation.” The BBC’s first experimental television broadcasts were just five years away.
Others could play the futurism game, though. David Sarnoff of RCA retorted by calling Wells a snob; the inventor Lee de Forest told him he needed a better radio—and perhaps the most unusual rebuttal came from the publisher of Radio News and manager of station WRNY, an émigré from Luxembourg named Hugo Gernsback. After arriving in New York at the age of nineteen, Gernsback had started the Electro Importing Company, a mail-order business selling radio parts to eager hobbyists in 1905, with tantalizing advertisements in Scientific American and elsewhere. Within three years he was printing his own magazine, Modern Electrics. By the twenties he was well known to legions of radio amateurs. “I refuse to believe in such a
—
IN THE TWENTIES the future seemed to be arriving daily. News had never traveled so fast, and there had never been so much of it, with the advent of wireless transmission, and by 1927 Wells himself had already had enough. The technology of communications had reached maturity, he felt, with wireless telegraphy, the wireless telephone, “and all the broadcasting business.” Radio had begun as a glorious dream—the finest fruits of the culture, the wisest thoughts and best music, transmitted into homes across the land. “Chaliapin and Melba would sing to us, President Coolidge and Mr. Baldwin would talk to us simply, earnestly, directly; the most august in the world would wish us good evening and pass a friendly word; should a fire or shipwreck happen, we were to get the roar of the flames and the cries for help.” A. A. Milne would tell stories to children and Albert Einstein would bring science to the masses. “All sporting results before we went to bed would be included, the weather forecast, advice about our gardens, the treatment of influenza, and the exact time.”
Yet for Wells the dream had turned sour. Asked by the New York Times to assess the state of radio for its readers, he ranted bitterly, disillusioned as a child finding lumps of coal in the Christmas stocking. “Instead of first-rate came tenth-rate music, played by the Little Winkle-Beach Pier Band,” he wrote. Instead of the wisest voices, “Uncle Bray and Aunt Twaddle.” Even the static irritated him. “Across it all dear old Mother Nature cast her net of ‘atmospherics’ with a humor all her own.” He did enjoy hearing a bit of dance music after a long day—“but dance music only goes on for a small part of the evening, and at any moment it may give way to Doctor Flatulent being thoughtful and kindly in a non-sectarian way.”
His assessment was so harsh that the Times editors were clearly taken aback. They emphasized that Wells could speak of radio broadcasting only “as He Encounters It Abroad.” Wells was not only disappointed in the present state of radio. His crystal ball showed him that the whole enterprise was doomed to fade away. “The future of broadcasting is like the future of crossword puzzles and Oxford trousers, a very trivial future indeed.” Why would anyone listen to music by radio when they could have gramophone records? Radio news vanishes like smoke: “Broadcasting shouts out its information once and cannot be recalled.” For serious thought, he said, nothing can replace books.
His Majesty’s Government had created a “salaried official body to preside over broadcasting programs,” Wells noted—the new British Broadcasting Company. “In the end that admirable committee may find itself arranging schemes of entertainment for a phantom army of expiring listeners.” If any audience remained at all, it would comprise “the blind, lonely and suffering people”—or “probably very sedentary persons living in badly lighted houses or otherwise unable to read, who have never realized the possibilities of the gramophone and the pianola and who have no capacity for thought or conversation.” The BBC’s first experimental television broadcasts were just five years away.
Others could play the futurism game, though. David Sarnoff of RCA retorted by calling Wells a snob; the inventor Lee de Forest told him he needed a better radio—and perhaps the most unusual rebuttal came from the publisher of Radio News and manager of station WRNY, an émigré from Luxembourg named Hugo Gernsback. After arriving in New York at the age of nineteen, Gernsback had started the Electro Importing Company, a mail-order business selling radio parts to eager hobbyists in 1905, with tantalizing advertisements in Scientific American and elsewhere. Within three years he was printing his own magazine, Modern Electrics. By the twenties he was well known to legions of radio amateurs. “I refuse to believe in such a
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