BY
ROBERT BENCHLEY
(1889-1945)
I wouldn't be surprised if I knew less about radio than any one in the world, and that is no faint praise. There may be some things , like horseshoeing and putting little ships in bottles, which are closed books to me, but I have a feeling that if someone were to be very patient and explain the principles to me I might be able to get the hang of it. But, I don't have any such feeling about rado. A radio expert could come and live with me for two years, and be just as kind and gentle and explicit as a radio expert could be, and yet it would do no good. I simply never could understand it; so there is no good in teasing me to try.
As a matter of fact, I was still wrestling with the principle of the telephone when radio came along, and was still a long way from having mastered it. I knew that I could go to a mouthpiece and say a number into it and get another number, but I was not privy to the means by which this miracle was accomplished. Finally I gave up trying to figure it out, as the telephone company seemed to be getting along all right with it, and it was evident from the condition my own affairs were getting in that there were other things about which I had much better be worrying. And then came radio to confuse me further.
Of course, I know all about the fact that if you toss a stone into a pond it will send out concentric circles which reach to the shores. Everybody pulls that one when you ask them how sound is transmitted through the air. If I have been told about tossing a stone in a pond once I have been told it five hundred times. I have even gone out and done it myself, but I guess that I didn't have the knack, for the concentric circles ran for only about two feet and then disappeared.
But the stone in pond explanation is really no explanation at all, for there have at least the stone and the pond to work with, whereas in radio you have nothing, absolutely nothing. If people tell me about the stone in the pond once again I shall begin to think that this is a gag worked up by those who don't understand the thing either. They have got to be more explicit if they want me to understand. Perhaps they con't care. I almost think that nobody cares whether I am enlightened or not. (I am sorry if I sound bitter about the thing, but I have stood it just about as long as I can.)
Somebody once did say something which made a great impression on me, but which I can hardly believe. He said that the air had always been full of these sounds, and that all the radio did was to give us a means of catching them. This is a horrible thought. To think that the room in which the Declaration of Independence was signed would have, by mere installation of radio, been echoing with the strains of something corresponding to " I Kiss Your Hand, Madame," or that Robert and Elizabeth Browning held hands in a chamber which was at that very moment teeming with unheard syllables explaining how to make bran muffins! Reason totters at the thought, and I mention the supposition here only to show how absurd the whole thing is.
But the suggestion is a haunting one, even though you , as I have done, discard it as impractical. If the air has always been full of music and voices which we have only just recently learned to make audible,what else might it not be full of right now which, perhaps in a hundred years, will also be dragged out into the light? If by the installation of a microphone at the other end and a receiving set at my end I learn that my room has all the time been full of noises made by the Little Gypsy Robber Sponge quartet in Newark ir a man employed by some slipper concern in Michigan, why isn't it possible that it is also full of things I don't know about, such as the spirits of the men who murdered the little princess in the tower, or perhaps a couple of Borgias? I t simply makes a mockery of privacy, that's all it does. A man ought to have some place where he can go and be alone without feeling that he may be breathing in a lot of strangers and what nots.
I will even concede that the air out of doors may be full of sound waves, but you can't make me believe that they can get through the walls of great big houses. They might through the walls of a summer hotel, or even come through an open front door and work their way upstairs. I will even go so far as to recognize the possibility of something erected on a roof catching them and bringing them down into the living room to disturb daddy when he is trying to take a nap. But to ask me to believe that a box which has no connection at all with the outside can be carried about a house which is securely locked, and still keep on playing sounds which have pushed their way through stone walls, is just too much. For this reason I have refused to turn on my portable radio set which was given to me on my birthday. I will not allow myself to be made a party to any such chicanery.
My biggest argument that the whole thing is a fake is the quality of the stuff that domes on the air. It is the same thing which makes me distrust spiritualism--the quality of the material offered us from the spirit world. I am really a very simple minded man at heart and will believe most anything as long as the person who tells me has a pleasant face. I might very easily e won over to Buddhism, osteopathy, and Swedish bread. But when I go into a darkened room with the expectation of hearing something out of the great unknown which will help clear up this mystery of life and death and find out merely that the uncle of some person in the room is still having that trouble with his hip which he had before he died, or that those old gray gloves which I thought I had lost are in my winter overcoat hanging in the hall closet, it all seems hardly worth the rouble.
It is much the same with radio Scientists have gone to all the trouble of rigging up apparatus which will pull out of the air sounds which we were never able to hear before, the whole ether is thrown into a turmoil, the south pole is placed in connection with Greenland and modern life is revolutionized by the utilization of these mysterious sound waves. And with what result? We in New York hear Miss Ellen Drangle in Chicago singing "Mighty Lak a Rose." The mountain which brought forth a mouse did a good day's work in comparison.
All Of this, however, is probably none of my business. I had better not sit here criticizing others for something which I couldn't possibly do myself. Probably that is what upsets me so[[that I don't understand how it works. I have seen other people make it work and that has more or less discouraged me. They get so unpleasant about it. It would seem as if contact with such cosmic natural elements as electricity and sound waves and WJZ would have a tendency to make a man broad-minded and gentle, but it doesn't work out that way. It just makes them nasty.
I had a cousin once who built a radio. It seemed to me to be a foolhardy thing to do in the first place, monkeying around with electricity and tubes and things, but I said nothing. He read books on the subject and bought a lot of truck and sat around trying to fit things together for weeks and weeks, not speaking to his family except to tell them to get away from there and, in general, behaving in a very boorish manner.
Finally he got the thing so that it would work and picked up some kind of concert which was being broadcast from a station about half a mile away. The selection was a marimba band playing "Moonlight Waves," and he was tickled to death. Everyone had to come in and listen and congratulate him. "You certainly are a wonder, Ed," they exclaimed, and he said nothing to dispute it. Then he tried another station and broke in on the middle of another marimba band playing "moonlight Waves." He was so pleased at being able to get another station, however, that he let it finish. That happened to be the end of that program; so he tried what he called "Cleveland, Ohio." Well, it seemed that "Cleveland, Ohio," was specializing that day on marimba band selections of "Moonlight Waves" and Ed got another load of that for half an hour. By this time the rest of the family had tiptoed out of the room.
The upshot of it was that Ed never moved away from that radio set for ten days and nights, always turning little knobs and looking up charts, always hoping against hope, but always getting a marimba band playing "Moonlight Waves." He refused food that was brought to him, but somehow had whisky smuggled in , which he consumed in great gulps to keep his courage up. Pretty soon this began to tell on him, and he grew emaciated and trembly and nobody dared go near him. His wife got a doctor to come, but he wouldn't let anyone come into the room, simply showing his teeth and growling like an old fox terrier every time the threshold was crossed. And all the time the moaning strains of "Moonlight Waves" dragged through the room, from Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Boston, until finally he collapsed and could be carried out.
They never found out quite what had been the matter. Some people said that he had built a gramophone by mistake, and that the marimba band number was a record which kept on playing and playing. Others said that he had stumbled on some new form of sound reproduction and had isolated a certain number of sound waves so that they never could get free. Articles were written about it in scientific journals and he was hailed as an inventor, but it didn't do him any good, as no one wanted to buy a lot of sound waves which did nothing but play "Moonlight Waves" over and over again. he whole thing was very tragic.
It only goes to show, however, that even the eople who know a lot about radio and electricity really don't know an awful lot, and makes me all the more contented to stick to my old banjo. I don't know many chords on it, but I do know where they come from.
I will even concede that the air out of doors may be full of sound waves, but you can't make me believe that they can get through the walls of great big houses. They might through the walls of a summer hotel, or even come through an open front door and work their way upstairs. I will even go so far as to recognize the possibility of something erected on a roof catching them and bringing them down into the living room to disturb daddy when he is trying to take a nap. But to ask me to believe that a box which has no connection at all with the outside can be carried about a house which is securely locked, and still keep on playing sounds which have pushed their way through stone walls, is just too much. For this reason I have refused to turn on my portable radio set which was given to me on my birthday. I will not allow myself to be made a party to any such chicanery.
My biggest argument that the whole thing is a fake is the quality of the stuff that domes on the air. It is the same thing which makes me distrust spiritualism--the quality of the material offered us from the spirit world. I am really a very simple minded man at heart and will believe most anything as long as the person who tells me has a pleasant face. I might very easily e won over to Buddhism, osteopathy, and Swedish bread. But when I go into a darkened room with the expectation of hearing something out of the great unknown which will help clear up this mystery of life and death and find out merely that the uncle of some person in the room is still having that trouble with his hip which he had before he died, or that those old gray gloves which I thought I had lost are in my winter overcoat hanging in the hall closet, it all seems hardly worth the rouble.
It is much the same with radio Scientists have gone to all the trouble of rigging up apparatus which will pull out of the air sounds which we were never able to hear before, the whole ether is thrown into a turmoil, the south pole is placed in connection with Greenland and modern life is revolutionized by the utilization of these mysterious sound waves. And with what result? We in New York hear Miss Ellen Drangle in Chicago singing "Mighty Lak a Rose." The mountain which brought forth a mouse did a good day's work in comparison.
All Of this, however, is probably none of my business. I had better not sit here criticizing others for something which I couldn't possibly do myself. Probably that is what upsets me so[[that I don't understand how it works. I have seen other people make it work and that has more or less discouraged me. They get so unpleasant about it. It would seem as if contact with such cosmic natural elements as electricity and sound waves and WJZ would have a tendency to make a man broad-minded and gentle, but it doesn't work out that way. It just makes them nasty.
I had a cousin once who built a radio. It seemed to me to be a foolhardy thing to do in the first place, monkeying around with electricity and tubes and things, but I said nothing. He read books on the subject and bought a lot of truck and sat around trying to fit things together for weeks and weeks, not speaking to his family except to tell them to get away from there and, in general, behaving in a very boorish manner.
Finally he got the thing so that it would work and picked up some kind of concert which was being broadcast from a station about half a mile away. The selection was a marimba band playing "Moonlight Waves," and he was tickled to death. Everyone had to come in and listen and congratulate him. "You certainly are a wonder, Ed," they exclaimed, and he said nothing to dispute it. Then he tried another station and broke in on the middle of another marimba band playing "moonlight Waves." He was so pleased at being able to get another station, however, that he let it finish. That happened to be the end of that program; so he tried what he called "Cleveland, Ohio." Well, it seemed that "Cleveland, Ohio," was specializing that day on marimba band selections of "Moonlight Waves" and Ed got another load of that for half an hour. By this time the rest of the family had tiptoed out of the room.
The upshot of it was that Ed never moved away from that radio set for ten days and nights, always turning little knobs and looking up charts, always hoping against hope, but always getting a marimba band playing "Moonlight Waves." He refused food that was brought to him, but somehow had whisky smuggled in , which he consumed in great gulps to keep his courage up. Pretty soon this began to tell on him, and he grew emaciated and trembly and nobody dared go near him. His wife got a doctor to come, but he wouldn't let anyone come into the room, simply showing his teeth and growling like an old fox terrier every time the threshold was crossed. And all the time the moaning strains of "Moonlight Waves" dragged through the room, from Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Boston, until finally he collapsed and could be carried out.
They never found out quite what had been the matter. Some people said that he had built a gramophone by mistake, and that the marimba band number was a record which kept on playing and playing. Others said that he had stumbled on some new form of sound reproduction and had isolated a certain number of sound waves so that they never could get free. Articles were written about it in scientific journals and he was hailed as an inventor, but it didn't do him any good, as no one wanted to buy a lot of sound waves which did nothing but play "Moonlight Waves" over and over again. he whole thing was very tragic.
It only goes to show, however, that even the eople who know a lot about radio and electricity really don't know an awful lot, and makes me all the more contented to stick to my old banjo. I don't know many chords on it, but I do know where they come from.
No comments:
Post a Comment