FUTURE OF RADIO

Waikato Independent, Volume XXX, Issue 2433, 6 January 1931, Page 2

FUTURE OF RADIO

TEN YEARS OF BROADCASTING. AMAZING DEVELOPMENT ALREADY. When some one hundred listeners, carefully poised before crude crystal radio sets, faintly heard a voice announcing, over station KDKA, the returns which told of the election of Warren G. Harding as President of the United States on the evening of Nov. 2, 1920, little did they realise that they were the forerunners of an army of listeners which just ten years later should reach the imposing estimate of 00,000,000 in the United States alone. New Zealand has about 50,000 listeners at the present time, of whom 15,000, are in the Auckland Province. Radio's fust decade has seen tremendous growth in the art. In receiving sets we have power, selectivity and tone quality hardly thought possible .years ago. Messy batteries and tangling wires have been largely eliminated. Connecting a radio set is as simple as plugging in a reading lamp these day*. Homely boxes have been displaced by splendid examples of the cabinet-mak-er's craft. In programmes the chain networks have brought the best in.entertainment, the only direct cost to the listener being the upkeep of his set. Most of the greatest artists are on the air. Ten years have passed. What will the next ten years bring? asks the Christian Science Monitor. The answer is largely written in the technical progress of several major contributions. Practical television is not far away, ! well-informed engineers putting it at ', two years. Synchronization is here, the ability to put many stations on the same wavelength using the same programme. This should mean more avail-.

able channels, more chains, better local programmes and a. generally higher level of radiocasting.

Then there is the stenode radiostat. This device, promising at least to double the number of wavelengths, multiplies the value of synchronization several times. It appears to answer one of the needs of television, a suffic--icnt waveband width effect for good reproduction. "To be sure, its introduction would demand a radical change in radio receivers, but this is not impossible. Still in the transmitting field, but out of the'field of invention, we have the possibilities of radiocasting with superpower on long waves. .Here may be the answer to the need for steady high-powered service to the rural areas night and day. Europe's experience with it lends much promise to its possibilities. jShort waves have been found useful and developed to an amazing degree. They tie together the far-flung corners of the earth with regular service using relatively low pOwer. They have made transatlantic radio broadcasts, such as the one when G. Bernard Shaw and Dr Albert Einstein were heard in the United States, an accepted practice. Surely, as radio enters upon its second decade, the promise is for as thrillingly great advances as have attended its first ten years. This great agent for the spreading of music, drama, religion and education, with the addition of visual transmission in sight, can no longer be called an infant art. Yet it stands upon the threshold of a far greater career. Who dares outline its place when Nov. 2, 1940, shall have arrived?