99% Invisible - 167- Voices in the Wire

Episode Date: June 3, 2015

This week on 99% Invisible, we have two stories about the early days of broadcasting and home sound recording, produced by Radio Diaries and the Kitchen Sisters. The sounds that came out Frank Conrad���s Garage in 1919 and 1920 are … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars Beautiful Radio Meaning you do not see the picture, you hear the voice. Here's something called the box you mana. Here's the human voice. The voice is radio. Involves the audience, fire more than television, every year. This is WJK, Monday, March 12, 1973. Thank you, and here's some more hidden music. Take 20 now, people. This is Big Jetter.

I don't know where to canon land. Here we go. There are those innovations that everyone loves and depends on. You're biggies like computers, electricity, the printing press, and then there are the innovations that made you who you are. Punk rock music, photocopiers, cassettes, non-chucks. But if I were to rank them, I think the two most important technological innovations to my life are broadcasting in home sound recording. And today I have two of my favorite stories from two of my favorite any productions all about the early days of broadcasting and recording.

Radiotopians, radio diaries, and the kitchen sisters represent a best of what we can achieve in audio storytelling, and here they are tackling the subjects that are near and dear to my heart. These pieces were first broadcast on NPR as part of the Kitchen Sisters' Lost and Found Sound series. First up, with his story of Conrad's garage and the birth of commercial broadcasting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, this is Joe Richmond from Radio Diaries, produced in 2001. produced in 2001. The sounds that came out of Frank Conrad's garage in 1919 and 1920 are gone. There were no recordings made, and everyone who participated in those weekly broadcasts has died. In fact, there may be only one person still alive who actually heard what was going on

in that garage. A man named Harry Mills. This is K4HU. Hello Charlie. W1HVA here's K4HU. How are you this evening? Hi, I'm Steve Goodman. I'm a little sleepy. Harry Mills is 94 years old. He was an engineer for RCA most of his life, but for the last eight decades he's been going on the ham radio just about every day.

Mills first discovered radio in 1919. He was 12 years old, and his parents bought him a copy of the Boy Scout Handbook. In the book, after a lot of the camping and setting up a tent in a rain and helping the old lady cross the street and so on, and the back was a chapter on how to build a wireless station. I had never heard of such a thing. So I built one. I'll show you how it works. It was built out of photograph plates and tin foil, a condenser, and this is weather stripping.

And this is a Ford Coil, Ford ignition coil which would hook onto your antenna and your on the air. This is what radio sounded like when Mills first started, the Dopp's and dashes of Morse code. That's the letter V, which you use for test purposes. If you hear me, he'd come back and we'd hold a conversation as simple as that. Almost every night Harry Mills would line his bed and listen to the amateur radio operator signal back and forth. Then one night he heard something different. I remember with 10 or 11 o'clock at night and all at once this voice appears. And I remember letting out a yoke or a shout of some sort my dad do it, who just got out of the bass,

come in wrapped in a toutus for sure I was all right. Somebody hadn't happened to me. And I said, dad, look, I'm hearing this full of talking. And we shared the headphones, only had one pair of headphones. And he allowed us, I was right. Harry Mills had stumbled onto the experimental transmissions coming from Frank Conrad's garage, 35 miles away. He was talking to me, says, now I'm going to play a phonograph record, and he did.

It was his time then. I didn't know you could be that. I began with that and heard voice before, and I dropped the music. It opened up a whole new world. Frank Conrad was not the first person to talk and play music on the radio. Inventors like Reginald Fessenden, Lee DeFarrist, and Mark Honey have been doing such experiments as early as 1906. But back then, radio was seen as a method of one-to-one communication, like the telegraph. Few envisioned radio is a way to reach many people at the same time, to broadcast.

Frank Conrad was among the first to use the word broadcasting. It was originally an agricultural term used to describe the distribution of seeds over a large area. In his garage, Conrad helped to change the concept of radio, and he did it largely by accident. Testing, testing, testing, testing one, two, three, test one, two, three, this is Frank Conrad from the garage. This is what it would have sounded like anyway. It's probably fair to say that nobody cares more about Frank Conrad's garage than a man named Rick Harris.

Harris is an amateur historian who has dedicated his life to preserving and researching the history of that garage. He's collected replicas of the equipment Conrad used. A microphone, made out of the top of a candlestick telephone, mounted in a small box stuffed with cotton, and a hand cranked to Vectrola. You turn the crank. Rick Harris says the story of Frank Conrad's garage really begins with that Vectrola. Conrad was an engineer for Westinghouse, so he had access to vacuum tubes which allowed him to transmit his voice over the air.

But at the time, Conrad wasn't thinking about broadcasting. He was simply trying to test and improve his transmitting equipment. The problem was his voice after talking endless hours into the microphone would wear out. So he got the idea one day to put on a record that would give him two or three minutes

to adjust his equipment and would save his voice. This one is an ancient one so I don't know what it's going to sound like. And as soon as he started playing the music he began getting requests for more music and he would get phone calls and letters asking him to play a certain song at a certain time so someone listening with their crystal set could convince a relative that you could actually play music over the air. He found very quickly that there was an unseen audience out there. It would call me up at night and ask me to transmit. They had some friends, one to listen to something coming out of the air.

This is Frank Conrad, recorded in the late 1930s not long before he died. And if I got to take care of that, I sort of reigns the same program twice a week. Everyone's in Saturday night. First of that time, and I actually had no idea what was going to end up in doom. Over time, Conrad's garage started to sound more like a radio station. Along with phonograph records, Conrad would transmit piano solos by family members and baseball scores. And then, when he started to run out of records to play, Conrad went to the Hamilton Music

Store and asked to be Guevara's son for his broadcast. The owner said yes, as long as Conrad agreed to announce the name of the store on the air. Slowly, Conrad was building the one thing announce the name of the store on the air. Slowly Conrad was building the one thing the radio industry hadn't yet thought much about, an audience. But the real turning point came on September 29th, 1920, when the Joseph Horn department store placed this ad in the Pittsburgh Sun.

Air concert picked up by radio here. The music was from the vitrola, and the home of Frank Conrad. Mr. Conrad is a wireless enthusiast and puts on the wireless concerts periodically for the entertainment of many people in this district who have wireless sets. Amateur wireless sets are on sale here, $10 and up. The ad really caught the attention of Conrad's boss at Westinghouse, a man by the name of Harry Davis, who the story goes, called Conrad in the next day, and said, essentially, I would like to put you out of business because I would like Westinghouse to set up its own station.

And Davis asked Conrad, could that be done in Conrad set of course? So over the next month Conrad and his team began constructing a wooden shack on the roof of the Westinghouse plant. They built a 100 watt transmitter and at 6 p.m. on the night of November 2nd, 1920, the newly licensed station KDKA went on the air. This is KDKA of the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. K went on the air. The station launched by Broadcasting the Returns of the Harding Cox Presidential Election. There were no recordings of that broadcast, but in the late 1930s, the original announcer, Leo Rosenberg, made this recreation.

We depreciated if anyone hearing this broadcast would communicate with us, as we are very anxious to know how far the broadcast is reaching and how it is being received. Well, nobody ever heard such a thing before, you had to wait till the next day to find out who won the election. Harry Mills, who was 13 by this time, remembers going down to the local newspaper where they had set up a receiving station. Somebody would sit at the receiver and a crowd gathered outside or a number of people

and they would watch these returns being updated as the numbers came in bigger. The next day on the newspaper, of course, the talk was, gee, for the first time ever, people were able to get the reports, the talk was G for the first time ever people were able to get the reports before the newspaper was printed. I think it's very difficult for us today to imagine really quite what a magical moment this was.

Susan Douglas is a professor at the University of Michigan and the author of Inventing American Broadcasting. She says the KDKA election broadcast was a watershed event. And because there were no connecting wires, because there was this concept of the ether, there was kind of a cosmic connection for people. It was a quasi sort of spiritual event that these voices were coming out of the air into your home. And two weeks after that first transmission, Weston House introduced the first radio for the general public, the Aereola Junior, which sold for $25.

The broadcasting boom had begun, and over the next few years, radio would move out of the garage and into the living room. It's KDKAP expert! Wherever you go! Today, KDKA is considered the oldest radio station in the country. History has not been as kind to Frank Conrad's garage. This fall, bulldozers began to clear the site. It will soon be a windies. The bulldozers destroyed Conrad's house, but Rick Harris and a group of supporters

called the Conrad Project managed to save the garage, piece by piece. The woodwork, all of the doors, the windows, and some 25,000 or so bricks, the ones that survived anyway. I don't know. It's just the more I learn about Frank Conrad and what he did and the fact that he's virtually unknown outside of Pittsburgh. It's just something, it feels that he's been overlooked for what he did.

Someday Harris hopes to reconstruct Conrad's garage and turned it into a museum. Frank Conrad may have helped to launch the modern broadcasting industry, but that wasn't really his vision. Conrad was just a talented engineer, tank-related night in his garage, trying to connect to people through the air. And that pretty well describes what 94-year-old Harry Mills is still doing, every night at 10 o'clock. After all this time, Harry Mills says he still feels the same way he felt when he first

heard Frank Conrad's voice coming out of the radio. To me, it's difficult to describe the fascination of it. I know I use it all the time. How does it happen? To me, it's difficult to describe the fascination of it. I know I use it all the time. How does it happen? I can't see the fella. No wire is going from here to there, but you can talk to him. It was a phenomenon that interested me from the beginning.

I presume it's safe to say that that is. I've never gotten over it. So with that, I'm going to say good night. Thanks for the use of your loudspeaker. Though good night, Bob, and good night, guys. W-1-T-R-F-K-4-H-U. Okay, very good. Good night. Good night, guys.

All day long, they are. Good night, all. I love what you want to hear. Conrad's Garage was produced by Joe Richmond of Radio Diaries in 2001 for the Lost and Found Sound Series. Harry Mills, who was featured in that piece, died in 2008. Conrad's Garage is still a pile of loose bricks in storage of waiting its final resting place as a museum, so someday, someday we hope, you'll be able to see it for yourself.

[♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ So here's the deal. Radio Diaries has a podcast, it's part of Radio Topia, and recently their stories were featured on this American life and planet money. Joe Richmond, offhandedly, said to me when we were talking about today's show, we'll see if you promoting the Radio Diaries podcast on 99% invisible will result in more Radio Diaries subscribers than Planet Money or T.A.L.

Now I don't know if you know this about me, but I am extremely competitive and so I need everyone hearing my voice to subscribe to the Radio Diaries podcast right now. Here's the thing, you'll get short, fortnightly stories that will blow your mind. Radio Diaries will reach more people than ever and I'll get to demonstrate the power of this bully operational battle station. Everyone wins except planning money in this American life. They're gonna lose. So you got it? Subscribe now.

It's important. Ira is watching. Now I don't want to push my luck here, but there's another podcast that you'll want to subscribe to right now that equally deserves to rock it up the podcast charts. It's called Fugitive Waves from the Kitchen Sisters. And if you require proof of why you need to subscribe to another podcast, well then I have the perfect story for you. This is probably one of the top 10 radio stories of all time.

It was first broadcast on MPR's All Things Considered in 2004. The hosting by No Addams and Robert Siegel is really integrated into the story, so I decided to present it as is. This is NPR's All Things Considered. No, it's not. I'm Robert Siegel. And I'm No Adam.

Stop, guys. Each week we begin our lost and found sound series with this theme. It's called Music in Marble Halls. This improvised duet of clarinetette and High Heels crossing a Manhattan office lobby was recorded in 1962 by New York audio legend Tony Schwartz, one of the most original and eccentric sound gatherers of the century. It was 1945 when Tony Schwartz first stepped out of his apartment with a microphone to capture the sounds of his neighborhood.

Now more than 50 years later, Tony Schwartz has amassed one of the largest and most eclectic collections of recorded sound in the world. The kitchen sisters, producer is Davie Nelson and Nikki Silva. Visited Tony in his Midtown Basement studio, where he's surrounded by tape recorders, mixing consoles, awards, photographs, and row upon row of audio tapes. There's Dore Tony Schwartz, 30,000 recordings later, looks at the legacy of a man who has spent his life exploring and influencing the world through recorded sound, beginning with a work called New York 19 was the non-commercial musical life of my postal zone.

And the postal zone was New York 19 at that time. It's 101019 now. That was the area I could travel in. I'm not able to travel far. I have a Gorophobia. And in walking, I could just go around my postal cell and it's still been happened. I made the first portable tape recorder.

I brought the VU meter from inside the case to the top so I could look down at it and see how loud things were. I put a strap on it so I could have it over my shoulder. That was 1940. I could go record children in the park doing jump rope rhymes. I recorded the street festivals. I made 14 records for folkways records. You can see them up there.

The children's games of the streets, I called it one, two, three, and a zing zing zing. On the macy's and me, more, more, more. There's a big, fat, leech, man at the door, door, door. I was interested in the sound around us. Two things that you're not allowed to carry in taxi. One is fish, the other is bedding, they're both. I had a wrist mic. I had a brush lapel mic and I would put it on a wristwatch band and I'd put it out my sleeve so I would just walk around and record that way like when I went into the pawn shop and I did cab drivers that way recorded

by 7800 cab drivers. Two way with your parko lots and mid-dial from 14th Street for 59th Street no parking a lot in the daytime only after 6 o'clock. There should be a solvulom. I had recorded the songs on truth boxes in the restaurants or bars that cater to the various groups around my postal zone. What I would do is get people in the restaurant who spoke English to come over and translate it translated for me. The country which I was born is suffering many, many back economic things. Even though I'll feel terrible there.

In my country there are always flowers. That is my paradise. I won't change Puerto Rico by 16 of yorks. I won't change Puerto Rican chickens by frozen chickens in the ice boxes here. This is Max Nichols of Peter Marisburg, New Tell, South Africa, calling Tony Swartz of New York, USA. Hello, Tony Swartz. I'm bringing you greetings from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This is a Greek folk show through Eilor Criter.

Hello, Tony. My name is Thomas Knott, 19th and Kalani, County Terry Island. When I got my first wire recorder, I asked the company if they would give me the guarantee slips from people from all over the world and all over this country who bought the recorders who said they were buying them because of their interest in music. And I would exchange wires with people in other countries who were interested in folk music and they would send me material from their countries. My name is Tony Schwartz. The music you hear is a Provean Indian playing his guitar on a quiet summer evening. This is one of 15,000 recordings I've collected. Recordings of folk music and folk music.

Recordings I've exchanged with people all over the world. Hello Tony, I received your letter here at the other day. Well I'm going to send you a wire and all this stuff that I generally do, you know, singing a comma and stuff. I don't know what you've been up to. New York City appreciate this kind of music. We folks around here do this hillbillie stuff. That's how it started. Recordings came in from all parts of the United States.

From all parts of the world. Recordings on wire. Recordings on tape. One of my exchanges was with a man who wanted sounds he no longer heard. Tony, I wonder if you do me a favor. I live out in the country and originally I came from the city and I kind of miss it. I was wondering if you would record some sounds of the city and send them out to me. I'd really like to hear it. How about it? Part of my answer was recorded in

Times Square. Here's the thing. Bus car. I don't know. It's all on the old Christmas Village in the bar. The end part. A week later, I found this in my mailbox. Tony, I received your sounds of the city this morning, and I've been playing them ever since. I noticed that you said that you recorded them about 830 at night.

To sort of reciprocate, here's the sounds of my country 830 at night. To sort of reciprocate, here's the sounds of my country 830 at night. The voices and music of the world came into my apartment in New York City, and I traveled no further than my mailbox. In people talking, there's an innate musicality in a way certain people speak. And also in the barcaries at nightclubs, various places. The sound of sewing used to be the people of vendors going by in the street or people singing in the backyard or shouting in the backyard.

Now, it's over the radio or television. I did a whole record on the sound of selling. VEGETAL MEN Apeles, apples on the street, or that horse and wagon selling vegetables. They were men who would go around buying old clothes and they'd go, I cash clothes, I cash go around buying old clothes and they go, I cash clothes, I cash clothes. It was February 3rd, 1956, when Tony Schwartz appeared at the information desk of the animal shelter to ask for a dog.

The attendant will take you into the adoption ward and ward a, look the dogs over and if there's anything you select, you tell them that's the dog you want. These are obedient, strange dogs working toward degrees, which of course, that's like receiving a college diploma. I did a radio program on sound once a week, on WNYC for over 35 years. I would do it on any subject that came up to me during the week.

Good morning. Every year for the last 13 years I've been presenting the story and sound of the growth of my niece. We've all heard of time lapse photography. Well I'm going to apply this technique to the growth of my niece, Nancy, in sound. 13 years condensed into two minutes and 13 seconds. Here it goes. Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pale of... What? Jack fell down and broke... And Jill came tumbling... What? How was it then? I would record the sound of my daughter growing up.

I have her first cries after being born. I had a microphone over her bed and a recorder in our bedroom. And any time I heard her beginning to wake up or anything I could turn on the recorder and record the sound of her waking up. Tony, if the dog makes a way we in house, if he has to make him a house broken if he makes away we in in the park and have to slap him with a newspaper then if he doesn't do it again he has broken.

What do you think of the Russians sending the dog up in the satellite? Well I hope he doesn't get hurt but if he does I'm that I'll send up a medical satellite. Black woman was working as a nurse for our child. And when she'd go home at night, I'd take her out to get a cab to go up to Harlem. If she'd a helicopter, they wouldn't stop for her. Blacks couldn't get taxis to pick them up. And I interviewed cabs, drivers, why they don't like to go to Harlem. I put that in a program.

It's all girls. You'll miss my hair, and it's very special for tonight. It's just the way I wanted to do a page board with a high top. And that's the way I like it. I'm taking guitar lessons, and that's fun. I take drama lessons after school, and that's great. And I've been working on the school newspaper. I might be editor next year. And I've been discovering boys.

And I come to these ideas just from being human and working with sound and knowing how sound affected me and affected other people. Dear lies, Tony Chirney. Once a pet turtle, a dattle chirney, died February 24, 1964. Who died? My turtle, Tony. He got a soul shell and they tried to save him by giving him hamburger, but he died and we're gonna bury him Not too well Sort of a tragedy for me. I'm gonna play taps and the flag is because I like him

Just like the prison of the United States when he died except But he's like in my family. I'm a turtle. You're going to turtle. Blind. Come to me. My melon. Colley baby.

Cut a lot. And don't be... Can't see be Can a baby shrivel? Anybody can feel blue. All your fears are foolish fancies, maybe. Well, I was born at the beginning of time. Time magazine started the year I was born. Harry Bolefonte was a pop singer when I met him. I got him into the Jamaican songs.

This is another working song. It is the banana loading song. Day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, night-o, day-o, night-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o, day-o And I played those songs the Arriba of Fonte. I got from a nightclub in Africa. Songs like Waymawaii. Remember that? And everybody loved Saturday night. Waymawaii I gave to the Weavers. And everybody loved Saturday night. I gave to which was name. He owns a casino in Atlantic City. He used to be a singer. He also, I watched Jeopardy on Toevers, and he ever watched that. And who was the guy that is the plunder of it? Merv Griffin, I gave him

everybody loves Saturday night. Good morning. Today I'd like to play two beautiful songs sung by Paul Robson. I think he was one of the great singers of our time. In the McCarthy era, Robson couldn't travel because they called him a communist, which is ridiculous. He wasn't a communist, which is ridiculously what a communist. Just believed in internationalism. He wanted to send tapes to various places around the world.

One I did to send to England for a speech for him. It was about peace, so I had his song behind it. Then I had his narration over that. Peace and friendship with our great wartime ally, and enduring peace growing out of United Nations, out of friendship with the Soviet people. I did it for many people who couldn't travel for W.E.B. Du Bois. I would record speeches that he wanted to give in South Africa. Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois of New York writer and president of the Penn African Congress to the peoples of Africa, greeting.

Then when the Hollywood 10 was supposed to go to jail for being un-American and many of them had made movies that I loved, I recorded all of them the night before they went to jail. Dalton Trombone telling what he was accused of. How did they treat you in Trombone? The committee was anti-Semitic, anti-labor, anti-need girl, pro-war, and had been denounced by everyone from Roosevelt down over the world. The ridiculousness of this McCarthy era, you know, he started the whole thing of loyalty oaths. Most people think of evil as the sounds of gunfire or thunder or lightning or something.

I've found and believe that the most evil sounds in the world are the sounds out of mouths of people. Why have you used media to shame people into proper behavior? In primitive cultures, if someone did something shameful, and word of mouth got around the village in an hour or so, in our culture, the same thing exists, but if you divide the distance of our country into the speed of sound, you find they would take a 64th of a second to reach across the country by telephone, radio, television or anything like that. I did a commercial with a pope against nuclear weapons. I've been against nuclear weapons since 1939.

One thing I've done was the daisy spot for President Johnson. I was working on sound for six or seven commercials in the campaign against Barry Goldwater. One of them was a little girl counting down and picking the pedals off her daisy, then there's the countdown and then the blonde goes off. Harold, these are the stakes to make a world in which all of God's children can live. Aren't to go into the dark. We must either love each other or we must die. What would you say to young people who smoke? I would say that they're very foolish even to consider it I had to have my voice box removed I have a whole micraote that's what I teach a course for NYU

I also teach median public health in Harvard both places come here. I have a Gauravphobia. I don't travel. I'm not able to travel. I have used the telephone to teach all over the world in Sweden, in Japan, South America, Australia. My brother built a one tube radio which never worked and I used to go up in the attic and play a spaceship like Jack Armstrong. I was also interested in physics and the physics teacher was interested in amateur radio. And I first built my own receivers and huge 20 meter antennas.

And I built my own little shack where I had 16 by 16. And I had my radio station in the front, my bed in the back. And I ran a telephone line up to the house so my mother could call me in for supper. I made up short way of listening cards, I speak to them on radio, and I would tell them how they're coming in. I think the most important thing we can work on in communication is to make the world safer for the people who live with it. People, that's what I was most interested in. People in their life, what they do.

Tony Schwartz, 30,000 recordings later, was produced by the kitchen sisters, David and Elson and Nikki Silva, with El from Tim Burby, Nina Ellis and Jim Anderson. Mixed by Jim McKee at Earwax Productions in San Francisco. This week, Lost and Found Sound thanks, Reena Schwartz, Gabriel Lewis, and Stations KQED and WNYC. Tony Schwartz died in 2008.

You can still buy his amazing recordings on iTunes. They're worth every penny as you get them. Thanks to the kitchen sisters for introducing me to him, Nikki Silva and Davian Nelson are total heroes to me. Their podcast is a central listening, it's called Fugitive Waves. 99% of visible is Katie Mingle, Sam Greenspan, Avery Troubleman, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7KALW San Francisco and produced out of the offices of Arxan, an architecture and interior sperm in beautiful downtown Oakland,

California. You can find this show and like the show on Facebook, all of us are on Twitter, Instagram, and Spotify, but to find out more about this story including cool pictures and links and listen to all the episodes of 99% In. You must go to 99pi.org. Radio Tapio. From PRX. you