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 In
case you missed it, yesterday, January 18th was the 100th
anniversary of the first radio broadcast in the world. Just
think about it…..one hundred and one years ago there were no
cell phones, pagers, televisions, short wave broadcasts, ship to
shore weather faxes or satellite news programs….nothing had ever
been transmitted via the airwaves prior to this time. If you’re
my age (60) or older it was very likely that your grandparents
were very much alive when this event took place. Not that they
would have known about it since the only way current information
was disseminated was by telegraph in Morse code. Filling a
newspaper with timely and up to date world events was very much
different than what we have today. Marconi’s revolutionary
invention was scoffed at by a large number of folks who never
thought information could be transmitted through the air. How
wrong they were. If you take a few moments to sit back and
reflect on what has been accomplished in just 100 years it tends
to jolt you into the realization that we have accomplished much
in a very short period of time. Imagine this…in 1902, a man
could come home from a hard days work and read the newspaper or
talk to his wife and children while dinner was being prepared.
The world news was days or even weeks old since there wasn’t
anything such as a television or CNN. Actual photos of smart
bombs falling on various buildings throughout the world were
non-existent, as was most of the stuff we get exposed to day
after day. If you had told anyone a hundred years ago, how the
news would be distributed in the future, they would have thought
you were crazy. Perhaps they would have been right.
Obviously the children of 1902 had to sit and actually
participate in the evening conversation due to the lack of
creature comforts such as Walkman or hip-hop, rap or whatever
it’s called these days blaring from the stereo. I guess it’s
still called a stereo and not a record player. I’ll get to that
in a minute. What a primitive society. Telephones were a rare
item in most homes, so the evening meal could be consumed by the
entire family at one time without the annoyance of various
telemarketers trying to get us to switch long distance carriers.
There simply weren’t any long distance carriers. After dinner,
the family did strange things such as talked or played games or
..horrors of horrors…..they read and the kids did their school
work. How quaint. My… how far we’ve come in such a short time.
Isn’t this wonderful progress?
I mentioned stereos. I think my Grandmother called them
Victrola’s or something like that. She had a funny machine that
played music on rolls shaped like soup cans. The first ‘record
player ‘ I remember my family owning played ‘78’s. Big records.
Then when I became a teenager, those were replaced by smaller
records called… ‘45’s..then they went to big platters called….
‘33’s. Each change brought about new players and a demand for
better quality. It also cost you money to buy the newest
technology, which is what I guess was their intention. I don’t
know what my Grandmother called it, but we had “Hi-Fi” then it
was stereo and now I don’t know what it is. All I know is I have
a huge stack of ‘records’ in the attic somewhere that I can’t
play since no one has record players any longer. Then the music
industry came along with CD’s. Now, I got all the music I want
in a space the same size as my first ‘record player’. The other
day I see this kid at the store with something stuck in his ear
called a MP-3 player. Holds like a 1,000 tunes in a box no
bigger than one you get when you buy kitchen matches.
Yep, what a changing world we live in. Pagers beeping all around
us. People driving down the highway at 90 miles an hour talking
non-stop on a cell phone. People watching television 10 and 15
hours of a day on 300 channels featuring everything from mud
wrestling to voyeurism. We can even travel non-stop across the
country and thanks to satellite radio, we can listen to the same
music from coast to coast.
All because one man, one American named Marconi decided to take
a chance and try to broadcast radio waves from one point to
another. Marconi, hero or villain ? Your decision.
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Copyright © 1998 – 2003 Peary Perry All Rights Reserved
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