The NBC School for Radio Announcers

You probably have no idea who Frank H. Vizetelly is. But 80 years ago he made some predictions and set into motion some changes to broadcast media that have had some truly substantial effects on our culture. Linguists have been mourning for decades our fading regional American accents. This was a personal goal for Frank Vizetelly, and he was in a position to actually drive some of that change.

In 1930 NBC started a school for radio announcers. The school was headed by the British-born Dr. Frank Vizetelly. In 1919 he published Soldier's Service Dictionary of English & French Terms. He also published his own pronunciation dictionaries including a 10 cent pamphlet called A Desk Book of Twenty-Five Thousand Words Frequently Mispronounced. There was another in 1921 The Words We Mispell and one called Mend Your Speech and yet another named A Desk Book of Errors in English. I think you get the idea.

Vizetelly became an announcer on the program Air College on WNYC-AM in 1929.  In another book he later wrote specifically for NBC staff he wrote in the introduction the need for steps to establish the purity of American English. He saw it as under threat from immigrants and foreign accents and presumably regional accents. His hope was that radio would have a homogenizing effect on our speech. He wanted radio to "...iron out any jarring irregularities common to various sections..." but he wasn't alone in this thinking. The book Radio's Civic Ambition by David Goodman covers this in some detail. More here.

In 1931 NBC Vice president Henry Bellows praised the BBC on their diction "British Program announcing is a good deal better than ours, because announcers over there are all honor-graduates of Oxford and Cambridge." Bellows had a Phd in English Literature so his bias comes as no surprise. In 1935 he wrote an article for Harpers magazine that further establishes his hopes that radio would be the domain of talented educated men.There were always money men, the management staff that had their eye solely on profitability. But in that era there was also a strain of liberal that wanted radio to be an educational media with certain civic ambitions. These mixed goals left a mixed impression on the listening public. A year later another NBC VP, John Royal stated "If our announcers are guilty of mispronunciation, it is not because they are lacking in education, because more than eighty percent of them are college men..."  NBC had a hiring policy that sought out recent college graduates. In short, this was a long standing policy for NBC and other networks.

For the staff it meant perfect diction. Announcer André Baruch recalled his own time at NBC.  He stated that  they used to test potential announcers using copy filled with tongue-twisters and foreign names, such as “The seething sea ceased to see, then thus sufficeth thus.”  Later it led to tests filled with expert-level tongue twisters including the legendary and somewhat comedic, Announcers Test passed down by Del Moore. It runs as follows:

• One hen
• Two ducks
• Three squawking geese
• Four limerick oysters
• Five corpulent porpoise
• Six pair of Don Alversos tweezers
• Seven thousand Macedonians in full battle array
• Eight brass monkeys from the ancient sacred crypts of Egypt
• Nine apathetic, sympathetic, diabetic, old men on roller skates with a marked propensity towards procrastination and sloth
• Ten lyrical, spherical diabolical denizens of the deep who hall stall around the corner of the quo of the quay of the quivery, all at the same time.

Ultimately Vizetelly was probably less militant about his ideas than the radio moguls that applied them. Vida Sutton also trained NBC announcers in that era and she considered regional variations acceptable but she saw the standardization of language happening of it's own accord. Whichever the case, it has come to pass.

DJ Rufus Thomas

Rufus Thomas is remembered primarily as a soul singer, with a big catalog on Stax record loaded with hot funk 45s. His biggest hits "Do the Funky Chicken" and 'Walking the Dog" are still known today. He's also remembered as a bit of a comedian which if you knew the rest of the story would make perfect sense. Rufus Thomas was a Memphis area DJ before he ever had a hit. Here's a clip of him clowning a bit on the air for a commercial. It's classic material.

Thomas attended one semester at Tennessee A&I University, but like many students today he couldn't afford to continue his studies. So in 1936 he bailed to join the Rabbit Foot Minstrels, a variety troupe that toured as a tent show from the 1930s until around 1950. He also worked at a textile mill and he kept that job until about 1963... when he started having real hit records.

But the year we care about is 1951 because that is when he started his program on WDIA-AM. He had an afternoon show called "Hoot and Holler" from 9:30 to 11:00 PM. He played rhythm & blues and even some actual blues. His delivery was fast based and he talked jive, that early rhyming slang that was popularized by a handful of R&B DJs that we now call rapping.  He did another 3 hours program later on with Nat D. Williams. The first hour was his own solo R&B show, the second hour was a co-hosted show called "Cool Train" he did with Nat D. Williams on Saturdays. In the third hour they revisited his old vaudeville material and did comedy. In the 1970s WDIA changed hands and Thomas crossed the street to WLOK-AM.

Rufus has started his recording career in 1949 but hadn't hit anything big yet. His first hit was in 1953 when he recorded “Bear Cat” for Sun Records. It was a parody of Big Mama Thornton’s bluesy “Hound Dog.” It the parody was unclear the full title was (The Answer to Hound Dog.) the problem is that the music was a note for note cover of Hound Dog. Yes there were lawyers involved.

In 1986 he was invited back to WDIA to host a blues revue celebrating the stations 38th anniversary. It was 97.1 on the FM side this time. He died in 2001, at the age of 84. His adopted hometown of Memphis named a street after him, just off of Beale where he used to play and where thousands listed to his program.

Nevil Maskelyne: Epic Troll

Nevil Maskelyne was the first troll in all electronic media.

 

It happened in June of 1903. John Ambrose Fleming was setting up a demonstration of the newest Marconi wireless device at the Royal Institution in London. He was supposed to receive a message from a transmitter in Chelmsford at an arranged time. Before he could begin, his machine began to tap out a message .-. .- - ... over and over.. it spelled R-A-T-S. But Fleming was nearly deaf, so the message continued to the amusement of the staff and spectators. Thanks to assistant Arthur Blok the event was recorded for posterity. Maskelyne was emboldened by the success and proceeded to tab out a bit of bawdy poetic verse.

There was a young fellow of Italy

Who diddled the public quite prettily

Maskelyne was largely self-taught in wireless technology. He had figured out that Marconis claims of true "Hertzian Syntony" were bunk. Maskelyne simply overrode the transmission with an untuned transmitter using a 10 inch induction coil. He knew that Marconi had been specializing in long waves so he used a shorter frequency to bleed in from any resonant frequency. Knowing the lecture began at 5:00 PM, he began his trolling promptly at 5:45 PM. In a word... tango down. More here.

Maskelyne  was a stage magician by trade and had learned Morse code to communicate with his hands during shows. He learned wireless gear well enough to make a spark-gap transmitter to remotely ignite gunpowder.  In 1900, he sent wireless messages between a ground station and a balloon 10 miles away. His ire for Marconi began with his excessively broad patents. It impeded him and other inventors working in early wireless. So he set up a 50 meter antenna near Porthcurno to snoop on the Marconi ship-to-shore transmissions. More here.

It was important that day that Maskelyne proved that wireless transmissions were not secure in any sense of the word. Fleming tried to claim later that Maskelyne had somehow cheated by using an earth ground that his interference was not "fair." But the truth was that those early tuned systems were totally vulnerable to the even earlier untuned or "dirty" systems.  Marconi had been trolled hard and lost. Fleming claimed that his instruments were configured in such a way that interference could not occur, but it did anyway. Editorials of the day gave some credit and praise to Maskelyn's legitimate criticism but others did not appreciate the crudity within their "sacred" institution. The book Scientific Credibility and Technical Standards by Jed Z Buchwald covers the event in great detail.

Maskelyn, Fleming and Marconi argued in the pages of a trade magazine called The Electrician for a couple weeks then in July, realizing that Maskelyne was indeed a troll, a troll of historic proportions. They ceased to respond to his further taunts and in the future they limited their public displays. In 1905 Fleming invented a more precise AC rectifier that was actually able to do what he'd claimed 3 years prior.

Transcription Mystery Disc # 166

This is a Wilcox gay Recordio. It spins at 78 rpm and is 8-inches in diameter. It doesn't have much wear from playing but it lookes like it was stored in a box off crayons and gravel over a hot summer. The text reads "JIM (Baa Baa Bad) Iu___who's K__ng h__now"  The writing is cursive and a bit of papers torn off. The lyrics reveal the title to be "I Wonder Who's Kissing Her Now"

Jim Baa Baa Bad
 
The recording is of Jim (presumably) singing with a bit of light piano accompaniment. The first song, "I Wonder Who's Kissing Her Now" first published in 1909 by Joseph E. Howard and Harold Orlob, with lyrics by Will M. Hough and Frank R. Adams. It's a pop standard today, but only because Ray Charles. Frank Sinatra, Harry Nilsson, Perry Como, and many others covered it. The second song is some nonesense lyrics about black sheep.  Phonozoic dates this make of blank to 1947. It's a fair guess for this one.

Radio Proximity Fuses

In the late 1930s the proximity fuse was developed in the UK.  The Germans were also working in the same arena and had developed some models but the Brits beat them to it. They had been working on a variety of developments to increase what the military called "air defense efficiency."

Into this technological melee they dropped William Alan Stewart Butement. In 1931 he and P. E. Pollard, invented a shipboard radio device for the detection of ships. Today we call it radar. It operated at 600 MHz and using pulse modulation was able to detect ships100 yards away. The Navy wasn't big on it, but others saw potential. By 1938 Butement had ramped up his invention into large scale devices that could be used from land to protect the coast.

In 1939 Butement attempted to improve anti-aircraft guns. It's hard to hit a moving target. He had a better idea.  His plan was a very compact  Radio Direction Finder (RDF) unit placed on the projectile. It would then trigger the detonation when near the target. This was not simple. The RDF had to be small and also durabel enough to be fired out of a cannon. This circuit included glass vacuum tubes. Somehow just over a year the United States was manufacturing projectiles with a proximity fuse. This was also called a VT (variable-time) fuse.

This was not an induction trigger. It wasn't sensing a ferrous body. It was detecting the reflection of radio signals. A later improvement was The transmitter which used the shell body as an antenna and sent out a continuous wave at around 200 MHz. As the shell approaches a reflecting object, (a ship, a plane, the ground) the reflected signal created interference. That pattern changes with proximity. As the objects get closers the signal moves in and out of resonance as the reflected signal length changes; half a wave is resonant, so is a quarter, an eighth etc.

This causes a small oscillation of the radiated power and consequently the oscillator supply current of about 200–800 Hz, the Doppler frequency. This signal is sent through a band pass filter, amplified, and triggers the detonation when it exceeds a given amplitude. Later in life, Butement said that he considered the proximity fuse as his most significant accomplishment.