184 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1944 
As for the great, modern art of radio, I can promise you that as 
a service to mankind everywhere it will keep pace with the march of 
science and industry in every other field. 
Today is the anniversary of a historic event that provides us with 
a timely opportunity to review the remarkable advances of radio 
within a quarter century, to reflect upon its vital role in the war, aad 
to look into its future. 
Twenty-five years ago this morning, news flashed across the hemi- 
spheres that the first World War had ended. In retrospect that day 
appears as a fleeting moment. History lifted her pen and paused to 
dot the “i” of an empty victory that proved to be only the prelude 
to a global war unprecedented in fury, extent, and destruction. 
In that autumn of 1918, Germany’s pleas for peace had revealed the 
plight of the German people. Germany was cracking. American 
radio was entrusted to transmit to a defeated nation President 
Wilson’s Fourteen Points as a basis for the restoration of peace, and 
for a general armistice on land, on water, and in the air. Radio opera- 
tors stood by for the answer. It came on the midnight air of November 
11, when silence in the “ether” over the Atlantic was interrupted by a 
flash from Europe. At 2:45 a.m. New York time, the news broke. 
The State Department in Washington announced the Armistice had 
been signed at midnight, and hostilities would cease at 6 o’clock in the 
morning—11 a. m. in France. 
There was no radio broadcasting to spread the welcome word—“It’s 
over, over there!” 
Under the banner headline “Peace,” Americans read the news at 
their breakfast tables. The world was only a reading world at that 
time. It had not yet learned to listen. News spread slowly in 1918. 
Although powerful radio alternators relayed these tidings around 
the world to ships on the Seven Seas, homes were not yet radio 
equipped. Many days passed before news of the Armistice filtered 
into remote hamlets and farms. War correspondents were scribes, 
not eyewitness broadcasters; they had the pen but no microphone. 
Today news travels at the speed of light, in every language to every 
corner of the earth. 
In those days there were no globe-encircling short waves, no high- 
power vacuum tubes, no universal receiving sets. The radiophone 
was just learning to talk. The electron tube had not yet revealed 
its power and its unlimited possibilities. 
The radio of that day gave everything it had to win the war. Re- 
search men and engineers rushed new devices into service to main- 
tain contacts with the battle fleet, with the convoys and the American 
Expeditionary Force in France. Although ships in the mid-Atlantic 
could not maintain direct contact with American and European shores, 
