186 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1944 
ever, in the air during those final months of the first World War. 
When a sub-chaser dashed out to sea from a port in Maine, its radio 
operator moved a portable phonograph near to his radiophone micro- 
phone to broadcast a popular wartime tune, “I May Be Gone for a 
Long, Long Time.” From the Navy station at New Brunswick, N. J., 
the “Star Spangled Banner” was broadcast up and down the coast. 
These were forerunners of the day when radio music from hundreds 
of stations would encircle the globe. 
War had revealed that new instruments could be made available 
for mass communication. The time was opportune and industrial 
science was prepared to answer the challenge. Soon after the Ar- 
mistice, America became aflame with a new national pastime—that of 
listening-in. The vast industry of broadcasting came into being. Its 
achievements as a service to America and to all the world during the 
past quarter of a century are an epoch-making and dramatic story 
of American ingenuity and enterprise at its best. 
In no other nation has radio developed as it has in the United 
States. Nowhere else are people better informed. Today this 
country is served by more than 900 broadcasting stations and 4 na- 
tional networks. There are 60,000,000 receiving sets in our land. 
The owner of every set is free to listen to any wave length from any 
country. American radio dials are symbols of freedom. 
The scientists, who worked out inventions and harnessed the wave 
lengths to equip America with this unsurpassed radio system, realized 
only vaguely that their achievements might be used in a second World 
War. Theirs were the tasks of peace. They worked to make a sym- 
phony orchestra sound with perfection hundreds and thousands of 
miles distant from its source and enable the human voice to ring true 
on the other side of the globe. 
They extended the influence of news, education, and religion to all 
parts of the earth. They made the world an open-air theater in 
which countless millions of people could enjoy free entertainment. 
Thus, scientists made American radio the Voice of Freedom, so 
interwoven with our daily lives that we have come to think of radio 
as an achievement only of the twentieth century. It is, however, a 
child of the ages. Modern radio came into existence through a long 
process of evolution. The long corridors of time through which man 
has conducted research and experiments extend far into the past. 
They lead back to ancient Greece. There the first electric sparks, 
called electrum, kindled a new science and unleashed a new force— 
electricity. 
While the men of science were seeking to explain the mystery of 
these sparks, the philosophers of Greece forsaw that if democratic 
government were to remain effective, the range of the human voice 
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