Not part 15, but two short vintage films about radio I just have to mention, and both entertaining to watch…
This first one is a 3 minute circa 1940’s newsreel about beginings of the NBC radio network.. the whole thing is great, but what I really found so stark was during the last 60 seconds or so with the illustrations and description of “web” covering the states..
http://www.shutterstock.com/video/clip-3943991-stock-footage–s-a-delightful-montage-of-people-listening-to-radio-transmissions-in-various-places.html
But this next one is the one which really fascinated me..
It’s a early 1950’s ARMY presentation called “Independent Radio Station”. The beginning had me wondering watching it’s introductiory start, then it went into introducing every aspect of what an independent station entails.. This one is 18 minutes long, and I found it to be very cool!
https://archive.org/details/Independ1951
Carl Blare says
Good Films
I just watched both of the movies linked by Rich Powers and they are both great!
They are a literal tour backwards in time to the empire of radio the way it was before television.
I was in a few studios that still had those amazing Western Union wall clocks, and an engineer explained to me that they were not just ordinary clocks plugged into the AC power.
It was explained that the Western Union Telegraph Company, by subscription, sent clock pulses every second to make the second-hand jump ahead. This happened on a dedicated phone-line.
Teletype news and weather machines each had their own dedicated phone lines, all the lines required a room filled with wire terminals connecting all the lines which came in on thick “trunk cables.”