This web site was created to be a non-commercial repository of historical information and photos documenting the early years of radio broadcasting in the United States. A substantial portion of the site is dedicated to the history of broadcasting in the San Francisco Bay Area. Your comments, corrections and contributions are welcome.

John Schneider is a lifelong radio historian, and a Fellow in History of the California Historical Radio Society. He contributes regular articles on radio history to "Radio World" and "The Spectrum Monitor", and is the author of two Arcadia Publishing books, "Bay Area Radio" and "Seattle Radio".

Long before GPS, drivers still wanted tech that could simplify the navigation process. //

Maps of America’s largest cities first appeared in the 18th century, and—incredibly—so did the first road atlas. In 1789, “The Survey of the Roads of the United States of America,” by Christopher Colles of New York mapped roads from Williamsburg, Virginia, to Albany, New York. However, it didn’t come as a complete volume—it was instead subscription based. Subscribers were expected to gather the plates together into a coherent atlas. Colles printed 83 plates in three years, each containing two or three maps. But the business faltered for one simple reason: there was little use for road maps in the United States in the late 1700s. //

By the late 19th century, most American roads had hardly changed from a century earlier, being little more than paths cut through the countryside by Native Americans and the wild animals humanity was hunting. Later, these paths were enlarged into wagon roads and improved by removing tree stumps and grading the dirt road’s surface, smoothing out any bumps or ruts. There was no federal system for building roads, so federal highways didn’t exist. Most trips were short and made on local roads by residents who already knew where they were going, so there was no need for road signs. It’s little wonder that until the early 20th century, most cross-country treks meant traveling by rail, not carriage. It’s also why Rand McNally’s first map, printed in 1872, was a railroad guide.

But the arrival of the automobile in 1895 changed all that. //

It was Jones who had invented the “Speed-O-Meter,” a device he installed on a Winton for a 1901 endurance run from New York to Buffalo. He applied for a patent in 1903, which was issued the following year. It used a flexible shaft cable and a gear-driven attachment to a front wheel, a set-up Jones would use in another invention, the “Combined Road-Map and Odometer.”

The Live Map was a glass-enclosed brass dial attached to the outer edge of the driver's side of the car and linked via a cable to a car’s odometer. Before leaving on your drive, you would purchase one of the company’s 8-inch paper discs with a trip’s directions, put together by The Touring Club of America. Each disc contained a trip’s mileage on the edge of the disc, with each tick mark symbolizing one mile, and supplementary tick marks for every fifth of a mile. Directions were printed alongside key mileage points like spokes on a wheel, describing road surfaces (paved or dirt), intersections, and rail crossings.

The disc was placed on the dial’s turntable. The driver would put the disc in the machine at the trip’s starting point. As the driver progressed, the disc rotated proportionally to your car’s speed, telling you what to do, what to look for, and where to turn. Each disc covered about 100 miles, at which point you pulled over and stopped to replace the disc with the next one. //

The meter cost $75 and included 12 disks. Additional disks cost 25 cents each, or you could purchase multiple discs for 15 cents. An advertisement in the Saturday Evening Post boasted that, "To have it with you is like having in your car a man who knows every road, every corner, every crossing, every landmark, every puzzling fork and crossroad in the entire world.”

By 1919, Jones offered more than 500 routes from New York to California, but Jones was not alone in this emerging market. In fact, Jones' device was rejected by the US Patent Office five times for its similarities to other devices.

'1917,' which follows the 'They Shall not Grow Old' by one year, shares a story of selflessness and honor through technically dazzling cinematic effects. //

It’s not often a film about a conflict as brutal and heartbreaking as the First World War manages to cut through tragedy and tell a story of courage and bravery. “1917,” which follows the release of Peter Jackson’s groundbreaking World War I documentary “They Shall not Grow Old” by one year, shares a story of selflessness and honor through technically dazzling cinematic effects. //

Beyond the technical cinematic achievement and the moving, haunting portrayal of soldiers risking their lives to save others in the later stages of the First World War, “1917” is energetically paced and will leave no viewer yearning for more action. With so few modern war films set during World War I, “1917,” which is in select theaters now and releases nationwide on Jan. 10, proves you do not need a history degree to appreciate such an incredible story.

Historian Tom Segev's new biography of the Israeli prime minister and Zionist hero David Ben-Gurion chronicles 20th-century episodes still salient today. //

Segev tells Ben-Gurion’s story happening-by-happening. His go-to format is to provide an impressionistic account of the outcome of some notable incident in Ben-Gurion’s life, then to back up and fill in details. This can be refreshing when the conclusion is an intriguing historical moment or anecdote. But in this 600-page doorstop of a book, the writing tactic is repeated without fail for chapter after chapter.

The technique also leads to confusion when a reader comes to the book with little prior knowledge of the inner workings of, say, the interwar international Zionist Congress, and can’t begin to fathom what picture Segev is trying to paint with his conclusion put ahead of the facts. Yet Segev’s handling of the facts is thorough and masterful, and we can draw our own conclusions if we don’t like his. //

Toward the end of his life, he flirted with Buddhism, but Ben-Gurion’s true religion was always the nation of Israel, and for nearly 30 years, the two were practically synonymous. The twentieth century was the deathbed for a great many fanciful nineteenth-century notions. It turned out that David Ben-Gurion’s dream of a Jewish nation wasn’t one of them. Israel survives and thrives long after his passing.

Avatar
gabe44
10 hours ago
There is no way for us to know the financial means of Joseph and Mary. But inferences can be drawn if you look at Luke 2:24 and Leviticus 12:8. The former: 24 and to offer a sacrifice in keeping with what is said in the Law of the Lord: “a pair of doves or two young pigeons.” The latter: 8 But if she cannot afford a lamb, she is to bring two doves or two young pigeons, one for a burnt offering and the other for a sin offering.

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Avatar
Laocoon gabe44
8 hours ago edited
I'm not sure that's any indication of anything.

By the 1st century Judiasm was dying. The people living in Judea and Galilee were mainly doing the min and calling it all good. The Pharisees created elaborate ways of avoiding as many of the religious obligations as possible. Jesus repeatedly criticized Jewish leaders for this nasty little habit. Not suggesting that either Joseph or Mary were as hypocritical as the Pharisees...but it's quite likely that they were doing the customary sacrifices that were found to be generally acceptable in their day. Luke actually says that when he refers to them "keeping what is said in the Law of the Lord". By the 1st century the whole doves/pigeons thing was pretty much the customary sacrifice and was in keeping with the conventional interpretation of the Leviticus passage.

As Streiff said...the term used for Joseph's profession is a Tekton. That term refers to a skilled craftsman..often in wood or stone. We get our word Architect from combining Archi (master, supervisor, leader, high skilled) and Tekton. During the youth of Jesus the Herodians were building Sepphoris only a short commute (6 kilometers) from Nazareth. They were snapping up all of the skilled workers they could lay their hands on and paying cash wages. Josephus records the scarcity of skilled craftsmen for the various projects the Herodians were working on. It was so bad that they were training Levite priests to be craftsmen to work on the more problamatic parts of Herod's Temple.

Can't prove it, but it's likely that a trained and skilled Tekton in Nazareth would be making a pretty good living from the work going on at Sepphoris. There weren't any US prevailing wage laws in 1st century Judea/Galilee...but from what we know about their building projects...the Herodians were quite willing to pay a premium to get quality work. We see that in Masada, in Caesarea, and in the remains of Sepphoris. And due to the craftsmen being absorbed in the near-by government bullding project at Sepphoris...prices for work on private sector projects would likely have risen as well. It was a good time to be a Tekton.

President William Howard Taft held many titles - President of the United States, Chief Justice of the United States, Secretary of War, Solicitor General, Governor of Cuba, and Governor of the Philippines, among others. Yet there is only one title which he still holds some 80 years after his death - fattest President.

Many anecdotes have been passed down regarding Taft's tremendous weight. One of the most famous concerns him getting stuck in the Presidential bathtub and thus ordering a replacement - large enough to fit four average-sized men! Taft even had a new bed constructed at his friend Todd Lincoln's (son of Abraham) house because the springs in the original mattress broke under his weight.

Yet, Taft was not always obese. He was a collegiate wrestler at 225 lbs. and by all accounts quite athletic. He steadily gained weight after graduating college, eventually ballooning to 320 lbs. in 1905, at which point he began his first diet. Before the era of diet books (let alone DVDs) and personal trainers, physicians often constructed and oversaw their patients' weight loss regimens.

The new movie “Midway” opened in theaters around the country this weekend. It has been roundly endorsed by Navy leadership. Here is the official statement about the movie from the Director of Naval History:

From: Director of Naval History

To: Senior Navy Leadership

Finally, Hollywood decided to make a $100 million dollar movie about real heroes instead of comic book heroes. In this case, the heroes are the pilots, aircrewmen, submariners, sailors, intelligence officers/code-breakers and senior commanders who against great odds and at great sacrifice turned the tide of the Pacific War against the Empire of Japan at the Battle of Midway on 4 June 1942. Although the movie is not perfectly historically accurate, the producers went to great lengths to be as accurate as possible given time and resource constraints, and it comes far closer than any other movie about naval combat (and is way more accurate than the 1975 “Midway” movie or the more recent “Pearl Harbor.”)

From the archives: IBM doesn't make consumer desktop OSes anymore for a reason.

Defenders of the Electoral College argue that it was created to combat majority tyranny and support federalism, and that it continues to serve those purposes. This stance depends on a profound misunderstanding of the history of the institution.

After finally delivering the last of the crates a new regulation was put in place limiting how many pounds of goods a single customer could ship or receive in a given day with the postal administration issuing a statement on the matter that “it is not the intent of the United States Postal Service that buildings be shipped through the mail.”

The bank still stands today in Vernal, Utah and remains nicknamed by the locals “The Parcel Post Bank.”

While the technical definitions for computer virus, worm, and malware might have a little overlap, it’s generally accepted that the first type of computer “virus” occurred in 1971 on ARPANET, the scientific/military network that preceded the modern internet. Creeper was an experimental self-replicating program that infected DEC computers across the network.

Written by Bob Thomas at BBN Technologies, Creeper propagated itself throughout ARPANET by exploiting a vulnerability in DEC PDP-10 computers running the TENEX operating system. The worm wasn’t malicious and, upon gaining access to a machine and replicating itself, broadcast “I’m the creeper, catch me if you can!” on the terminal screen. The first virus removal program, dubbed The Reaper, soon followed, designed to ferret out Creeper infections and tidy up.

Francis Fukuyama got quite a bit wrong in his 1992 essay “The End of History,” but he also got a lot right, especially in regard to the roughly 25-year period between the fall of the Soviet Union and the election of Donald Trump. A neoliberal world order led by the United States did emerge in the 1990s to become, if not a hegemonic power, at the least the dominant one. Capitalism was not only on the rise but promised to liberalize nations like Russian, and especially China.

With the election of Trump and the success of socialists like Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez the future of the American-led, bipartisan, neoliberal world order is in considerable doubt. In fact, breaking with this world order was central to Trump’s appeal and victory. On trade, military actions, and foreign aid, Trump challenged basic assumptions held by the leaderships of both parties for decades.

Not everyone was on board back in the early 1990s. Ross Perot’s historic performance as the Reform Party candidate in the 1992 general election was rooted almost exclusively in the fact that he was the candidate who opposed the globalism and trade deals that both George HW Bush and Bill Clinton tacitly supported. That voting base never really went away, and a quarter-century later it did the heavy lifting in putting Trump in the White House.

The central theme of Trump’s ideology towards the United States’ relationship with the rest of the world is that we are being taken advantage of. In the post-Cold War era the United States took on an enormous burden in exchange for dominant influence. It was the patriarchal nation not just of the free world, but of almost the entire world. It was a generous parent, often providing extravagant allowances to its client states.

In some ways, this paradigm was wildly successful. Poverty rates globally declined dramatically. Here in the United States commercial goods became remarkably cheap, giving the middle class, and even the poor in some cases, access to material wealth that would have seemed extravagant in the Cold War period, like flat-screen TVs and cell phones. And for a time, it did appear that a relaxed approach to nations like Russia and China would inevitably lead to their liberalization.

‘When they shall look back upon us, they shall know, at least, that we possessed…gratitude for what our ancestors have done for our happiness.’

A tiny Alaskan island faces a threat as deadly as an oil spill—rats. //

Between 40 and 60 percent of all recorded bird and reptile extinctions since 1600 have been attributed to rats, with Norway, black, and Pacific rats the most destructive species. These losses warp ecosystems. Without seabirds and shorebirds to control intertidal invertebrates, for instance, populations can surge and decimate seaweed. Deprived of ocean nutrients found in seabird poop, island grassland can turn to tundra. Rats may have even contributed to the fall of civilization on Easter Island, devouring the environment out from underneath its human inhabitants. //

Pacific Islanders brought Pacific rats to new haunts by canoe as a food source thousands of years ago. Ships on missions of war, colonization, and trade later spread Norway and black rats. Today, rats inhabit more than 80 percent of the world’s islands.

The history of influenza as a global disease is inextricably tied to steamships and the expansion of world trade. A war demonstrated how big a pandemic could get.

Johann Sebastian Bach's stature as a composer of such extraordinary genius and widespread influence is so firmly established in Western culture that it is difficult to imagine that only a little over a century-and-a-half ago, his music and reputation languished in obscurity, virtually unknown to all but a few specialists. It was through Mendelssohn's recognition of Bach's genius and his efforts in making Bach's works accessible to a wider public that these works are today recognized as summits of musical expression.

Here in the 21st century, it’s difficult to imagine broadcast automation without thinking of computers; you can’t have one without the other. But it wasn’t always this way.

Computers and automation systems have both been around for a long time but the two worlds didn’t begin to merge in a big way until the mid-1970s, when IGM introduced the 750 system with a DEC PDP-8.

Most of the hardware, playback media and terminology of these earlier analog systems is long gone and forgotten. That means it’s time for a ’70s flashback.

FLASHBACK

Let us don our wide-lapeled, burgundy, three-piece polyester suits, set the date for April 1974 and dive headlong into the time machine.

We emerge just in time for the opening of the NAB show of 45 years ago, and we visit the Sparta booth to see what’s new in broadcast automation systems.

When you go home, tell them of us and say: For your tomorrow, we gave our today. – John Maxwell Edmonds

During the second world war, aviation became a crucial weapon of modern warfare. From the Battle of Britain to dropping atomic bombs on Japan, much of WWII was fought in the skies. Investment in aircraft technology during this time drove the aviation industry in general forward in leaps and bounds, paving the way for the modern aircraft used in passenger operations today. //

The largest allied bomber of WWII was the B-29 Superfortress. Responsible for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, this aircraft also has a less dubious claim to fame. It was one of the first times pressurized cabins had been used, which protected crew from subzero temperatures when flying long-range bombing missions, and is something we all rely on today for long-distance, high altitude flying. //

Although there had been some experimentation with pressurization prior to the second world war, it wasn’t until the demands of war really pushed the boundaries of technology that it came into its own. In 1943, the Lockheed Constellation became the first widespread airliner with a pressurized cabin, followed by aircraft like the DC-6 and DC-7, laying the path for the cabins we fly in today. //

As well as developing technology used in aircraft themselves, the second world war also saw the widespread use of radar for the first time. Developed in the decade preceding the start of WWII, radar had the capability to detect approaching aircraft from miles away, allowing British fighters to intercept bombers before they arrived.During WWII, this technology was further developed for use in aircraft themselves. This allowed RAF pilots to find their enemies, even when they could not be seen. Modern radar technology is a world away from these early interactions, but nevertheless an essential component in keeping flight safe in the skies. //

At the start of the war, there were very few airports that could support military operations. Throughout the war, aerodromes were rapidly constructed all over participating nations. Many of these became civil aviation bases after the war, heralding the move from flying boats for long haul operations to modern land planes.

From what I've seen, m$ is far more heavy handed than IBM ever was,
and DEC never came close to either.
Have to agree, but I think both IBM and MSFT build unnecessary
complexity into their products to forestall efforts of competitors to
duplicate their products.

On this topic I was intrigued by the new opcodes IBM introduced in
1978.

Before then, every 4-byte instruction had the form xxxxBDDD
and every 6-byte instruction had the form xxxxBDDDBDDD
where BDDD had a consistent interpretation.

The MVS/SE instructions introduced in 1978 deviated from that
format, for no particularly good reason. At the time I wondered
if that was deliberate, hoping that such a redefinition would be
tedious and expensive for 370-compatible manufacturers, like
Amdahl, to adapt to.

Was it?

James Dow Allen