[78-L] BE Nit Pick

[Michael Biel]

From: Bill Knowlton <udmacon1 at hotmail.com>

> the ballroom crowd gathered around a radio with a horned loudspeaker on
> its top to listen to the Harding-Cox elections, supposedly coming from KDKA.
 
> I don't think people were listening in 1920 to a speakered radio;
> earphones were the method of hearing that early time, right?! 

Correct!  But it is not just a nit pic, it shows a basic
misunderstanding of American culture.  Great crowds gathered at the
NEWSPAPER OFFICES on election nights.  In New York City there was a
tradition of huge bonfires in Journal Square fed by office furniture
snatched by street urchins.  I have a detailed illustrated story about
the 1880 election from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper. 

If they wanted to have a ballroom scene, by this era they would have had
people at the papers and precinct offices telephoning in to the party. 
Additionally, the stock market ticker was probably being used because a
lot of offices had printers.  People of influence like those in this
show could have leased a newspaper teletype machine.  ANYTHING but a
radio which NOBODY of influence would have been caught dead with in
1920.  It was for teenage boys and electronic geeks.

I didn't see the episode, but the only appropriate way they could have
properly merged a radio into this crowd would be if they had a character
who was a WW I vet who had been in the signal corps.  Additionally,
there was only a couple of days notice that the broadcast would happen,
and it would have been IMPOSSIBLE for a radio of 1920 to have picked up
Pittsburgh in Atlantic City because the transmitter was very low power. 
I think the only reception came from less than 25 miles away.  

Mike Biel  mbiel at mbiel.com