WE DINED BY CANDLELIGHT that evening, and by candlelight I read episode thirty-seven of Dead Air, “Act Now! Offer Limited!”
MY BROADCASTING NETWORK was the jewel of the set of enterprises that I ran before I became a teenager. Like many another business success story, mine began with a flash of insight and an invention born of necessity. With the radio transmitter that I had built from a kit, I had gone on the air as WPLR, but the transmitter’s range was too limited for a boy with my ambitions. Thus the necessity: a longer reach. Porky White had come up with the invention: the idea of linking transmitters like a string of pearls to extend the range of WPLR.
“That could work,” I said to Porky. “That could actually work.”
A little time spent with a map of Babbington and a compass showed me that if it was going to work, if I was going to make a necklace of transmission that would reach from my bedroom to Kap’n Klam, I would need 106 transmitters. This was daunting, and a lad with less gumption or more sense might have abandoned the effort then and there. Fortunately, however, my mother had just signed on as a Beauty Gal for Beauty Gal Cosmetics, and her experience showed me that assembling a string of 106 transmitters was not only possible but a cinch, if one went about it in the right way. Part of my mother’s job as a Beauty Gal was selling cosmetics door-to-door, but another part, the more lucrative part, was selling the idea of selling cosmetics door-to-door. Every time she recruited another Beauty Gal she got a bonus, and from then on a portion of the income of each of “her” Beauty Gals came to her. It didn’t take a genius to see that she should forget about selling the cosmetics and sell the occupation instead, since that was the road to the big money, so I set out on a similar path to riches in the radio game.
I knew that I could never build 106 transmitters on my own (well, by “never” I mean “not in less than fifty-three weeks”) so I got out my Little Giant Printing Outfit and printed some flyers based on an ad in Impractical Craftsman Magazine that offered a happy life raising giant frogs:
The Future Is in Radio!
Learn Radio Broadcasting in Your Spare Time!
Make Big Money as a Network Affiliate of WPLR!
Act Now! Offer Limited to 106 Applicants!
I recruited 106 of my schoolmates in a couple of weeks, ordered their kits for them at a premium, negotiated a volume discount from the supply house where I bought the kits, charged the affiliates for showing them how to assemble transmitters from the kits, and — when they had finished their work — gave them certificates authorizing them to solicit advertising, with a portion of the revenue to come to the parent station — that is, to me. (Actually, “gave” is not correct; I charged them a licensing fee.) Circle by circle, my affiliates extended my range.
If my success seems to have come too easily, let me assure you that I am sparing you tedious accounts of 106 struggles, 106 setbacks, 106 foolish mistakes, and 106 puzzling malfunctions. I’ll let the ordeal of feedback stand for all of them. The instructions in the assembly manual had the young broadcaster find a “blank spot” on the dial, a frequency where no other station was broadcasting. I had found a good, clear spot that I was using, so I told my affiliates to use the same frequency. The result, when all 106 sets were turned on, was a hideous wail rising from radios all over Babbington. It brought my father running upstairs to see what I was up to.
“What the hell is that?” he inquired.
“Feedback,” I said with enthusiasm. “I’ve read about it, but this is the first time I ever heard it! You see, the microphone is picking up what’s coming in over this radio and the transmitter is broadcasting it, but what’s coming in over this radio is what the transmitter’s broadcasting, so it broadcasts it again, and it goes around and around, and that’s feedback! Amazing, huh?”
“Shut it off!” he said, and, reluctantly, I did.
Although quite a few of the affiliates liked the effect enough to want to continue it, I knew that it was likely to cost us listeners. After some blind mental fumbling, serendipity brought me the solution: each affiliate station had to find its own “blank spot” on the dial; that is, no station could broadcast at the same frequency as another. This rule, and the short range of each station, eliminated the feedback, but it meant that WPLR was all over the place. Not only was the station physically located in 107 houses, counting my own, but it was at 107 different spots on the dial, depending on where you, the listener, were located. We were everywhere, but if you didn’t happen to tune us in on the right frequency for the little corner of Babbington where you happened to be, we were, for you, at that place and time, nowhere. This circumstance made it difficult to establish the kind of loyal listenership that might have made me a powerhouse in the broadcasting business.
[to be continued]
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