RADIO TREMENS

In addition to the proposal that University football teams be served up ready for delivery to play games all over the country in order to satisfy the growing demands of the alumni, serious suggestion has been made for radioization of all football games with the same object in view.

The idea, practical or not, is additional testimony to the fact that "radio" is writing its name across the sky in more and more alarming capitals. Already the scheme of a "traffic cop for the air" is out of the musical comedy stage, as anyone will agree who has heard the exquisite discords emanating from the "magnavox",--the lady in Wellesley Hills trying to sing, the trio in Newark on the piano and two other instruments (to all intents and purposes a pair of steam calliopes), and the gentleman in Wilmington who wishes to talk about the natural development of cucumbers. The general effect is something between water disappearing from the kitchen sink, a street car sour-milking round a curve, and a boiler-factory on the rampage.

Radio is transforming the otherwise harmless air into a veritable bucket-shop bedlam, with twenty-one thousand transmitting stations between the Great Lakes and the Rio Grande. The government itself has begun to display distress signals. The Kellogg-White Federal Radio Control Bill has been introduced to bring some sort of order out of the present chaos of jazz-bands, sermons, crop reports, and sporting syndicates running simultaneously on the same wave lengths.

The congestion is largely an out-growth of the five hundred and sixty-nine broad-casting stations now in operation. When one city possesses twenty broadcasting centers, and each at the same time sends out a different form of entertainment, the result is terrible even to the ear of a trained stone-blaster. It is this problem which Secretary Hoover declares is undermining the whole, useful future of wireless. If Dante were journalistically inclined today, he would be adding another circle to his Inferno, and unless controlled, the end is not yet.