1942 - Communications, Media

Communications, Media

The Voice of America (VOA) makes its first broadcast to Europe February 24 under the auspices of the 8-month-old U.S. Foreign Information Service (FIS) with announcer William Harlan Hale saying in German, "Here speaks a voice from America" and promising to tell listeners the truth, whether the news is good or bad. President Roosevelt established the service at the suggestion of playwright and presidential speechwriter Robert Sherwood and named Sherwood first director of the FIS. Sherwood has rented studio space at New York, recruited a staff of journalists, hired theatrical producer John Houseman to head up the New York office, and begun producing material for privately-owned U.S. shortwave stations to beam to Europe, having said in 1939, "We are living in an age when communication has achieved fabulous importance. There is a new decisive force in the human race, more powerful than all the tyrants. It is the force of massed thought—thought which has been provoked by words, strongly spoken." The FIS made its first broadcast to Asia in December of last year (in Amoy, Cantonese and Mandarin, and Tagalog), the February 24 broadcast uses medium- and long-range BBC transmitters to relay its signals, and by year's end the VOA is reaching listeners in Afrikaans, Arabic, Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Farsi, Finnish, Flemish, French, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Thai, and Turkish as well as German and English (see 1943).

Radar provides crucial warning of Japanese air attacks at the battles of Midway and the Coral Sea, but it is conventional radar without magnetrons (see 1940). Maine-born Raytheon Corp. engineer Percy (Le Baron) Spencer, 47, has suggested an innovative manufacturing process that simplifies production and improves performance; his German-born colleague Fritz A. Gross, 31, develops a unique shipboard radar detection system that enemy ships cannot observe, and Raytheon has beaten much larger companies to gain war contracts (see 1943).

The U.S. Supreme Court upholds a New York City ordinance forbidding distribution of printed handbills bearing commercial advertising (Valentine v. Chrestensen). The court hears in arguments March 31 that a Florida man acquired a former U.S. Navy submarine, moored it at a pier on the East River, and printed a handbill to solicit admission-paying visitors; city police halted distribution, and Owen J. Roberts delivers the majority opinion April 13, inventing a "commercial speech" doctrine that will stand for years: "The respondent contends that . . . he was engaged in the dissemination of matter proper for public information . . . If that evasion were successful, every merchant who desires to broadcast advertising leaflets in the streets need only append a civic appeal, or a moral platitude, to achieve immunity from the law's command."

The Office of War Information (OWI) created by President Roosevelt June 13 is headed by Indiana-born CBS commentator and novelist Elmer (Holmes) Davis, 52. The OWI takes over responsibility for the Voice of America, which will soon have 23 transmitters beaming messages in 27 languages.

U.S. forces on Guadalcanal find that the Japanese have broken U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Corps codes, so they use 29 Navajo volunteer "code talkers" to transmit radio messages in their native language; the enemy can never figure out that Washindon be Akalh B-kosilai means "United States Marines" (it is estimated that outside of 50,000 tribespeople only 30 people in the world have any knowledge of Navajo and none is Japanese; Federal officials have tried for generations to suppress the guttural Navajo tongue, which has a complex, irregular syntax and no alphabet, but the volunteers are among those who have kept it alive, and although they lack words for modern military terms they work out a two-tier code in which English words are represented by different Navajo words; e.g., the Navajo word tas-chizzle for swallow means a torpedo plane, jay-sho for buzzard means bomber, da-he-tih-hi for humming bird means fighter-plane, and chay-da-gahi for turtle means tank). With help from the code talkers, Marine commanders are able to issue orders, report on enemy troop movements, and coordinate intricate operations without fear of message interception (see politics [Saipan], 1944).

Radio and sound-recording pioneer Valdemar Poulsen dies at his native Copenhagen in July at age 72.

U.S. patent 2,292,387 issued August 11 to film star Hedy Lamarr and composer George Antheil covers a secret communications system designed to provide jam-proof wireless control of long-range torpedoes. Lamarr's first husband, Fritz Mandel, was a domineering arms manufacturer who socialized with Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini; before escaping to London (by drugging the maid, putting on the maid's uniform, and climbing out a window) she sat in on Mandel's business meetings, learned that his people were trying to find a way to control weapons by radio signals, and realized that changing radio frequencies on a continuous and random basis would protect them from jamming. She met Antheil at a dinner party given by Janet Gaynor, he came up with a system that uses a piano roll to change between 88 frequencies, the two donate the system to the U.S. Navy, it will not be used for torpedo-guidance systems until the 1960s, and the patent will remain classified until 1985, but military computer chips will incorporate the frequency-hopping idea in the late 1950s (see 1957).

The first New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle appears February 15. The Times has hired expert Margaret Petheridge Farrar, now 44, to design the puzzles, and they will appear on a daily basis beginning in 1950. Farrar will continue in the job until she retires in 1968.

Yank begins publication June 17 under the direction of Col. Egbert White, 48, who puts out the weekly armed forces magazine with help from Chattanooga Times general manager Adolph Shelby Ochs, Saturday Evening Post editor Robert Martin Fuoss, and Liberty magazine art editor Alfred Strasser. White worked as a sergeant on Stars and Stripes in 1918 and has risen through the ranks. "The Sad Sack" by former Walt Disney cartoonist George Baker, 26, attracts many readers.

Negro Digest begins monthly publication at Chicago. Arkansas-born publisher-insurance executive John (H.) Harold Johnson, 24, has worked his way up from office boy at the Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Co. while studying at the University of Chicago and Northwestern. He has borrowed $500 against his mother's furniture to start his company, his first issue has sales of only 3,000, but circulation will soar to 100,000 when Eleanor Roosevelt writes a piece for its feature series "If I Were a Negro" (see Ebony, 1945).

Houston Chronicle founder Marcellus E. Foster dies of a heart attack at his Houston home April 1 at age 71; newspaper and racing form publisher Moses L. Annenberg is released from Lewisburg Penitentiary June 3 and dies of a brain tumor at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., July 20 at age 64. He leaves seven daughters and one son, Walter H. (Hubert), now 34, who carries on the family's business and will make it grow multifold; magazine publisher Condé Nast dies of a heart attack at his native New York September 19 at age 68; "Barney Google" comic-strip creator Billy DeBeck of cancer at Chicago November November 11 at age 52 (Fred Laswell will soon dump Barney, feature his sidekick Snuffy Smith, and carry on the strip until his own death in 2001).

The 116-year-old Paris daily Le Figaro suspends publication November 22 and will not resume until August 1944.