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Science Communication

DOI: 10.1177/107554700202400102 2002; 24; 4 Science Communication

Marcel C. Lafollette Their Own Voices

A Survey of Science Content in U.S. Radio Broadcasting, 1920s through 1940s: Scientists Speak in

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SCIENCE COMMUNICATIONLaFollette / SCIENCE CONTENT ON U.S. RADIODuring the formative years of radio broadcasting in the United States, information about sci-ence and medicine was initially packaged in formats common to educational settings, such astalks by individual scientists. Broadcasters eventually developed more appealing presentationapproaches, adapting to the American listeners’expressed preference for drama and fast-pacedentertainment, although the scientific community often hesitated to participate in such efforts toreach mass audiences. This survey of U.S. radio programming examines informational scienceseries, broadcast from the 1920s through the 1940s, and the role played by key individuals, asso-ciations, and corporate underwriters. It identifies several trends pertinent to understanding thestate of popular science communication today and raises questions for future research by histo-rians of science communication.

A Survey of Science Content in U.S. RadioBroadcasting, 1920s through 1940s

Scientists Speak in Their Own Voices

MARCEL C. LAFOLLETTE

When it comes to their broadcasting content, Americans have always seemedto favor a good laugh or cry over even the most thoughtful lecture. Given thevariety of communication sources in a democratic society, perhaps peoplehave assumed that essential information will always be available somewhereat a later time. Until the era of inexpensive audio and video tape recorders,broadcasts also had an insistence not conveyed by print. During radio’sgolden years, Jack Benny’s ancient Maxwell cranked up promptly at theappointed hour, while Life magazine would still be there when the programfinished. From the beginning, therefore, the content of network radio broad-casting in the United States, aiming to attract and please the largest number oflisteners, veered toward entertainment. This trend, coupled with scientists’

Author’s Note: Address correspondence to Dr. Marcel C. LaFollette, 338 Eighth Street, S.E.,Washington, DC 20003-2109; phone: 202-543-2846; e-mail: [email protected].

Science Communication, Vol. 24 No. 1, September 2002 4-33© 2002 Sage Publications

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haphazard participation in programming efforts and the networks’ unre-strained commercialism, influenced the type and amount of science thatappeared and survived on American radio during its first three decades.

This article, the first of two that survey science broadcasting in the UnitedStates through the 1950s (see LaFollette 2002 [this issue]), covers the emer-gence of radio, exploring how the medium welcomed or ignored science andhow various educational, medical, and scientific associations strove in the1930s to shape network content. It also discusses the role of a few enlightenedcorporations that funded scientific lecture series on radio. Ultimately, onlythe medical associations appear to have experienced much success in lever-aging content, primarily through their use of entertainment approaches.Competition from popular comedies, dramas, and musical programs eventu-ally nudged most science communicators away from the solemn, lecture-based approach, although after 1945, radio did serve as a platform for seriousdocumentaries on science-related social, ethical, and political concerns.

Historians of science communication have tended to neglect populariza-tion via radio, perhaps discouraged because the amounts were so small, andhistorians of radio have initially concentrated on such aspects as advertising,entertainment, economics, and politics, not science (see, e.g., Barnouw 1966;Craig 2000; Douglas 1999; Hilmes 1997; Smulyan 1994). In comparison toentertainment offerings, the science programs have been inconsistently pre-served and documented. In some cases, neither recordings nor scripts appearto have survived, and few of these series have received extensive scholarlyattention to date. This article, part of my broader study of how science hasbeen represented in American mass media, seeks to piece together the devel-opment of science on radio during a critical period, to identify trends thatmerit fuller analysis, and to encourage greater attention to these productions(and their producers and underwriters) from communications scholars andhistorians of science.

The experimental programs and fledgling projects listed below must beinterpreted in light of the scientific community’s own evolvingprofessionalization and social cohesion during the 1920s and 1930s (see,e.g., Dupree 1957; Geiger 1986; Kevles 1978; Reingold and Reingold 1981;Tobey 1971) as well as scientists’ traditional communications practices.Radio represented an unfamiliar venue for scientists, whose information dis-semination patterns can be characterized as either formal and print oriented(e.g., the scientific journal article, which looked much the same in 1850,1900, and 1950) or personal and interactive (e.g., seminars and classroomlectures, where questions and interruptions from peers and students areencouraged and expected). On the radio, scientists could not see their audi-ences and, as the medium evolved, they were pressured to speak in ever

LaFollette / SCIENCE CONTENT ON U.S. RADIO 5



shorter sentences and simpler language, without the benefit of demonstra-tion, illustration, or gesture. Many prominent scientists were, as my previouswork has shown (LaFollette 1990), already exploiting popular magazines toreach wider audiences, but it was much easier to submit an essay to SaturdayEveningPost in the 1930s than to arrange an appearance on NBC. In addition,there is little evidence that broadcasting industry executives, educators, orsocial commentators regarded science as an essential component of radiocontent. Instead, it was treated as one among many potentially interestingtopics. In his pioneering 1940 analysisRadio and the Printed Page, even PaulLazarsfeld ([1940] 1971, 207) lumped “education” and “science” together inhis classifications; that is, he implied that science was important but not privi-leged. As Burnham (1987, 201) points out, broadcasting in this era did notperceive science as “a substantial element” in its programming.

The science that did appear on network radio served as an indicator oftrends to come, however. Biomedical topics proved to be popular, not theleast because of the energetic participation of medical associations in produc-ing or encouraging such programming. Other science series survived in com-mercial venues if they had substantial underwriting from scientific groups,universities, or corporations. And science topics appear to have been consis-tently attractive to millions of Americans, especially when presented inentertaining ways, such as through dramatization.

An Emerging Medium

Although wireless radio existed in the nineteenth century, it was not untilthe 1920s that the medium began to be organized in the United States into sta-tions, with assigned call letters and frequencies, and then into commercialnetwork operations (Barnouw 1966; Craig 2000; Hilmes 1997). As receiversimproved in quality and declined in price, and as the amateur operators’con-tent gave way to commercial broadcasters’more polished efforts, Americansembraced radio as a source of information, news, and home entertainment.By the end of the 1920s, about 40 percent of all U.S. households had radiosets; in some cities, almost three-quarters did (President’s Research Commit-tee on Social Trends 1933, 942). By 1932, Americans owned almost half theradio sets in the world, and there were twice as many radios as telephones(Douglas 1999, 131). Far more than print had been able to do, radio helped tounite the United States politically and socially. Listeners were encouraged,Hilmes (1997) writes, to “construct themselves as an ‘imagined commu-nity’ ” (p. 11), and Douglas (1999, 76) adds, radio became “a national entity”as audiences laughed and learned together.

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Commercial goals soon dominated programming decisions. Some observ-ers expressed the hope that the public good and commercial self-interestwould be reconcilable, but those forces have remained at odds in the broad-casting world ever since. Corporations such as the Columbia BroadcastingSystem (CBS), NBC, and Mutual Broadcasting System (MBS) formednational networks of affiliated stations and controlled the content supplied tothem, later applying the same approach when they began television broad-casts in the 1940s. Each local station essentially served as an outlet for thenetworks’ “vertically integrated and nationally centralized systems of pro-gram production and distribution” (Streeter 1996, 98-99). By the mid-1930s,the networks were delivering most of the broadcast entertainment to whichAmericans were listening; Craig (2000) says that by 1936, affiliates of CBS,NBC, and MBS (37 percent of all stations nationwide) “commanded nearly93% of the nation’s total transmission power” (p. 34).

The airwaves also became saturated with advertising once networks andstations realized they could make money from “selling time,” that is, fromselling advertisers the opportunity to reach potential buyers in their ownhomes (Smulyan 1994; Streeter 1996). From the beginning, American adver-tisers adopted an intimate tone for selling products that “approximated theone-to-one relationship between salesman and prospect” and helped to buildemotional relationships between performers and audience (Marchand 1985,88-89, 109). It is an informal, intimate style of communication that is quitedifferent from science’s studied precision. As Marchand (1985, 90) pointsout, advertisers (who produced much of the content in radio’s early days) alsotended to regard the medium as a tool for “cultural redemption” of the massaudience, as something that should reflect “the loftiest purposes” and upliftlisteners, emphasizing moral and social messages, not rational analyses.

The reliance on advertiser-driven content initially created opportunitiesfor communicating science because unpurchased time, usually late at nightor in other periods when fewer people were likely to listen, still needed to befilled with content. The networks began a practice of using sustaining (non–revenue producing) programming such as public affairs and educationalseries to fill those slots. Almost from the beginning, then, broadcasters per-ceived science, medicine, and public health programs, which were often pro-vided to them at no cost by nonprofit organizations or government agencies,as part of their “public affairs” or “public service” content (see Waller 1943).

The history of broadcast regulation in the United States also helps toexplain why the networks neglected science, along with other topics impor-tant to citizen education and enlightenment. Craig (2000), in his study ofradio’s political content, outlines the various regulatory approaches thatmight have been adopted for the U.S. system. Radio could, for example, have




been regarded as a form of speech and therefore subject to First Amendmentprotection, with only minimal government control. Likewise, it could havebeen construed as a private monopoly of its developers. The United Statescould also have adopted the British model, whereby airwaves and transmis-sion facilities fall under government control and a tax or fee supports pro-gram production, resulting in the British Broadcasting Corporation’s strongtradition of public service content. In essence, the American system devel-oped somewhere in between. A federal communications commission grantsand oversees broadcast licenses, but stations and networks are commercialoperations that can be bought and sold. The arrangement relies on industryself-regulation and places few content demands on the broadcasters them-selves, with only the occasional hopeful exhortation that they serve the publicinterest. Craig argues that how radio’s political uses evolved can be traceddirectly to both the choice of this regulatory model and the industry’s com-mercial roots. A similar suggestion might be made for the evolution of sci-ence programming on radio.

Speaking to Thousands

Some in the 1920s believed that radio’s principal role should be nationaleducator, with experts delivering talks to eager, interested audiences (Head1956, 400). This vision had proponents even among the broadcasters them-selves. NBC founder David Sarnoff (1926) predicted in theSaturdayEveningPost that workers would “go to night school” via radio and that scientistswould use it to demonstrate their “latest discoveries” (pp. 24-25). But theprospect of widespread educational use faded, at least on a national scale,because of inadequate financial support for educational programming or sta-tions and the extraordinary financial success and political clout of commer-cial broadcasting (Head 1956, 400). Most educational stations licensed in the1920s failed. As Craig (2000) notes, “many university stations began opera-tions with high hopes of bringing education to the masses, but soon falteredas broadcasting costs increased, audiences diminished, and professors dem-onstrated that lecture-hall brilliance did not always translate into good radiotechnique” (p. 68).1

Radio did play an important role in public education in two science-relatedareas—agriculture and public health. These are (not uncoincidentally) areasin which government agencies and communities of experts took an early,active interest. In 1921, the University of Wisconsin station began scheduledweather reports, and by 1922, there were regular farm market reports that




included advice on pest control and soil enhancement (Leigh 1984, 365). By1922, 35 of the 36 stations then licensed in the United States were broadcast-ing official agricultural market reports; most stations carried weather reports,along with various other educational and informational programs directed atfarm families (Smulyan 1994, 21-22; Waller 1946, 260-270).2 The mostenduring of these programs, NBC’s National Farm and Home Hour, lastedfrom 1928 to 1960 and successfully integrated agricultural news and educa-tion with entertainment, sandwiching segments produced by the U.S. Depart-ment of Agriculture between commercially sponsored ones produced by thenetwork (Baker 1981, 29-36). Public health information had already beenwidely disseminated via films and print, when, in 1921, a Denver station car-ried a program sponsored by the American Society for the Control of Cancerand the U.S. Public Health Service began weekly health talks on a naval radiostation in the Washington, D.C., area (Bauer and Hull 1937, 40; Burnham1987, 58). By the early 1930s, at least seventy-five state, city, or county medi-cal agencies or associations were regularly using radio for public health edu-cation; in addition, many dairy councils, pharmaceutical companies, andinsurance firms produced health series (Bauer and Hull 1937, 41-42; Presi-dent’s Research Committee on Social Trends 1933, 883).

During the 1920s, universities and corporations sponsored talks by scien-tists that differed little in style from how the same person might perform in alecture hall. In 1924, for example, after the University of Pittsburgh hadestablished an educational radio studio on its campus, operating as a branchof Westinghouse’s KDKA in Pittsburgh, the station initiated a regular seriesof “radio talks” by university professors, including scientists, which ran until1930. On occasion, entire academic departments took responsibility for theprograms—in January 1926, for example, the Pitt chemistry department,headed by chairman Alexander Silverman, organized seven talks on suchtopics as the chemistry of dyes and explosives and the process of catalysis(Silverman et al. 1926, 3). Other science programs were titled “Evolution andHeredity” (1924) and “Highlights in Modern Physics” (1925); zoologist P. W.Whiting gave eight talks titled “Heredity and Human Problems” in 1929; andmultipart lectures titled “Science in the Home” (1926), “Science for theHome Manager” (1929), and “Science in the Kitchen” (1930) were inter-spersed among discussions of art, music, literature, and history. Many ofthese talks were subsequently printed and distributed to interested listeners, amodel for dissemination that had been developed by commercial advertiserseager to track potential customers and a technique ideally suited for enhanc-ing technical subjects. Soon, other stations began to carry science talks.Gruenberg (1935, 85) reported that in 1935, up to 35 percent of the talks in




one University of Michigan radio series were on science and that 29 of the 30land-grant colleges included some natural science topics in their radioefforts.

Astronomer Harlow Shapley (cited in Gruenberg 1935) attempted to per-suade his peers that radio offered greater reach and more efficient use of a sci-entist’s time: “use the radio and speak to thousands, instead of taking valu-able time with a class of twenty or thirty, or even a lecture for severalhundred” (p. 83). Constructed in this way, the radio talk might seem an invit-ing communication venue for scientists, riding a long tradition of public lec-ture programs. These speakers, however, tended to perceive their mission aseducation, not entertainment. They made half-hearted attempts to conform tothe medium’s constraints, but as long as they remained stiff and formal theycould never compete with the dance bands, comedians, tear-jerking serialdramas, and suspenseful detective stories that were consistently attracting thelargest audiences.

Conflicting Goals

Opposition to the growing commercialism of American broadcastingfound expression when a number of groups formed to promote educationalbroadcasting, such as the National Committee on Education by Radio and theAssociation of College and University Broadcasting Stations. There wasconsiderable enthusiasm, many historians emphasize, for using radio foreducational purposes, but the impetus faded because of indecisive goals,opposition from broadcasters, and “listener apathy” (Craig 2000, 212). TheNational Committee on Education by Radio took a pedagogical approach,aiming to provide “listeners with formal and detailed courses on high culture,science, and government” (Craig 2000, 213). Americans, however, hadalready begun to gravitate toward education phrased as entertainment, andbroadcasters such as William Paley of CBS argued that the networks now hadan “obligation” to respond to those preferences rather than to the onesexpressed by educators (Craig 2000, 213-14).

One other organization, which operated from 1930 to 1938, the NationalAdvisory Council on Radio in Education (NACRE), was created by NBC andthe fledgling National Association of Broadcasters, and funded byRockefeller Foundation and Carnegie Corporation grants. It sought toresolve these conflicting pressures by encouraging commercial broadcastersto develop educational programming that also kept listeners interested.NACRE’s discussions and activities help to shed some light on how the scien-tific community perceived this medium, for its leadership included




prominent scientists such as California Institute of Technology physicistRobert A. Millikan (NACRE’s President), Michael Pupin of General ElectricLaboratories, MIT President Karl T. Compton, and the head of Bell Labora-tories, Frank B. Jewett. The council itself was composed of about sixty “well-known, public-spirited men” (Millikan’s description), including prominentmedia personalities such as Walter Lippmann and H. V. Kaltenborn and poli-ticians such as Henry Wallace and Harold Ickes; but its director and guidingforce was Levering Tyson, who had been a professor at the Columbia Univer-sity Teachers College. The American Association for the Advancement ofScience (AAAS), American Chemical Society, American PsychologicalAssociation, and National Research Council were listed among NACRE’s“Co-Operating Organizations.” NACRE’s twenty-seven functional commit-tees included ones on astronomy, chemistry, engineering, geology, mathe-matics, public health, physics, medicine, psychology, and science, althoughamong this group, only the latter three apparently took much action (Head1956; NACRE 1931; Tyson 1931).

In his address to NACRE’s first national assembly in 1931, Millikan (whowas introduced by President Herbert Hoover) declared optimistically that“radio seems to be already showing that it contains within it the possibility ofexerting an influence toward introducing more rational, less emotional think-ing and acting into American life”; but, he added, it also imposes a responsi-bility on its users to avoid “looseness of statement” and to get “the factsstraight before presenting them” to mass audiences (Millikan 1931, 5).Another speaker, CBS Vice President Henry Adams Bellows, remindedNACRE participants that commercial stations did not automatically see edu-cational programming as beneficial to their interests. The content had to beattractive to listeners, he insisted, because “all that a station has to sell is itsability to reach a listening audience, a greater or smaller number of peoplewho are with a considerable degree of regularity interested in its programs”(Tyson 1931, 42). Listeners do “insist on being interested as well as enter-tained,” Bellows observed, and so it is necessary to create an “interest that isquite independent of entertainment” (Tyson 1931, 43).

At NACRE’s second conference, audience researcher Carroll Dunnexplained that most programs built their audiences gradually. He listed thefive most important factors in attracting an audience to any particular pro-gram, most of which were aspects rarely considered important for technicalor educational communication: “the intrinsic entertainment value or appealof the idea around which the program is built,” the “showmanship” of the pro-ducers, the cast, the competition, and the popularity of preceding and suc-ceeding programs (Tyson 1932, 58-59, 91). Although NACRE made someeffort to develop acceptable educational programs, and eventually helped to




instigate about fifteen series in different fields, most of its projects followedthe traditional lecture format—failing to heed Dunn’s advice.

NACRE’s Committee on Psychology (chaired by Walter Bingham)worked with the American Psychological Association, for example, to pro-duce Psychology Today, a thirty-two-part NBC series that ran weekly fromOctober 1931 through May 1932.3 The series sought to present—throughtalks by experts such as Gardner Murphy, Arnold Gesell, John B. Watson,Floyd H. Allport, and Edward L. Thorndike—a review of ideas in contempo-rary psychology, with emphasis on the field’s contributions to society. Withthe assistance of the American Library Association, the committee produceda popular Listener’s Notebook for each of the six topic units, reprinting thelectures along with explanatory charts, illustrations, bibliographies, and dis-cussion questions. The books cost twenty-five cents. By May 1932, listenershad requested more than 45,000 copies, and there had been a “snowstorm” ofmail and telegrams about the shows (Bingham 1932; Tyson 1932, 27). Theprogram’s success reportedly prompted the American Psychological Associ-ation to establish a radio committee the next year.4

The use of supplementary materials such as theListener’sNotebook raisessome interesting questions, especially as future historians locate the data thatassociations may have collected and preserved from this mail. Radio audi-ences were frequently encouraged during the 1920s to write the commercialsponsors, perhaps commenting on a program’s quality or requesting addi-tional product information, and this mail served as a primitive measure ofaudience interest and demographics during radio’s experimental years (Craig2000, 24). Many science and medicine series adopted this technique. Theinformation they gathered, to the extent it may survive in archives, could helpto develop a better portrait of the audience for popular science during the1920s and 1930s, when public attitude data were not routinely collected onsuch topics.

NACRE appears to have conformed primarily to conventional presenta-tion models. In 1933, for example, NACRE worked with Cal Tech to broad-cast from its campus a panel of distinguished scientists (Albert Einstein,Henry Robinson, William Munro, and Robert Millikan) discussing the topic“America and the World Situation,” and it also sponsored talks by Sir ArthurEddington titled “The Expanding Universe” (Tyson 1933, 5-6). By NACRE’sfourth assembly in 1934, however, the members’ petulance at being ignoredby the broadcast industry was apparent (Tyson 1934). When the foundationswithdrew their financial support, NACRE disbanded.

Caution prevailed among the nation’s prestigious educational institutions,most of which eschewed involvement in radio programming during this criti-cal period. Head (1956, 402-403) observes that there was little agreement




about what radio “education” meant and a prevalent assumption that theobjectives of formal education were incompatible with those of commercialorganizations. Each interest blamed the other for lack of cooperation, and thefederal government did little to break the impasse. In 1935, despite evidenceto the contrary, the Federal Communications Commission assured Congressthat commercial broadcasters were giving sufficient time to educational pro-gramming and there was no need to set aside separate frequencies or to reas-sign ones from commercial to educational purposes (Head 1956, 401). Withprivate and government funding, yet another advocacy group, the FederalRadio Education Committee, was established, and although it too held con-ferences and issued reports, it was, in the face of rising commercial interests,no more effective than NACRE had been.

One academic organization, the University of Chicago, did initiate a num-ber of successful efforts in the 1930s and 1940s. It set up a faculty advisorycommittee to guide its efforts and participated in various consortia and coun-cils intended to improve the educational uses of radio. The university’s mostwell-known effort was University of Chicago Round Table, which ran onNBC from 1931 to 1955. Although Round Table is often characterized as aproduct of network self-interest, prompted by the threat of federal legislation(Lewis 1991, 240), few who listened to Round Table (or who read its pub-lished transcripts today) can deny that its driving force was intellectual ratherthan commercial. Part of a long tradition of radio debate programs, RoundTable expressed the propensity of university faculty to argue interminablyabout anything and everything, even if no one is listening (Denny 1941;Dunning 1998, 690-91; Lewis 1991, 240). Round Table adapted a formatthen used by America’s Town Meeting and American Forum, where the goalwas to “keep it moving and keep it conversational” (Dunning 1998, 691).Belying the show’s title, the table around which the guests sat was actuallytriangular, which put every speaker face-to-face with the others andforegrounded the confrontational structure of “talk radio” today. RoundTable’s producers persuaded prominent university faculty members andintellectuals from all fields to debate the most controversial issues of the day,including scientific topics. During 1948, for example, they discussedwhether there is life on other planets, what might be the scientific basis forbelief in God, and whether light is a wave or a particle.

Radio and Health Education

Although radio had been used for public health announcements from thebeginning, it was the flamboyant “radio doctors” of the 1920s who pushed




the American Medical Association (AMA) into taking an active role inbroadcasting. The most notorious of these medical pitchmen, John RomulusBrinkley, used his own station in Kansas to promote goat gland transplants asa remedy for impotence—until his medical and broadcasting licenses wererevoked (Craig 2000, 73-74; Lewis 1991, 237). Most radio doctors offeredcautious advice, but their sheer numbers alarmed the conservative medicalestablishment. Programs hosted by physicians D. R. Hodgon, R. H. Baker,and Arthur J. Payne ran for several years on CBS, NBC, and MBS, respec-tively; Alan Roy Dafoe, the physician who delivered the Dionne quintu-plets, held forth on CBS from 1936 to 1938, and psychologist JosephJastrow appeared on NBC (Swartz and Reinehr 1993, 166). On an NBCshow sponsored by Sharp and Dohme Pharmaceuticals in 1932, Howard W.Haggard talked about the history of medicine. Among the more unusual ofthe physician-broadcasters was Royal S. Copeland, who starred in severalhealth talk series during the 1920s and 1930s while also serving in Congressfrom 1923 to 1938 as U.S. senator from New York.5

AMA involvement began with sponsorship of monthly health talks in the1920s and expanded to production of weekly series broadcast from 1932through the 1950s. With W. W. Bauer, director of the AMA Bureau of Healthand Public Instruction, as host, Your Health (1935-1940) combined dramati-zations with expert discussions.6 In the 1940s, the series was continually refo-cused, becoming during wartime Doctors at Work (1940-1942), Doctors atWar (1942-1944), and Doctors Look Ahead (1945) and, after the war, Doc-tors atHome (1945-1946),Doctors Then andNow (1946-1947), andDoctorsToday (1947-1948). All were sustaining series, without advertising, providedto stations at no cost. The association also produced supplementary pam-phlets, workbooks, and listening guides for use in secondary schools.

In addition to the AMA efforts, there were a few credible commerciallyproduced and sponsored programs during those years, such as Herman N.Bundeson’sAdventures inHealth (sponsored by Horlick Malt) on NBC-Bluefrom 1932 to 1934 and a medical interview show sponsored by AmericanCyanamid, Doctors Talk It Over (which ran on NBC from 1935 to 1936 andwas revived in 1946-1947). The programs produced with or by the medicalassociations appear to have survived the longest. State medical associationsand state and county medical societies benefited greatly from the AMA’sexperimentation and assistance, the latter often including specific technicalinformation about how to use this new medium.

Finding the appropriate tone was not easy. Your Health, for example, fea-tured “dramatized health information” and interviews with medical experts,but the dramatizations were sometimes criticized as “overdrawn” and the




experts as dull, uninteresting, and devoid of appropriate broadcasting skills(Bird 1939, 67). The programs nevertheless offered countervailing voices tothe dubious medical advice shows. In their 1937 book, Health Education ofthe Public, W. W. Bauer and bacteriologist Thomas Hull bemoaned the factthat there were “health racketeers broadcasting the most poisonous types ofmisinformation” alongside the many good programs (p. 40).

Health educators’ choice of commercial venues during these years mayhave contributed, Toon (1998) argues, to the growing perception that per-sonal health advice was a commodity marketable just like soap. Bauer andHull (1937, 43-44), in fact, once described radio as a huge “auditory bill-board” that can “keep a certain message before the public” and probably keepthem “health-conscious,” although they cautioned that expectations of spe-cific influence should not be high:

anyone who proposes to use the radio intelligently may as well begin by puttingaside any Arabian Nights’ fantasies about the breathless millions of the unseenaudience hanging on his every word. . . . One who would be heard among themyriad voices of the ether must have something to say. . . . And he must say it ina manner which commands attention. (Pp. 43-44)

That is to say, health programs must have punch and should be scheduled soas not to compete against more popular entertainment.

Bauer and Hull (1937) adamantly rejected commercial affiliation formedical and health broadcasting, fearing censorship of topics and tone. Theyacknowledged that it was difficult to persuade broadcasters to donate time(“There are those who hold that attempting to explain medicine to a lay publicis not only without profit, but is definitely undesirable”) and therefore it wasessential to keep the audience entertained and interested (pp. 27, 50). Theydismissed fears that health education “creates hypochondriasis,” “promotesfallacies of self-medication and self-diagnosis,” arouses “false hopes,” or(because it uses a forum “perverted to the uses of quacks, faddists, and fak-ers”) taints good medicine by association (p. 28). Instead, they asserted,radio’s “enlightening forces” are vital in combating the ignorance and confu-sion promoted by quacks.

Most in the American medical community appear to have endorsed theAMA’s vision, regarding radio health education as “a type of epidemiology inwhich the morbidity to be combated is ignorance, indifference, and misinfor-mation” (New York Academy of Medicine 1945). Other medical organiza-tions, such as the state academies of medicine or health departments, alsoengaged in radio projects. The New York Academy of Medicine worked withCBS to produce Highways of Health from 1932 to 1943; during 1942, there




were 283 broadcasts about health on eleven stations in New York City, pro-duced with the cooperation of fifteen different health organizations. In onemonth alone (November 1943), the five principal radio stations in New YorkCity presented twenty-nine regular fifteen-minute radio programs on healtheducation, most (fourteen of the twenty-nine) broadcast between noon and1 P.M. (New York Academy of Medicine 1945, 101-102). In 1943, slightlymore than half of U.S. radio stations affiliated with national networks regu-larly carried public health programs, most of them fifteen minutes long orless.7 Some of these programs had been on the air for five or more years, buta more substantial number had been first broadcast only in the previous yearor two. Most programs were scheduled in “Class B” time (9:00 A.M. to6:00 P.M.) whether they originated locally or through the network.

The medical community’s ability to speak and act with a united voice,through its national and regional organizations, helped it to achieve somemeasure of influence on the quality of medical information disseminated tothe public via radio. Broadcasters were happy to have the AMA or a statemedical society evaluate or supply content—with a station sometimes doinglittle more than simply making the broadcast facilities and time slot avail-able—in return for implicit endorsement (New York Academy of Medicine1945, 2). To their credit, and with AMA encouragement, most medicalexperts apparently refused to cooperate on—or lend their imprimatur to—broadcasts unless their conditions for ensuring accuracy and quality weremet. The efforts of other scientific and technical organizations were not sowell coordinated or uniformly successful.

Science Service, Smithsonian,and Similar Groups

In 1931, NACRE’s Committee on Science forecast that “the greatest edu-cational force of radio will never be felt within the walls of schoolrooms. . . . Itis most effective in the living-rooms and dining rooms of the ordinary home”(Tyson 1931, 259). One early advocate of using radio to accomplish thesegoals was Science Service, the nonprofit organization created to act as anintermediary between the scientific community and the media. It beganbringing science directly into Americans’ living rooms in 1924 by sponsor-ing talks by eminent scientists, providing science news to radio stations, andproducing a series of dramatizations of science (Rhees 1979). Science Today(CBS) included speakers such as Kirtley F. Mather (“Plumbing the Depths ofthe Earth”), Karl T. Compton (“Adventures with Electricity in a Partial Vac-uum”), and William Charles White (“What Germs Are Made Of”) (Davis




1931). Watson Davis trumpeted Science Service’s efforts to use drama, pre-dicting that it would be “the most effective means of presenting science overthe radio” (Tyson 1931, 260). And, in fact, Science Service’s most successfulventure wasAdventures in Science, a fifteen-minute program that ran on CBSfrom 1938 to 1957, as part of the CBSAdult Educational Series. Davis freelyadmitted that “it is necessary to put showmanship into the preparation of sci-ence presentations.” Broadcasts about such things as the new telescope at Mt.Palomar Observatory could be made into “radio dramas of history in the mak-ing,” he suggested, and the public thereby “led to appreciate the drama, theromance, and historical perspective of science through a series of historicallyand scientifically accurate playlets based on classics, discoveries, and inven-tions that have made civilization what it is today” (Tyson 1931, 260).

The Smithsonian Institution also became involved in radio in the 1930s,helping to develop a number of successful programs. The World Is Yours ran(usually on Sunday afternoons) on NBC from 1936 through 1942, when itwas suspended because of the war. This cooperative presentation of theSmithsonian and the U.S. Department of Interior’s Office of Education waspart of an experimental Works Project Administration project aimed at deter-mining “the type of educational programs that would both instruct and enter-tain” (True 1949, 332). Project directors wanted to experiment with a drama-tized series, so they arranged with the Smithsonian to provide experts forconsultation and interview. The Interior Department produced the half-hourprogram, at no cost to NBC, as well as a series of supplementary booklets,reading lists, and a monthly magazine that eventually reached a circulation of150,000. Programs looked at science along with history and art, dramatizingsuch topics as “Comets and Meteorites,” “The Inca Empire of the Sun,” and“Whales, the Largest Mammals” with actors, orchestras, choruses, andappropriate sound effects. Eventually, the project received more than500,000 letters from listeners, most of them “enthusiastic in their praise”(True 1949, 336). The developers also surveyed 35,000 listeners, finding that“the average number of listeners at each radio was four, that the ages rangedin fairly constant proportion from 9 to 60, that slightly more men than womenlistened,” and that audience members came from all sorts of occupations andall parts of the United States and Canada (True 1949, 336-37). This was thefirst of many ventures into radio (and later, television) by the Smithsonian asit sought to promote its research and exhibitions.8 Among other programssponsored or developed by museums, planetariums, or similar organizationswas Hayden Planetarium Talks, a fifteen-minute program broadcast fromNew York’s American Museum of Natural History (first on CBS, 1936-1939,and then MBS, 1940-1941) and moderated by astronomer Clyde Fisher.




Organizations such as AAAS also ventured onto the airwaves during the1930s. AAAS worked with NBC on Science Everywhere (1937-1938), Sci-ence on the March (1938), and Science in the News (a fifteen-minute scienceeducation talk hosted from 1936 to 1940 by radio personality Olan Soule)(Buxton and Owen 1997; Kohlstedt, Sokal, and Lewenstein 1999, 91; Sum-mers 1971; Swartz and Reinehr 1993). Francis R. Moulton, permanent secre-tary of AAAS, explained that the association regarded Science on the Marchas a way to speak directly to the public, eschewing any attempt to present“science as magic or scientists as heroes” and instead seeking to “advocateconfidence in experimentation and the process of reasoning” (Moulton 1938,546).

Scientists remained cautious about such radio ventures, and they strug-gled to maintain close control of the content. Before embarking onScience ontheMarch, AAAS carefully negotiated the program’s goals with NBC, even-tually agreeing to an approach in which “the speaker and the announcer arethe characters, the latter representing the listener”: “in Socratic fashion theyquestion and argue, sometimes following false trails . . . sometimes beingcompelled frankly to admit that they do not know the answers to the questionsthey are considering. That is the way it is with scientists” (Moulton 1938,547). Moulton (1938) admitted that the broadcasts often failed to achievethese high ideals, explaining that radio production was a part-time, amateuractivity for the association: “it is a somewhat onerous burden to prepare anddeliver at a fixed time a broadcast week after week in the midst of many otherduties” (p. 547). In the first ten months of the series, thanks to a grant from theCarnegie Corporation, AAAS mailed 170,600 copies of the printed scripts tolisteners and in June 1938 used that mailing list to survey audience responseto the show.9 Almost 28 percent of the respondents said that they intended touse the scripts for dramatic readings at home, school, or social clubs(Moulton 1938, 548).

It is possible that there was, in fact, much more science programming onradio in these years than listed here or traditionally acknowledged in historiesof science communication. Locating information about these shows is diffi-cult, given the absence of recordings and transcriptions and the minimaldescriptions in standard reference works. Many questions remain unan-swered. How popular were the programs produced by the scientific associa-tions themselves? What audiences did they attract? What topics andapproaches did they employ and find successful, and which did they reject—and why? How much was commercial programming influenced by the non-profit broadcasting projects, or vice versa? And when a science seriesflopped, was there a tendency to blame the topic rather than the skill of




production or other factors? We simply cannot say whether Americans werebeing well informed (or ill informed) about scientific developments throughradio; we do not even have useful contemporary estimates of the amount ofprogramming available. Davis (1939, 39) estimated that about 6.25 hours ofeducational or informational science programs were broadcast every week in1939 on network radio (that is, about 7.5 percent of scheduled programming),while Lazarsfeld ([1940] 1971, 207-13) concluded that newspapers gavemuch more attention to science in 1938 than did radio.

What we do know is that groups such as Science Service, AAAS, and theSmithsonian occasionally dared to move beyond the conventional lecturemodel in their radio projects and that when they did, the audience responseappears to have been positive. Unfortunately, even science broadcasterscame to assume that any hint of an educational purpose within a programmight alienate potential listeners: “never let that great unseen audience knowof any desire to turn their radios into extramural schools,” a NACRE reportadmonished (Tyson 1931, 259). And so educators embraced the notion that“science must use all the mechanisms of oral and sound presentation thathave been devised for stage, talkies, pulpit, rostrum, and radio, even advertis-ing” if it was to reach the masses (Tyson 1931, 259-60) because professionalbroadcasters had convinced them that radio’s “social value,” as the Presidentof the National Association of Broadcasters phrased it, must be measured “bythe number of those who receive its message” (Miller 1941, 323). It was a for-mula biased toward entertainment.

Another factor influenced the number of science programs—broadcast-ing economics. When the formats involved talks or roundtable discussions byscientists, the production costs were relatively small, and stations were happyto have their off-peak hours filled. Smithsonian scientist Austin H. Clark(1932) emphasized this symbiosis when he wrote:

through the radio stations scientific organizations are enabled to reach a largersection of the public at practically no expense to themselves. They are the bene-ficiaries of a large amount of valuable advertising which, though receivedwithout cost to them, means a considerable expense to others, who are quitejustified in anticipating that this expense shall in some way be counterbal-anced. (P. 268)

To compete for audiences in an increasingly sophisticated marketplace, how-ever, the science productions became more complicated—and thereforemore expensive. The impact of these presentations was difficult to measure,and scientists and their organizations had few ways to know if they were mak-ing a difference with the audience. The professional associations did not




regard communication to the public as their primary activity, and projectswere easily marginalized whenever costs rose and other organizational needsassumed priority. All too often, the underwriters lost heart after a few years.

As early as 1931, Watson Davis (cited in Tyson 1931) called for “a sim-pler, cheaper, and more accurate method of evaluating radio program appeal,one that does not involve the costly mailing of samples or other gifts to thepublic” (p. 261; see also Davis 1931). The demand for Psychology Today’ssupplementary lecture material, where listeners actually had to mail a requestand send money, offered one useful measure of interest. Other sustainingseries that offered their premiums for free received similar enthusiasticresponses. Davis recognized that the prevailing model involved a delicatebalance of interests. Individual scientists volunteered their time liberally asthey assisted script preparation; their organizations or foundations under-wrote the actual production costs; and the broadcasting systems and stationsallotted time, forgoing revenue. As commercial radio began to achieve profit-ability, “it seems logical to expect,” Davis (cited in Tyson 1931) wrote:

that eventually the broadcasting stations and systems will consider it advisableto defray the costs of obtaining necessary scientific and other educational pro-grams in the same way as they now compensate the philharmonic orchestrasthat compose parts of the non-advertising portions of the radio broadcast pro-grams. (Pp. 261-62)

This dream of subsidy from the broadcasters went unfulfilled. And, ofcourse, the radio networks eventually stopped subsidizing their own orches-tras. The informational science that proved to be the most successful was thatwhich adapted to the audience’s fascination with the dramatic.

Dramatizing Science’s Detachment

Through its dramatic and comedic presentations, radio could fuel theimagination and transport its listeners beyond their living rooms to lands ofpleasure and enjoyment—Jack Benny, Charlie McCarthy, Buck Rogers, andMatt Dillon brought laughter, mystery, and adventure. So it should not be sur-prising that by the late 1930s, science communicators turned to dramatic for-mats to make technical material more palatable to radio audiences grownaccustomed to quick wit, clever dialogue, and stunning sound effects. TheHuman Adventure (1939-1946), produced by the University of Chicago(under the supervision of Sherman H. Dryer from the university’s Depart-ment of Education), sought to “open up the closed books of man’s past andfuture” through dramatizations of subjects such as physics, the roots of




Nazism, and the origins of the earth (Bluem 1965, 62; Dryer 1941). Broad-casting executives often cited the series as an example of how “highly techni-cal and frequently involved scientific principles” could be made “interestingand understandable” (New York Academy of Medicine 1945, 95; also seeDunning 1998, 335). One Human Adventure segment attempted to explainEinstein’s theory of relativity in thirty minutes, using a cast that included F.Chase Taylor (famous as the radio character Colonel Stoopnagle) playing a“know-nothing layman” and the urbane actor Clifton Fadiman cast as an“omniscient explorer.”10 Another program, which helped to win a PeabodyAward for the series in 1945, was “Typhus,” a dramatic account of how DDTwas used to stop epidemics of typhus during World War II (“the story oftyphus research and the answer of modern science to the dread threat of thisdisease”) (Barnouw 1945, 323; Bluem 1965, 63). That script included atten-tion to scientists’roles in identifying the disease vector and then developing asubstance to combat it.

Unlimited Horizons, written by Arnold Marquis, ran on NBC from 1940to 1943, thanks to support from a consortium of universities. Although somescientific topics were off-limits during the war, the thirty-minute series nev-ertheless explored a wide range of advances in fields such as astronomy, geol-ogy, and biology (Dunning 1998, 691). Programs sought to present storiesthat were “vital, human and full of emotion,” with “a competent cast of radioactors,” so that a show could not “fail to hold the attention of anyone at allinterested in the subject, and even those who know little about it—and—careless” (Waller 1943, 44). Broadcasters had thus begun to perceive new ways inwhich science’s inherent dramatic meaning could be brought to the forefrontin such programs, recognizing how to describe artfully, as CBS executiveLyman Bryson (1941) phrased it, even “the very impersonality and detach-ment of the laboratory worker” (p. 368).

Following the war, Sherman H. Dryer created another science series,Exploring the Unknown, which aired to good ratings first on MBS with com-mercial sponsorship (1945-1947) and then on ABC as a sustaining program(1947-1948) (Dunning 1998, 238). This series incorporated a continuing nar-rator and orchestra and the participation of Hollywood stars such as CedricHardwicke and Veronica Lake, investigating topics ranging from entomol-ogy to psychology; “The Battle Never Ends,” starring Orson Welles, forexample, was the story of research on insect plagues. During 1946-1947, thelistening audience forExploring theUnknownwas estimated to be between 3percent and 5 percent of all U.S. households.11

By the 1940s, it was becoming common wisdom among radio profession-als that audiences craved drama, not discussion. Judith C. Waller (1943),NBC’s director of public service, wrote that even the most interesting and




important subject fades when reduced to “just another talk” (p. 44). Yetdespite the AMA’s successful use of dramatization in its various series, not allparts of the medical community applauded this trend. The New York Acad-emy of Medicine (1945) complained that radio health dramas failed “griev-ously.” “In most instances,” its report declared, “the so-called drama is notdramatic, but consists merely of a motley of situations represented in excitedchatter . . . [and] when . . . the exposition is truly dramatic, it is almost entirelydevoid of health education” (p. 26). Despite such criticism, the AMA contin-ued to produce medical dramas through the 1940s.

Americans were also being increasingly exposed to a new form of enter-tainment, the manufactured drama, whereby real events were planned andarranged for broadcast. Sometimes these programs intermingled on the air-waves with dramatized news reports like on TheMarch of Time (see Fielding1972, 1978). A prime example of manufactured drama occurred with thebroadcasts from Richard Byrd’s polar expeditions.12 Using a combination ofshort-wave hookups, CBS took Americans along on Byrd’s 1933 to 1935expedition (Dunning 1976, 5; Summers 1971; Swartz and Reinehr 1993,167). Sponsored by General Foods, these programs were conceived as two-way broadcasts in that listeners heard the expedition’s scientific reports sentvia short wave, but the broadcast was also used to convey personal messages,music, and entertainment to the expedition members. Radio had begun to“emphasize the spectacular and exciting,” Gruenberg (1935) observed at thetime, by allowing listeners to “hear Byrd’s voice in the comfort of [their]home when he is buried in snow thousands of miles away” (pp. 1-2). As oneAmerican later recalled, “it was a real thrill” in the 1930s “to hear someonetalk from the South Pole—scratchy as reception was some of the time, a realmarvel in those days” (cited in Barfield 1996, 62).

Unleashing the Wild Imagination

Radio eventually became an integral part of American life thanks to twotypes of content—news and entertainment. At the beginning of 1940, Ameri-cans owned 44 million radio receivers; by the end of the year, with fightingerupting around the world, they bought another 10 million sets. To take theirminds off war, they tuned into detective stories and space adventures, wherescience had become a standard element in a hero’s arsenal. Police and privatedetectives used the latest in forensic science to identify and convict criminals,and on space-fiction dramas such as Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (whichplayed on CBS from 1932 to 1936 and on MBS from 1939 to 1947), science




helped the adventurers to defeat their evil opponents, aided by such contrap-tions as psychic restriction rays, teleradioscopes, and atomic disintegrators(Buxton and Owen 1972).

No presentation on radio, before or since, rivals the impact of the OrsonWelles 1938 dramatization of H. G. Wells’s novel War of the Worlds, how-ever. By coincidence, the broadcast took place just as social scientists werebeginning to study how radio affected its listeners. Immediately after theWelles broadcast, Princeton University researcher Hadley Cantril (1940)obtained extra funding from the Federal Radio Education Committee and theRockefeller Foundation to study the show’s impact. As a result, Cantril’sreport has preserved valuable historical data about the audience reaction, andit gives additional hints about how popular science in general was beingreceived and how references to scientists helped the dramatist to achieve(false) authenticity.

The novel’s plot involves an invasion of England by Martian spacecraft,whose horrible death rays can destroy all living things around them. OrsonWelles, in a cunning adaptation, phrased his broadcast script as a series ofradio bulletins rather than the personal narrative used in the book, and he setthe events in the United States. Audience estimates for the program ran ashigh as 6 million, at least 1 million of whom, Cantril (1940) later concluded,became “frightened or disturbed” by the broadcast.13 Many of those whoreacted emotionally lived, perhaps predictably, near where the Martian shipshad supposedly landed in New Jersey.14 More than one quarter of the listenersmay, in fact, have initially assumed it was a real news broadcast, due in nosmall part to Welles’s clever mimicry of contemporary presentation tech-niques and to the fact that many had tuned in late. The fake news bulletinsbroke into what seemed like a live broadcast of a dance orchestra (a commonoffering of the time). The actors copied the style and language of newsannouncers. And Welles constructed interviews with the type of experts whokeyed well into American respect for authority. The most logical person toask about the authenticity of any object falling from the sky, of course, was ascientist, so Welles included fake interviews with astronomers from the plau-sibly named “Princeton Observatory” and “California Astronomical Soci-ety” (Cantril 1940, 70-71). By including precise technical details about theMartian landing craft, the drama employed the science-fiction technique ofplausible specificity. In addition, many people were apparently willing tobelieve that it was all true. Cantril concluded that:

for many persons another bewildering characteristic of our present civilizationis the mystery of science. . . . [But science] comes from a world outside and lies




within a universe of discourse completely foreign to the perplexed layman. . . .If science can create the things we have, why can’t it create rocket ships anddeath rays? (P. 158)

After the end of World War II, science fiction became a standard radiooffering, occasionally including discussions of real science within obviouslyfictional plots. Some series—such as Space Patrol and Tom Corbett, SpaceCadet—were aimed at young audiences, but anthology series developed foradult listeners frequently implied an unwarranted level of authenticity. UntilNBC’s Dimension X (1950-1951), radio had neglected science fiction as anadult entertainment, and it is still considered the best of radio science fiction,rivaled only perhaps by the same network’s X Minus One (1955-1957) andExploring Tomorrow (1957-1958), a twice-weekly MBS series based on sto-ries from Astounding Science Fiction magazine. Exploring Tomorrow beganwith the tantalizing announcement that “the program you are about to hear isfiction, science fiction. We make no guarantee, however, how long it willremain so” (Dunning 1998, 199; Terrace 1999, 471). This technique ofentwining science facts with science fiction became standard practice on tele-vision, as the second part of this survey describes (see LaFollette 2002).

Corporate Engagement

In addition to the professional associations and universities, a number ofU.S. corporations played important roles in underwriting science program-ming during the 1930s and 1940s. A typical corporate project involved “radiotalks” by scientists and engineers, such as the series initiated by GeneralElectric Research Laboratories at its station, WGY, in Schenectady, NewYork. Science Forum, which began in 1932, usually featured a ten- to fifteen-minute talk by a prominent researcher (often a company employee), followedby either an interview with the scientist or a panel discussion.15 The series,which became weekly in 1936 and eventually ran nationally under the titleExcursions in Science until 1949, emphasized the science behind the com-pany’s engineering efforts. Its goal was “to present the meaning, scope, andseveral purposes of modern scientific research and engineering in languagethat could be understood by the intelligent layman” (Reynolds and Manning[1939] 1972, viii). Guests included such prominent scientists as IrvingLangmuir, Hans Bethe, Fred L. Whipple, Selman A. Waksman, and Glenn T.Seaborg, discussing topics such as heat pumps, fireflies, chemotherapy,earthquake prediction, tooth decay, phosphors, sun spots, meteorites, Mars,and ozone.




More innovative—and probably more influential in bringing science togeneral audiences not automatically attuned to science—were so-calledintermission talks. From 1929 to 1937, General Motors Corporation spon-sored a variety of Sunday evening concert broadcasts that included experttalks during the intermissions; in 1937, one thirteen-week series featuredradio personality John B. Kennedy telling “dramatic stories of science”(Dunning 1998). Following World War II, corporate scientists and engineerssuch as C. F. Kettering occasionally gave talks during the intermissions ofGeneral Motors Symphony of the Air (NBC).

The most remarkable programs of this type aired in 1945 and 1946. TheU.S. Rubber Company had begun in 1943 to sponsor New York Philharmonic-Symphony broadcasts on CBS, and its intermission offerings had followedthe prevalent model, with experts talking about history or public affairs. AsWorld War II was drawing to a close, the company’s advertising agency pro-posed to reorient the series to “look forward into the future,” using science astheir window: “the time had clearly come when everyone ought to have abroader and more authentic understanding of what science is and how it oper-ates,” it later explained (Serving through Science 1946, v; Weaver 1947). U.S.Rubber and its advertising firm assembled a distinguished scientific advisorycommittee chaired by Warren Weaver of the Rockefeller Foundation andincluding Frank B. Jewett (then President of the National Academy of Sci-ences); Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley; anatomist George W. Corner ofthe Carnegie Institution of Washington; Wendell M. Stanley, who was achemist and virologist at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research; andthe noted historian and newspaper editor Douglas Southall Freeman. Theyengaged professional science writer George W. Gray to help the scientistspolish their talks for broadcast and pamphlet publication.

The scientists later recalled their “incredulous skepticism” that responsi-bility for the series would actually be given to the committee and their initialconcern that the final product might turn out to be “jazzed-up” science ratherthan “real science, dignified and authentic” (Serving through Science 1946,vi). The brief talks, about eleven to twelve minutes, were intended to “stimu-late, rather than satisfy, an interest in science and the scientific method”(Serving through Science 1946, 3). The list of speakers, like that for the Gen-eral Electric series, reads like a who’s who of science. During 1945, concertaudiences heard Arthur Holly Compton, Irving Langmuir, Edwin H. Land(“Polarized Light”), Igor Sikorsky (“Direct Lift Aircraft”), Robert Yerkes(on chimpanzees), Isaiah Bowman, and E. P. Hubble. On 5 August 1945, theintermission featured a talk about penguins, but by the end of the year, theseries was responding to Americans’curiosity about atomic energy. Listeners




eventually heard Hans Bethe (“Within the Atom,” 2 December 1945), HaroldC. Urey (“Isotopes in Atomic Research,” 9 December 1945), James Franck(“Medical Benefits from Atomic Energy,” 16 December 1945), and even J.Robert Oppenheimer (“The Atomic Age,” 23 December 1945) describing theatomic age. Other talks covered DDT, streptomycin, hybrid corn, andepidemics.

The scientists appear to have been aware that they had been handed anextraordinary opportunity to communicate about their work directly to thepublic. Here, the advisory committee later wrote, “was a vast national audi-ence, brought together every Sunday Afternoon by the glorious music of theNew York Philharmonic-Symphony,” and scientists might “give them somedirect awareness of what science is accomplishing” (Serving through Science1946, vi). The scientists could “speak with their own voices, describe theirown work, tell the stories that they themselves considered significant,” withfew of the filters and synthetic veils that were becoming common throughoutAmerican broadcasting (Serving through Science 1946, vii).

Serious Matters to Talk About

By the 1940s, NBC started using the term “public service” to designateprogramming that was neither entertainment nor news, considering the word“education” to be too “austere” for a category that contained shows designedto be “amusing, entertaining, or easy to listen to” (Waller 1946, 171). AfterHiroshima, however, radio did play an important public service role ininforming Americans about the political and ethical challenges posed by thedevelopment of nuclear weapons. On the 12 August 1945 broadcast of TheUniversity of Chicago Round Table, for example, Robert Hutchins asked hisguests (scientist Rueben Gustavson and sociologist William F. Ogburn),“Gentlemen, is the atomic bomb good or bad for the earth?” and, in a Novem-ber 1945 broadcast, he invited other guests to consider the topic “Peace andthe Atomic Bomb” (University of Chicago Round Table 1951, 3). Hutchinsminced no words in describing atomic energy as a discovery that placed a“moral burden” on the human race, and he later argued that the money beingspent on the cold war weapons program should be redirected toward scien-tific research that could cure “cancer, influenza, venereal disease, unemploy-ment at home, or starvation abroad” (University of Chicago Round Table1951, 9). During the 1940s, the Federation of American Scientists and otheraction groups encouraged scientists concerned about postwar control ofatomic energy to use radio to reach the public. Believing radio to be a morereliable route to a national audience than film or press interviews, the




Federation of American Scientists worked with the Advertising Council tocreate public service programs on that topic (Smith 1970, 296).

Other explorations of atomic politics came via a relatively new format, theradio documentary. Longer than a news report, and often employing profes-sional actors to re-create events, these programs exploited entertainmenttechniques for serious purposes. Davidson Taylor (cited in Waller 1950),CBS director of public affairs, went so far as to characterize a radio docu-mentary as “a show in which the material is fact and the method is fiction”(p. 213). Historians frequently cite these documentaries as influential inshaping public concern about atomic energy, singling out the CBS documen-tary The Sunny Side of the Atom (30 June 1947), which focused on peacetimeuses, and MBS’s Atom and You (September 1948) (Boyer 1998, 30; Weart1988). A New York City station, WMCA, broadcast a thirteen-week series ofdiscussions of atomic energy, One World or None, which was sponsored bysuch scientists as Einstein, Oppenheimer, and Urey, and ABC presented afour-part reading of John Hersey’s novel Hiroshima.

Perhaps because of such broadcasts, a Social Science Research Councilsurvey found that in 1947, Americans regarded radio as “their most trustwor-thy source of information about the bomb” (Gitlin 1949, 327-28). Based onits own research, CBS claimed that The Sunny Side of the Atom had informedits audience about possible peacetime uses of atomic energy even as it stroveto “counter the ‘closed-mind’ attitude resulting from the ‘scare’ approach”(Gitlin 1949, 329). The network found that after hearing the broadcast, 46percent of the sample listener group were “less fearful” of atomic energy.Gitlin (1949, 327-28) estimated that by 1949, hundreds of separate radio pro-grams about atomic energy had been broadcast on U.S. stations.

Not every documentary offered comfort. As Orson Welles had proved,radio drama could easily unleash the wild imagination. Actress Jane Fonda(cited in Weart 1988) once claimed that The Fifth Horseman (a four-partNBC series in 1946) frightened her enormously as a little girl—“because ofthat radio show, I’ve always thought that we were tampering with things”(p. 116). In 1950, Fred Friendly produced a controversial series for NBC,TheQuick and the Dead, which mixed fictional material and dramatizations withinterviews of real scientists, politicians, and even crew members from EnolaGay.16 On that show, comedian Bob Hope played the role of Taxpayer, a char-acter who asked devil’s advocate questions to a newspaperman, who thenreferred them to real experts (whose taped answers were spliced into the nar-rative) (Bluem 1965, 70-71). Other well-known actors played the parts of sci-entists such as Lise Meitner and Albert Einstein as the shows told the historyof the development of the bomb.




Radio documentaries also looked at other science-related topics, espe-cially the growing concern about natural resources. In 1947, a program called1960?? Jiminy Cricket!! used Walt Disney characters Donald Duck, JiminyCricket, and the Seven Dwarfs to dramatize how science would assist “thefuture needs and resources of America.” The next year, an NBC documen-tary, Mother Earth, focused on the “plundering of the earth’s naturalresources” (MacDonald 1979, 313). CBS radio in the mid-1940s produced adocumentary on medical quackery, Menace in White. After the late 1940s,however, the networks produced fewer radio documentaries. Science series,almost always provided as sustaining or public service broadcasts, occupiedless prominent parts of the network schedule and tended to be newsy reportsabout current research—for example, CBS’s fifteen-minute series Frontiersof Science (1947-1948); ABC’s Science Editor (1952-1955); WestinghouseElectric’sAdventures in Research; and Looking into Space, an ABC programhosted by rocket expert Willy Ley (Summers 1971; Swartz and Reinehr1993).

Disconnected Voices

In the face of television’s competition for audience attention, radio beganto fade as Americans’primary source of dramatic and comedy entertainment;sports, music, and eventually talk shows began to dominate its programschedules. As Douglas (1999, 220-21) describes in Listening In, radio con-tinued to “structure” people’s days, helping to awaken them in the morning,inform and entertain them during the drive to and from work, and providebackground music for chores and leisure activities, but the roles it had playedin general entertainment and public education, including that on science,shifted toward television.

While not a failure, radio’s science content never seemed to rise above theaverage. In radio’s heyday, drama and comedy had helped to develop “dimen-sional listening” skills in its audiences (Douglas 1999), while science was toooften presented in unidimensional, highly intellectualized formats, drainedof emotion and excitement. Underwriting was inconsistent and scientificorganizations appear to have been so concerned about controlling the contentthat they ignored broadcasters’ advice for how to reach the audience.

The goals for science presentations also clashed with the way in which themedium had evolved as a commercial endeavor. In assessing educationalbroadcasting, Head (1956, 404) has observed that “good” educational pro-gramming almost invariably conflicts with the “basic principles of goodcommercial programming” in that it aims at a small, not a mass, audience; is




expensive to produce; attracts little or no revenue; and tends to erode the rat-ings of programs scheduled before and afterward. As a result, in the UnitedStates, any radio content deemed remotely educational was, after the 1940s,relegated to channels, stations, or schedule slots outside the mainstream orprime time. Science therefore resided in the off-hours, even when the contentwas entertaining as well as informative. Only substantial underwriting bycorporations or scientific associations brought science into radio’s primetime, a pattern later repeated during the first decades of commercialtelevision.

Notes

1. Craig (2000, 68) states that 164 of the 202 educational stations licensed between 1921and 1927 either sold out to commercial stations or relinquished their licenses and that similarfailure rates occurred among church-operated stations. By 1940, noncommercial stations repre-sented only 4.8 percent of all broadcast licenses in the United States.

2. Programming information in this article that is not otherwise attributed has been com-piled from a wide range of broadcasting directories, schedule analyses, and reference books, in-cluding such standard works as Buxton and Owen (1972, 1997), Dunning (1976, 1998), Mac-Donald (1979), Summers (1971), Swartz and Reinehr (1993), and Terrace (1999).

3. The program initially aired on forty stations nationwide, and by May 1932, it aired onforty-five.

4. Burnham (1987) states that “psychology and health both rated above average in a majorsurvey of radio programming in 1935” (p. 43).

5. Most were fifteen-minute programs broadcast four to five times a week, but Copelandalso starred in a thirty-minute series on NBC-Blue in 1929-1930 while serving in Congress.Copeland’s other series ran on NBC-Blue from 1927 to 1930, on NBC from 1931 to 1932, and onCBS in 1932. Copeland, a professor of homeopathic medicine, had an interesting career mixingpolitics and medicine. Before his legislative career, he had been mayor of Ann Arbor (while onthe faculty of the University of Michigan) and, later, the New York City commissioner of publichealth.

6.Dr.W.W.Bauer: AMAHealth Talks andYourHealth:Dr.W.W.Bauer: AMAHealth Talks(on NBC-Red and -Blue Networks from 1935 to 1938, thirty minutes) were usually scheduled at5 P.M. on weekdays.

7. These data come from a member survey conducted in 1943 by the National Associationof Broadcasters (Egolf 1945). Although 241 stations (42 percent of the membership) returned re-sults and 57 percent of these carried some type of public health program, from five to forty-fiveminutes in length, the data were reported for the number of programs running each week, not forindividual series. There is no way of knowing how many of the programs were repeated duringthe week or what percentage of total programming that represented. The four major networks re-ported originating 902 programs during the previous year, most of which were fifteen minutes inlength. But these data, too, are not delineated by frequency of broadcast, by proportion of overallprogramming, or as individual series. Such problems are useful as pointers toward trends but arereminders of how few empirical data exist about these early efforts.

8. Later Smithsonian Institution radio ventures included Radio Smithsonian (1969-1990),Smithsonian Galaxy (1979-1987), and Here at the Smithsonian (1982-1989).




9. The American Association for the Advancement of Science mailed 8,000 questionnairesand received 2,000 responses, from which they selected 1,250 at random for their analysis.

10. Col. Lemuel Q. Stoopnagle is described as a “fast-talking, scatterbrained inventor” whowas continually giving advice to other characters (Dunning 1998, 335).

11. Summers (1971) says that it had a Hooper rating of 3.0 in January 1946 and a Hooper rat-ing of 4.8 in January 1947.

12. Dennis Rawlins and Robert Bryce, the intrepid and dedicated debunkers of Byrd’s claimto have been the first to reach the North Pole, would undoubtedly add that “manufactured” is toomild a term to apply.

13. Cantril (1940, 47-56) took the average of the Gallup Poll estimate of 9 million adults andthe C. E. Hooper, Inc., rating of 4 million. He then estimated the number who were frightened byextrapolating from his own interview sample.

14. There was, for example, a measurable increase in the volume of telephone calls to policestations in that area during the broadcast and a 39 percent increase in telephone use overall in thatarea of New Jersey, probably as listeners called friends and relatives to acquire more informationor receive reassurance (Cantril 1940).

15. Many of the talks were published in essay form in 1939 and later editions (Reynolds andManning 1939, [1939] 1972; Stokeley 1951).

16. This four-part series was broadcast (with repeats throughout) during a seven-week periodin July and August 1950 (Dunning 1976, 495; Dunning 1998, 558).

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MARCEL C. LAFOLLETTE is an independent scholar and consultant in Washington,D.C. She served as editor ofScience Communication from1990 to 1998 and is the authorofMaking Science Our Own: Public Images of Science, 1910-1955 (1990, University ofChicago Press) and Stealing into Print: Fraud, Plagiarism, and Misconduct in ScientificPublishing (1992, University of California Press). She is currently working on a bookthat reassesses the representation of science in American mass media during the twenti-eth century, including the history of radio and television programming.




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