| It was 1961. Evan and I
were developing a pocket pager
system for a small company in Los
Angeles. It was an early predecessor to
the ubiquitous cell-phone. Four decades
later, pocket pagers are still used by
couriers and business executives, doctors and
nurses, real estate brokers and
tradesmen.
Our concept exploited a
technical loop-hole in federal regulations
for broadcast radio. Evan and I took
notice of the fact that the assigned carrier
frequency of each commercial station had a tolerance
of plus or minus fifty cycles per second
(the term 'hertz' was not yet in use).
About that time extremely
precise 'crystal
controlled' oscillators became
available. Our system used two
crystals for digitally dithering the
frequency up and down within the mandated
band to broadcast paging codes -- in effect
superimposing FM
(frequency modulation) on AM
(amplitude modulation).
The project needed
to make sure that the paging signals did not
interfere with the radio programing and vice
versa. Evan Drummond was a devoted ham radio
enthusiast, a master of the skills necessary
for developing the transmitter and receiver
electronics. He was well-costumed for
the part: white socks, pocket protector,
horn-rimmed spectacles, taciturn -- a
canonical engineer, with soldering
iron in one hand, oscilloscope
probe in the other.
My part of the
project was the digital coding at the
broadcast station and the decoding in the
pocket receiver.
If everything worked right, a
company operator would respond to phone calls
on an office line and enter codes on a special
key pad. The codes would be relayed by
leased line to the radio transmitter.
"Transistorized" receivers the size of
staple-guns dangled from a tradesman's
belt. Within the station's coverage area
pagers would recognize their respective codes,
much like your garage door opener, and
activate a buzzer. The person being
paged would then go to a phone booth, insert a
nickel, and dial the company operator (no
push-button phones back then) to obtain the
particulars of the call.
For product development, we
made a secret -- surely illegal --
arrangement with the owner/licensee of KTYM,
a hillbilly station in Los Angeles, with its
transmitter atop the nearby Baldwin
Hills. Evan set about conducting
experiments in the laboratory, keeping a
radio on his workbench tuned to KTYM all day
long with the volume turned up. It was
summertime, and the building had no air
conditioning. People began complaining
about the endless twanging of guitars and
banjos, the moaning harmonicas and fiddles
emanating from the laboratory and wafting
through open windows into every
department.
One day, I came up with a
prank. Evan's radio antenna was strung
up on the outside of the building to a
second-floor window in the accounting
department. I built a primitive noise
generator using a spark coil operated by a
telegraph key. With the spark coil
attached to the antenna, I prepared to tap
out a solemn message in Morse code. At
such a moment, it seemed important to choose
exactly the right message. What should
that be?
The Next Voice
You Hear is a 1950 film in which a
voice claiming to be that of God preempts
radio programs for days all over the world.
It stars James Whitmore and Nancy Davis as
Joe and Mary Smith, a typical American
couple. It was based on a short story of the
same name by George Sumner Albee. The voice
is never heard by the audience, most likely
due to restrictions of the Hollywood
Production Code, which prohibited ridicule
of any religious faith.
Thus, horrible buzzing sounds
came blasting through the radio speaker in
dots and dashes, obliterating the hillbilly
music...
. ...-
.- -.
-.. .-.
..- -- --
--- -. -..,
. ...-
.- -.
-.. .-. ..-
-- -- --- -.
-.., - ....
. -. . .--.
- ...- ---
.. -.-. .
-.-- --- ..-
.... . .-
.-. .. ...
--. --- -...
“EVAN DRUMMOND,
EVAN DRUMMOND,
THE NEXT VOICE YOU HEAR
IS GOD.”
The building shook with
laughter. Evan confronted me with a
scowl.
"I was not fooled!" he
exclaimed. "God knows that the 'x' in
'next' is -..-."
|
Far as I know, nobody has ever called me a nerd.
Still, I never use the term. Almost.
