[CW] 1915 New York Herald Radio WHB PX (Spark)

[D.J.J. Ring, Jr.]

I found the recording of WHB 1915 audio recording of a wireless telegraphy
press message to ships at sea from the New York Herald station WHB.

https://archive.org/download/maritimemorsememories/old_cylndr_but_cleaned_Apgar.mp3

73
DAVID RING N1EA




On Wed, Jul 24, 2024, 3:54 PM D.J.J. Ring, Jr. <n1ea at arrl.net> wrote:

> Anyone have this recording?
>
> 73
>
> David Ring N1EA
>
> Only one or possibly two recordings of the Morse code spark signals of a
> press broadcast are known to exist. The California Historical Radio Society
> distributed a 1915 audio recording of a wireless telegraphy press message
> to ships at sea from the New York Herald station WHB. The late Jim Maxwell,
> W6CF, (then W6CFC) commented on it: “Copying WHB as Recorded by Charles
> Apgar, 2MN, in 1915; by James A. Maxwell, W6CFC, Redwood Estates, CA. “The
> latest CHRS tape, Vol. 13 No.1, is a very interesting tape. The
> transcriptions were not all that easy to understand at times, but
> considering their age and the state of recording technology 50 to 70 years
> back, they are in remarkably good condition. “Here’s the text of the WHB
> transmission: MNY K BT INVESTIGATION SHOWS MISSING BANK CLERK HENRY BRADLEY
> MERCHANTS NATL BANK SHORT HUNDRED FIFTY THOUSAND PLAYED RACES PLUNGED STOX
> “Note: 1. This Morse was hand sent. 2. The recoding starts in the middle of
> a transmission. It isn’t clear what was going on prior to the BT (pause).
> MNY is a common abbreviation for ‘many’ and K is an invitation to transmit.
> It is possible that this represents a fragment of a conversation between
> the operators prior to going on with the news. The entire transmission
> seems somewhat informal - note the use of the abbreviation NATL for
> National, and STOX probably for STOCKS. 3. In the word MERCHANTS the two
> letters CH were sent using the Morse sequence ‘----’ (four dashes). This is
> not commonly used these days except among Spanish speaking operators. 4.
> The word PLUNGED is actually somewhat ambiguous. The manual sending was
> good throughout, with a slight swing, but easy to copy. But when the letter
> G was followed by a very brief hesitation and either a long dot (E) or a
> short dash (T). The possibilities are thus GE, GT, Q or Z, resulting in the
> four possible words PLUNGED, PLUNGTD, PLUNGD, or PLUNZD. Only PLUNGED makes
> and sense here, referring to 'Plunging' (investing heavily) into the stock
> market or stocks plunging in value. 5. There was another character
> following STOX, but it faded into the noise at the end of the transmission.
> “ “Overall, It seems as if a report was being given of a missing bank clerk
> who had been playing the races and the stock market. Too bad we don't have
> more information on it. Someone with access to back issues of the New York
> Times (the SF Public Library has them going many years back on microfilm)
> could probably put together a very interesting story.” (From the Journal of
> the California Historical Radio Society. The correct callsign WHB is
> emended. The audio recording comes from the archives of the Antique
> Wireless Association in New York, part of an NBC 1934 interview with
> Charles Apgar.)
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.qth.net/pipermail/cw/attachments/20240726/202cc839/attachment.html>