David, AWA has an aluminum disk recording of the NBC broadcast about Charles Apgar from 1934(?). I think we at CHRS got a cassette tape from AWA and duplicated it. The best source would be AWA (Jim K). There are two circa 1915 Morse code audio excerpts within the interview of Apgar. The second bit of Morse is a weather report -- or maybe a coded broadcast to a German submarine (it's always a "wilderness of mirrors").Apgar made disk recordings of the Atlantic area spark Morse code traffic he could hear from New Jersey. Those disks are lost in the mists of time, but the NBC interview saved two messages. (I sought the disks from the Smithsonian but they didn't have them or couldn't find them...)73 de Bart, K6VK ##-- --Bart Lee, (Attorney at Law, Retired), FCC amateur extra class license K6VK, FCC General Radio Operator's License with Radar, CHRS Fellow ("Doc" Herrold Awarded) and (late) Archivist, AWA Fellow (twice Houck Awarded), ARRL Liaison (ARRL Emergency Communications Commendation re 9/11)
Texts only to: 415 902 7168On Wed, Jul 24, 2024 at 12:54 PM D.J.J. Ring, Jr. <n1ea@arrl.net> wrote:Anyone have this recording?73David Ring N1EAOnly 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.)