Radio Gala
A skit in As Thousands Cheer, currently the most popular musicomedy in Manhattan, represents John Davison Rockefeller Jr. bestowing Radio City on his father as a birthday present. In a tremulous rage, the elder Rockefeller takes after his son with a carving knife. Guffawing audiences find the skit the funniest in the show, because it seems the truest. Financially, Radio City is a thumping flop. The precise size of the deficit is unknown, but there is no doubt that the thump lands squarely on the Rockefeller pocketbook. Most of the land beneath the enterprise is owned (tax free) by Columbia University and for it Son John pays some $3,000,000 annually. For the buildings he guaranteed $100,000,000 from his own pocket, plus $65,000,000 which he got from Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. in return for 5% bonds to be amortized over 20 years.
Blithely unconcerned with all this and with desolate acres of unrented floor space over their heads, hordes of engineers and artisans have been busy preparing a section of the first eleven floors of the 70-story RCA Building for a bargain-driving tenant. National Broadcasting Co. With everything in readiness despite a last-minute flurry of confusion, one rainy night last week NBC dedicated its new quarters with a gala program. Bland words were spoken by NBC's President Merlin Hall ("Deac") Aylesworth, RCA's Board Chairman James Guthrie Harbord, GE's Board Chairman Owen D. Young, RCA's President David Sarnoff (speaking from London) and Sir John Reith, director-general of British Broadcasting Corp. with whom the tycoons chatted across the sea. Some 1,200 invited guests, mostly radio advertisers or their emissaries, watched and listened. All this week the scientific marvels of NBC's new quarters will be unfolded to the public.
Most of the marvels have to do with acoustics. Each of the 35 studios, 16 of which are in use, is a room within a room, supported clear of the building floors by heavily padded steel springs, and sound insulated by three inches of rock-wool, 250 tons of which were used in all. Every studio has an observation room, a clients' (advertisers') booth and a control room, all shut off from the studio proper by three thicknesses of plate glass.
To keep the sound-tight rooms from being stuffy, NBC installed an air-conditioning plant consisting of 64 independent units. In an hour these machines suck in 20,000,000 cu. ft. of Manhattan air, dry or moisten it, warm or cool it as required, feed it through the studios so fast that a complete change of air is effected every eight minutes.
Three years ago President Aylesworth predicted that when NBC moved into Radio City, television would be ready to move in with it. Television had not moved in for last week's premiere. But radio listeners who believe television just around the corner thought they could see its nose protruding when they scanned the elaborate provisions made for it at Radio City. In the ornate "Auditorium Studio," world's biggest broadcasting room, the stage, spacious enough to seat 100 musicians, is movable so that it can face hypothetical televisors at either end of the room. Light fixtures and chandeliers that might interfere with television are done away with by having overhead lights everywhere flush with the ceiling. One studio, called the "Clover Leaf," has four cubicles encircling a central turntable, so that televisors mounted on the turntable can register quick changes of scene. Television was already realized in the laboratory when President Aylesworth made his prophecy three years ago. What prevents it from becoming a commercial reality is not, as some radio listeners suppose, the reluctance of entrepreneurs to provide free shows or the difficulty of collecting admission. Advertisers would pay for the show as they do for sound broadcasts. But they will not do so until television receiving sets are cheap enough to insure an audience comparable in size and buying power to the present radio audience.
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