YOU AREN'T LISTENING ANYMORE!
GONE TO WEB SITES, MOST EVERYONE!

I read last year, that radio station WMAQ was "signing off" for the last time. The unthinkable is happening. Our valued high-powered clear channel radio stations are becoming Obsolescent! While we weren't looking, Radio History was being made. Alexander Bell's telephone wire is replacing De Forest's Radiotelephone.

DOES THAT STARTLE YOU?

Here and following are seven Startling Statements:

1. America is being rewired. A change that is churning the soil from coast to coast. The leased line NBC used to interconnect the old AM Giants, WMAQ, KOA, KSL, KFI and a dozen others is being disconnected and becomes the Web connecting 50,000.000 homes. The programming of CNN is hard-wired to potentially all of us. Cable trench has been opened under lawns, sidewalks and streets, deserts and mountains. Glass, a non-conductor is replacing copper wire. We will communicate with modulated light. Part of the 1880 idea of A.G. Bell's photo phone. For the first time we have the ability to send a complete video frame in real time. Presently "persistence of vision" tricks our eye to present a series of Marconi's dots, as a picture. And repeats it again and again to make us think that the picture moves!

2. The millions of us on the Web not only access complete programs but the source material itself. We can own free, our favorite music and artist. We can store and retrieve more information than we want.

3. Last month* two L.A. stations went "off the air" and connected their programs directly to the web. No transmitter, no tower, no engineer and no assigned frequency!

4. 84 million "free" cell phones (appliances) allow web users a personal wireless connection to the Internet. They represent about twice the radiated power of all the old clear channel 50,000-watt transmitters combined!

Note: I think these figures to be reasonable, if not accurate. They are only listed to show a trend.

The web connections will swell by a million before you have read this. The Telephone Co. will have little revenue from the telephone itself. Talk on the web is free.

5. Television did not end Radio. It did cause Radio to become a service. Now radio offers News, weather, traffic and sports. It has also added telephone talk. The listeners can entertain themselves.

6. Thousands of relay towers, some poorly camouflaged as palm trees, each in sight of the next, march like a tall fence all along California's busy traffic ways. These are replacing, will have replaced, the tall towers of stations symbolizing our Radio past. Our Government may keep the clear channel giants as a communication backup. They were used for that purpose during the war.

7. Who would have thought that these 83,000.000 tiny hand held mini-transmitters would obsolete the 50,000-watt power channels of old time radio! Perhaps Radio will, like last century's inventors and entertainers, just fade away. The giant stations may disappear but wireless Radio will rest as a private possession in the hand of the listener. YOU.

* At the time this article was written.