On December 12, 1901, Italian scientist Guglielmo Marconi stood on a hill overlooking St. John's, Newfoundland, and received the first radio message ever to cross the Atlantic Ocean. That fateful message was just a few Morse pulses—the letter 'S', in fact—but it changed the face of the twentieth century. This month marks the 114th anniversary of Marconi's milestone, so we've asked Jeopardy!'s Ken Jennings to get on the air and clear the air about some of the most appalling misconceptions from radio's first century.
The Debunker: Did Orson Welles's "War of the Worlds" Cause a Mass Panic?The night before Halloween 1938, boy genius Orson Welles used his CBS Mercury Theatre on the Air program to broadcast a radio play of H. G. Wells's novel The War of the Worlds. The clever adaptation took the form of mock news bulletins from the tiny New Jersey village of Grover's Mill, where a Martian army was supposedly beginning its conquest of Earth. Banner headlines in front pages across America the next day recorded that the faux-news conceit was even more convincing than Welles had expected. "Radio Listeners in Panic," reported The New York Times. "Radio Play Terrifies Nation," said The Boston Globe.
There's just one hitch to this remarkable tale of an entire nation gripped by mass hysteria: there's no evidence that it ever happened! Firsthand reports in New York and Washington, D.C. on that night report quiet, empty streets. Many of the 12,500 newspaper articles covering the "panic" include allegations of suicides, heart attacks, and hospitals treating frightened listeners for shock, but researchers following up in November couldn't verify a single case of hospitalization or death.
It's true that the American Institute of Public Opinion did find that over a million Americans were "frightened" or "disturbed" by the broadcast, a number that has lingered in the public imagination. But this survey was conducted six weeks after the broadcast, when print journalists had spent a lot of ink on the purported panic. In fact, Welles's ratings that night were a tiny 2 percent of the country (he was on opposite Edgar Bergen, the Sunday Night Football of his day) and his show had been pre-empted in many big markets, like Boston. Welles also interrupted the broadcast three separate times to remind the audience that no actual Martians were being harmed in the making of his show, which means that any terrified mobs weren't paying very close attention. The real culprits behind the panic were America's newspapers, who drummed up the terror angle in order to make the new, print-threatening medium of radio look irresponsible and dangerous. In hindsight, the real story here is that tens of millions of people ignored an alien invasion to listen to Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. I mean, come on. A ventriloquist act…on the radio? Who can't do that?
Quick Quiz: Another media frenzy began on May 22, 2005, when what odd event took place during TV promotion for Steven Spielberg's film of War of the Worlds?
Ken Jennings is the author of six books, most recently his Junior Genius Guides, Because I Said So!, and Maphead. He's also the proud owner of an underwhelming Bag o' Crap. Follow him at ken-jennings.com or on Twitter as @KenJennings.