On March 21, 1920, the Sandusky Register reported on an astonishing invention in which W. W. Macfarlane, traveling in a car (driven by a chauffeur), held a conversation with his wife back at the garage -500 yards down the road! The article is reprinted at Paleofuture. Link

During America’s wars, they were considered entertainers more than harbingers of fear to U.S. troops. But sometimes media stars like Tokyo Rose and Hanoi Hannah broadcast strategic information that there’s no way the enemy should have known.

As radio propagandists transmitting from enemy capitals, their job was to undermine the morale of opposing troops in World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. Uncle John examines the careers of seven infamous enemy broadcasters of the 20th century.

1. TOKYO ROSE

Iva Toguri was born in Los Angeles in 1916 and graduated from UCLA with a zoology degree; she was visiting Japan when war broke out in 1941. She was hardly a household name in World War II -until the name given her by Allied forces in the Pacific made her an international celebrity.

Wartime Activities: Tokyo Rose played American music and used American slang during her 20-minute daily newscast on Radio Tokyo’s “The Zero Hour” while she predicted attacks, identified American ships and submarines, and even peppered her conversation with the names of prominent individuals. Listeners thought she was uncannily accurate, but she had little impact on the offensive juggernaut that first isolated and then defeated Japan.

Postwar: After the war, Toguri was arrested, convicted of treason, and imprisoned; she was released for good behavior in 1956 after serving six years. Upon moving to Chicago, where her family ran a store, she insisted she had always been a loyal American. She claimed that she was forced to make the broadcasts, and Allied POWs who worked with her confirmed her story years later, convincing president Gerald Ford to pardon her in 1977. In January 2006, she received the Edgar J. Herlihy Citizenship Award from the World War II Veterans Committee; she died in September of that year.

2. LORD HAW-HAW

The British gave the nickname “Lord Haw-Haw” to a collection of announcers on the English-language propaganda broadcasts from Hamburg, Germany, during World War II. But it was William Joyce, who claimed to be a British citizen, who came to symbolize Lord Haw-Haw as the chief Nazi sympathizer. Born in the United States and raised in England and Ireland, Joyce was a member of the British Union of Fascists and was about to be arrested when he fled to Germany in 1939.

Wartime activities: From 1939 to 1945, his radio broadcasts to England on the “Germany Calling” program were designed to undermine the morale of the English, Canadian, Australian, and American troops, as well as the citizens of the British Isles. Joyce reported Allied ship losses and planes shot down, and bragged about Nazi secret weapons with the goal of demoralizing the Allies.

“Lord Haw-Haw” was originally the nickname of James Brudenell, the 19th-century British general who led the infamous Charge of the Light Brigade. A British radio critic borrowed the moniker and, whether or not he was specifically referring to Joyce, it stuck to him because he was the most popular announcer on “Germany Calling.” The radio critic noted sarcastically, “He speaks English of the ‘haw-haw, dammit-get-out-of-my-way’ variety.” The name stuck and his fame grew to the point that even the Germans introduced him on the air as “William Joyce, otherwise known as Lord Haw-Haw.”

Postwar: Joyce was captured by British troops, who got the last “haw” when the war ended. He was tried and hanged for treason in early 1946.

3. LORD HEE-HAW

A native of Dubuque, Iowa, Frederick Wilhelm Kaltenbach was on a bicycle tour of Germany after his high school graduation in 1914 when he was detained due to the outbreak of World War I. He liked Germany well enough, but after his release a few months later, he returned home and went to college. He joined the U.S. Army in 1918 but stayed stateside for the duration of the war, after which he earned his master’s degree in history from the University of Chicago. As a schoolteacher in Dubuque, he founded a Nazi-style club for boys in 1935 that was so controversial, the school board fired him. Kaltenbach promptly returned to Germany to work for Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda ministry as a broadcaster.

Wartime Activities: Kaltenbach’ thick Midwestern accent became familiar to British listeners, who dubbed him “Lord Hee-Haw” to differentiate him from “Lord Haw-Haw.” Kaltenbach’s reign on the air came to an end with the collapse of the Third Reich.

Postwar: He was under indictment in the United States for treason, but the Soviets got the last “hee.” They arrested him in Berlin in 1945 and refused to release him to American forces. The broadcaster died within a year in a Soviet prison.

4. AXIS SALLY

British and American GIs on the march through Italy in the last months of World War II were familiar with the radio voice of “Axis Sally.” Rita Luisa Zucca, born to a Manhattan restauranteur, called herself “Sally” while broadcasting propaganda first for Benito Mussolini’s fascist government and then for Nazi Germany. She was a regular voice on the “Jerry’s Front” program that aired from Rome. She’d come to Italy before the war to look after her family’s estate and was forced to renounce her American citizenship to keep the property from being expropriated by Mussolini’s government. She was 30 when she was hired as a radio announcer in February 1943.

Wartime Activities: Her theme song was “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” and her signature sign-on was “Hello, suckers!” She mixed pop music, news of Allied troop movements, and appeals to the British and American troops to surrender.

Postwar: Sally was captured by the U.S. Army in Milan on June 5, 1945, with her newborn baby. Tried in Italy for collaboration with the enemy, she was convicted and sentenced to four and a half years in prison. Released after nine months, she lived the rest of her life in obscurity in Italy.

5. BERLIN BESSIE

Mildred Gillars, who was born in Maine, dreamed of being an actress but instead wound up as radio announcer “Berlin Bessie” for Radio Berlin in World War II. After dropping out of Ohio Wesleyan University, she left the United States in the 1930s for Dresden, Germany, to study music. She was working as an English teacher at the Berlitz School of Language in Berlin when war broke out across Europe in 1939.

Wartime Activities: Radio Berlin hired her as an actress and announcer in 1940. The Allied soldiers called her a variety of names: “Berlin Bessie,” “Olga,” and “The Bitch of Berlin.” Introducing herself on air as “Midge,” she tried to convince listeners that their wives and sweethearts back home were being unfaithful. Between American tunes, she made anti-Semitic remarks and criticized president Franklin D. Roosevelt. She stayed on the air until Berlin fell in 1945.

Postwar: Gillars tried to blend in among the thousands of displaced Germans, but she was captured and flown to the United States in 1948 and charged with treason, convicted, and imprisoned until her release in 1961. She took up residence in an Ohio convent and later earned her degree from Ohio Wesleyan in 1973. She went on to teach French and German at a prep school, and died of natural causes in 1988 at age 87.

6. SEOUL CITY SUE

During the Korean War, a Methodist missionary from Lawrence County, Arkansas, became the North Korean radio announcer better known a “Seoul City Sue.” Born in 1900, Anna Wallis Suh graduated from the Scarritt College for Christian Workers in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1930 and undertook a mission to Korea. After marrying Korean schoolteacher Suh Kyoon Chul, she dropped out of the missionary service of the Southern Methodist Conference and became interested in Korean politics.

Wartime Activities: When the Korean People’s Army captured Seoul in 1950, Anna went to work as a radio announcer on Radio Seoul. Her programs featured names of American soldiers captured or killed, and threatened newly arrived soldiers and ships sitting off the coast. She also taunted African-American soldiers for their lack of civil rights in the United States. She delivered all this in a monotone against a backdrop of soft music. American soldiers dubbed her “Seoul City Sue” after the 1946 pop tune “Sioux City Sue.”

Postwar: A few days before the U.S. forces retook Seoul from the North Koreans, the Suhs evacuated to the north. Anna lived there until her death in 1969.

7. HANOI HANNAH

Trinh Thi Ngo, born in Hanoi in 1931, was a Vietnamese radio personality who became the voice of anti-American propaganda during the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s. She was the daughter of a prosperous factory owner and learned English because she loved American movies like Gone With The Wind. By age 25, she was an English-language news broadcaster on Vietnam’s national radio in Hanoi.

Wartime Activities: Trinh made as many as three radio broadcasts daily in an attempt to demoralize the American troops who were defending South Vietnam from an insurgency from the north. To the GIs, she became “Hanoi Hannah” and “the Dragon Lady.” She played antiwar songs popular in the United States, and read the names of soldiers who had recently been killed or imprisoned. U.S. forces were impressed with her military intelligence, which included details about where individual units were deployed.

Postwar: After the war, Trinh and others revealed that their wartime information came from the American military newspaper Stars and Stripes. Today, she lives in relative obscurity with her husband in Ho Chi Minh City (the former Saigon). In the United States, her voice can be heard on the computer game “Battlefield Vietnam.”

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The article above was reprinted with permission from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader History’s Lists.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you’ll love the Bathroom Reader Institute’s books – go ahead and check ‘em out!

If you thought the morning zoo crew on your local radio station were about as entertaining as robots, there may be more truth in that then you thought. One station in San Antonio has “hired” an artificially intelligent DJ named “Denise”  to talk to listeners. Is this the end of the traditional radio DJ?

Meet Denise. She is not a real person, but instead, a personal assistant conjured up by Guile 3D Studio. She used to be a AI secretary, starting Aug 24th, she’ll be promoted to AI DJ at KROV in San Antonio. Denise cost a meager $200 when she was “hired” as a personal assistant to answer phone calls, Google things for people, check emails and make appointments. You know, the same kind of things you have your intern do after you’ve bought him for $200. It was radio personality Dominique Garcia‘s idea to promote Denise to DJ.

Link

The Onion always has some great satire, but this radio piece on the banks trying to charge $.75 every time a customer says the word “bank.” I’m glad I use a credit union or else this article would cost me.

Link Via Consumerist

Is your Father a gadget freak?  You need to check out the BodyGard Survivor 12-1 self-powered emergency tool from the NeatoShop!  It is the perfect gift for any Dad who loves to push buttons.  This great little item includes lots and lots of buttons and other cool stuff:

1. Panic Button
2. LED Flashlight Control Button
3. Digital FM Radio On/Off Switch
4. Motion Alarm On/Off Switch
5. Emergency Flasher Button
6. Cell/MP3 Charger
7. A/C Input for Charging Adapter
8. Compass
9. Signaling Mirror (under hand crank)
10. Self-Charging Hand Crank
11. Storage Compartment
12. Lanyard

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great Tools!

Link

Building the world’s largest radio telescope will come with lots of infrastructure issues to start with. One of the biggest problems researchers will face is how to analyze the massive amount of data that will be collected. One solution may be to turn to the public for some extra computing power.

Australia wants to host the world’s biggest and most sensitive radio telescope, and as part of its bid to land the $2.1 billion Square Kilometer Array (SKA) the joint Aussie-New Zealand effort is going go launch a massive cloud computing initiative in September to prove it can handle the data flow. The initiative could quickly turn into one of the largest scientific cloud computing networks in the world, tapping the computing power and storage offered up by desktop computers worldwide.

Link

This photograph of a liquor store was taken in Minneapolis in 1939, and recently posted to Shorpy. Interesting, but… what is that futuristic thing sticking up out of the car parked in front?

The first comment on the picture identified the car as a new 1939 Mercury, and the second commenter asked about the flashy antenna. It didn’t take long for someone to find another car with the same gadget, and another to find an advertisement for the exact radio and antenna. This kind of collaboration and information sharing is one of the things that makes the internet so addicting. Link -Thanks, Marilyn Terrell!

If your lover is a star lover (no, not the celebrity kind – the massive, luminous ball of plasma kind), then here’s the perfect T-shirt for you: The Romance of Radio Astronomy from the NeatoShop by Mark Heath of Nobrow Cartoons. Perfect for Valentine’s Day gift, too!

Like that? See more: Mark Heath T-shirts | Scientists Do It T-shirts | Science T-Shirts | Funny T-Shirts

From Technabob:

It’s made from unusual materials such as porcelain, walnut, stainless steel, brass, and yes, that’s a speaker grill made from lace. You control the volume by turning the speaker. The frequency is selected by rotating the antenna. It’s too bad that Hasan has only made one of these, because I’m sure that they’d sell to those with an eye for unusual design.

Link

He tells NPR’s Guy Raz that the stations are unlicensed, which makes it hard to figure out where they’re broadcasting from. And the mystery only deepens: No government has ever officially admitted to using numbers stations. No one’s really sure when the stations began broadcasting, though they’re most likely a Cold War-era invention.

And, Stout says, no matter how advanced modern computer cryptography is, good old shortwave is often the best option for getting messages to spies in the field.

“Because [a message] can be broadcast over such an enormous area, you can be transmitting to an agent who may be thousands of miles away,” he says. And, he adds, computer communications almost always leave traces.

“It’s really hard to erase data out of your hard drive or off a memory stick,” he says. “But all you need here is a shortwave radio and pencil and paper.”

Link via reddit | Photo by Flickr user maliciousmonkey used under Creative Commons license

A radio at the Montrose Air Station Heritage Center in Scotland has been picking up radio broadcasts from the WWII era.

The vintage radio set is kept in a recreation of a 1940s room. Several people have heard Second World War era broadcasts including the big band sound of the Glenn Miller orchestra and speeches by Winston Churchill. The broadcasts come on at random and can last for up to half an hour…

“It plays Glenn Miller, and that’s what everyone has heard. It is very faint and you have to put your ear to it, but that’s what it’s playing.

“It’s not just one of us who’s heard it – most of us here have. We are talking about highly educated, reliable people.

“My wife Aileen was with me when we heard the Glenn Miller Orchestra last weekend. She’s a physicist and not predisposed to believing in things like this but no-one has an explanation.

The fact that the radio is not plugged in will cause some people to be skeptical, and assume that an audio device has been hidden inside the radio case.  However…

Technicians who examined it removed the back, but found “nothing but cobwebs and spiders”.

So there.

Link.  RAF Heritage Center website.

BEG, BORROW OR STEAL (BBC2)

Jamie Theakston: Where do you think Cambridge University is?

Contestant: Geography isn’t my strong point.

Theakston: There’s a clue in the title.

Contestant: Leicester.

PHIL WOOD SHOW (BBC GMR)

Wood: What ‘K’ could be described as the Islamic Bible?

Contestant: Er. . .

Wood: It’s got two syllables . . . Kor . . .

Contestant: Blimey?

Wood: Ha ha ha ha, no. The past participle of run . . .

Contestant: (Silence.)

Wood: OK, try it another way. Today I run, yesterday I . . .

Contestant: Walked?

What’s doubly funny is how the hosts try their best to help out a clueless contestant. Link -via Bits and Pieces

Link.  Blog with video explanation.  via kottke.

In the world of radio journalism, there’s nothing better than “This American Life.” With their remarkable focus on everyday people and their indescribable story selection, the hipster-friendly show is a unique radio magazine.

Try your luck on ten questions about the PRI show and its television counterpart in this Lunchtime Quiz from mental_floss. Link

Following a friend’s suggestion, Jonathan Ryan made a Pandora station with artists and bands with foods in their names. Here’s the result: Food Radio – via JonathanRyan