Measures for Progress: A History of the National Bureau of Standards

POLICING THE ETHER 289
died in committee.199 Without the least power to regulate a licensee, Com-
merce could only propose solutions and seek the compliance of the stations.
At a conference called in March 1923, the Department and the sta-
tions agreed to abolish the term "wavelength" for that of "frequency," the
latter representing the number of oscillations of the radio wave per second,
expressed in kilocycles per second.20° The band of frequencies between 550
and 1350 (later 1500) kilocycles was to be set aside for commercial broad-
casting, and by dividing the country into 5 radio zones and setting station
frequencies 5 kilocycles apart, 570 broadcasters could be accommodated in
the 89 available channels.
Stations continued to proliferate and the air waves grew crowded
again. Conferences in 1924 and 1925 moved ship traffic out of the broad-
casting band, and by duplication on the east and west coasts, room was
found for an additional 30 stations. By 1926, another 155 new stations
raised the total on the air to more than 730 and the chaos had become com-
plete. The radio industry begged to be regulated and Congress had to
oblige, On February 23, 1927, the Federal Radio Commission (to become
the Federal Communications Commission in 1934), with policing power
over its decisions, established public ownership and regulation of the air
waves. The boom and battle of the stations came to an end.
Members of the radio section of the Bureau participated as technical
advisers at all the early radio conferences, chief among them Dr. J. Howard
and Dr. Charles B. Johiffe, who laid the groundwork for the
formation of the FRC. As 'brilliant and sound in radio research as he was
in planning and directing its research by others, Dellinger become the first
chief engineer of the FRC. He was to leave 'his name in radio terminology
a decade later with his discovery of the simultaneous occurrence of visible
solar eruptions and semi-worldwide sudden radio fadeouts, a phenomenon
known as "the Dellinger effect." 201
Jolliffe, who jo:ined the Bureau' radio group on getting his doctorate
at Cornell in 1922, succeeded to the Commission post when Dellinger re-
turned to the Bureau in 1930. A researcher and organizer himself, Jolliffe
moved on the the RCA Laboratories in 1935, later becoming executive vice
president and technical director of the company and its laboratories.202
in order to learn about radio transmitting at first hand, the Bureau
itself became one of the first of the broadcasters, antedating KDKA by sev-
eral months, when in 1920, at the request of the Bureau of Markets in the
Herbert Hoover, "Policing the ether," Sci. Am. 127, 80 (1922).
'°° NBS Annual Report 1923, P. 71.
201 See ch. VI, p. 351.
on the FRC work of Dellinger and Jolliffe appears in NBS Box 234,
IEW (1928); Box 296, AP; Box 303, IEW; and Box 321, PRM.