Navy Captain Frank Conrad in Pittsburgh USA, Lieutenant Idzerda in the Netherlands, the undercover marine specialist Hans von Bredow in Germany or Oskar Czeija in the Austrian Marconi Society, - all these founding fathers of radio were either directly or indirectly involved with radio as a tool of war. In Austria it was the intact and undamaged equipment of the broadcasting tower on the Ruckerlberg near Graz which Captain Scheyerling wanted to place in the secret service- and Marconi Society-trained hands of Oskar Czeija; in Königswusterhausen, it was nothing other than Germany's central military broadcasting complex which Hans von Bredow wanted to - and did - continue to operate.

But first of all, all the old military commanders had to be convinced with great difficulty - Bredow (Urania speech) didn't have it any easier than his English or French colleagues. [2] How could one convince the old military boneheads that light entertainment should now be broadcast on the communication waves previously so important in the war? The boneheads had sound reasons.

During the entire 19th century, both military and civil telegraphy was written, that is, typed by the fingers of the hand, and read from ticker tape. With telegraphy a process begins which will in the end completely undermine the world of print initiated by Gutenberg. This process moves via the simple code of Samuel F. B. Morse, who as a painter of historical scenes, had connected his code ticker to the easel in his atelier in 1837 - from where the process continues to the 1874 Remington & Sons typewriter, the hammers of which printed the 26 letter type faces onto a movable paper-carrying cylinder (a revolution in writing), and leads further to Alan Turing's universally "discrete machine" of 1937 which can record every alphabet and every imaginable algorithm on the virtual paper tape of the theoretical Turing Machine, thereby describing nothing less than the architecture of our present computer. This is one line of development: describing the evolution of telegraphy into the universal medium "computer".

Another line, from the creation of telegraphy to the electronic mass media starts in the first year of this century with the processing by bodily human ears of the ethereal signal-codes. This was Marconi's invention: the trained human being as a wireless telegraphy receiver. When the imperial army ordered the construction of the sounding spark gap transmitters in Nauen and Norddeich by Telefunken and its chief engineer Dr. Hans von Bredow starting in 1905, they caused deafening noise for kilometres throughout the countryside so that a human organ, the telegraph operator's ear, becomes an important instrument of war, and later wireless communication symbolizes the essence of timeless human conflict, as Bredow was then to remark.

The eminent importance in World War 1 of radio-telegraphy and the correspondingly trained ears is widely appreciated. Not only would the English sea blockade not have worked from the very beginning without radiotelegraphy, not only would Marconi's "All Red Cable" make England into the dominant world maritime communication power, but also on the Western Front, after the battles of Verdun and on the Somme had taken 1.7 million lives in 1916 alone, the importance of radio-telegraphy was to become the turning point of the final war years. New mechanised methods of attack with the first tanks and armoured vehicles were attempted, and co-ordinated with infantry and air support, required totally new skills from the communication troops who up to that point had simply relied on messengers and long telephone lines to provide land based reconnaissance for the artillery. In short: on all fronts of the war, the number of communication and telegraphy troops multiplied toward the end of the war. [3] An army of weIl over 100,000 weIl trained communications technicians was discharged after the First World War, - this was the foundation of the entertainment broadcasting which was to follow.

At the end of the First World War, which historically already carried the seeds for the beginning of the Second, the paradigm of war in the 20th Century changed. While up until Verdun, positional battles of mass armies and the direct confrontation of masses against masses were the norm, thereafter and up to the present day it is he that decides the fate of a war who destroys or conquers the enemy command structures: the infrastructure, the logistics, the communication lines.

At the start of the First World War the transmission of human concepts or orders had almost no role to play: "And I urgently bade Engineer Schloemilch to abstain from such unpromising experiments, since Telefunken has more important things to do than to play with telephones", declared Engineer-Officer Graf Arco for example even in 1914, as such experiments were carried out on the wavelengths of the new spark gap transmitter of Norddeich Radio. [4]

It was therefare even more important that Officer - Engineers like Schloemilch didn't neglect the human voice on the path to optimizing the human ear as a covert communication technology weapon after the war. Because this was founded precisely on the spark gap transmissions and in the manufacture of amplifiers and transmitters as one can read in von Bredow's memoirs. [5]

Whether or not low and high frequency amplifiers hooked up in series can really produce stable wave pallerns can best be shown by transmissions of the human voice and piano music. And it is therefore no surprise that it was an Inventor - Engineer and ex-NAVY Officer in America who in 1919, a year after the war, started transmitting again with stolen equipment and piano rags on Victorola records.[6]

The NAVY, responsible for all broadcasting, allotted him a calling code as if he were a ship: "KDKA 360". This was the first public American radio station.[7] Even today, U.S.American broadcasting stations are still designated by this old NAVY code. Surrounded by Terra Firma, radio broadcasting started in America as the beached Noah's Ark of the war.

The First World War starts on all fronts, in Germany and Austria as in Belgium and England with the thundering of spark gap transmitters, where Morse code signals and limited radio waves are one and the same; it ends with the quiet humming of adjustable vacuum tubes where the base carrying frequency and the Morse code signals are separated into high frequency and low frequency wave patterns. All the following wars, including those after the Second World War, are to be dominated by technologies which penetrate ever further into the electro-magnetic freguency spectrum, and this in ascending order. WorId War I operated in very long and long, toward the end however, also with medium and short wave bands. It is on these freguency bands that entertainment broadcasting will launch its great era world-wide.

World War II was opened by ultra short wave guided tank formations in Poland and France; by radio waves in the one metre range. This war will end, however, over the beaches of northern Germany and France in the high freguency battles between the English bomber sguadrons and German night fighters and coastal radar in the decimetre band range. The loss of the U-boat fleet and the destruction of the Reich from the air can no longer be deterred because the Nazis, blinded by ideological omnipotence, are too late in allowing research in the centimetre band, and thereby fail to provide a mobile 360o horizon radar.[8]

After World War II, what with lunar landings, the Vietnam, Falkland, Grenada and Gulf Wars, the Gigahertz battles are fought via satellites. This freguency band, below the 1 mm barrier, is now also being commercially exploited. Astra, Kopernikus, TV/SAT1 are the catchwords, digital radio and high definition TV will become the electronic consumer goods and media dominating the masses by the end of this century. And the wars fought by the western industrial nations will continue to be decided on these frequencies.[9]

What we call the electronic media are from their origins and primary use just advances in the conquest of the electro-magnetic spectrum. This conquest commences with a change in the concept of war in the middle of the First World War and its end is presently unforeseeable.

The axes of this development are not purely military and seem to appeal for the first time in this century in entertainment broadcasting: innocent public radio is allowed to thrive because it indirectly furthers military research by directly causing the expansion of the electronic communication media. This double axis is the natural pivot in the careers of Oskar Czeija and Hans von Bredow.

As a navy attache and informed of top secrets, Dr. Bredow, head engineer at Telefunken, designed and built the three most important communications transmitters of the war: Nauen, Nordcleich and Königswusterhausen. At the same time he co-ordinated with Graf Areo and others research and development at the Technical- Physical Institute of the Reich on the one hand, and at Telefunken, AEG, and Siemens on the other. After the end of the war the military commissions dried up and Bredow switched chairs from receiving commissions to organising them by shifting the axis of development to the German Reichspost.[10]

Oskar Czeija, the founder of Austrian broadcasting, received not only every imaginable support from the then secretary of state Carl Vaugoin, and not only were the first broadcasting studios situated on a floor of the defence ministry, but the newly founded RA VAG (Austrian Radio Broadcasting Company) received as a gift from the military its first spark gap transmitter, which transmitted all else but pleasant sounds.

Much like Hans von Bredow .in Germany, for the following 1 1/2 decades in Austria it was Czeija who involved industry (through the manufacture of receivers), the military intelligence community (development and testing of equipment), the postal and telegraph services (through high frequency telephone interconnections for the hook-up of transmitters), and finally politics (censure and propaganda) in a completely novel project, for which at that time there was no historical, political, or medial precedent. A first primordial military - industrial - media complex is conceived, and now for the first time: with this society-embracing project which brings the wonders of the world into the living room of each Austrian for a few Schillings, the cloak of invisibility begins to descend on the medium.

Of primary interest was to cover up a birth defect of the radio project which has never completely healed even to the present day. There was now a new medium, but for what? Brecht described it thus: "It was not a case of raw materials looking for methods of production to serve a public need, but rather of methods of production fearfully looking for raw materials. One suddenly had the means to say everything to everybody but if one really thought about it, one had nothing to say. (...) This was broadcasting in its first phase as a substitute. As a substitute for theatre, opera, of concerts, of lectures, of light music, of local news in the press, and so forth.[11]

Brecht wasn't giving away any secrets, but rather revealed what was common sense to the radio play producers of the day: "We have a technology, but we don't have any purpose for it", says for instance Ludwig Capella, a colleague of that director of the literary department of the Viennese RAVAG, by lhe name of Dr. Hans Nüchtern, who gave Austria the very first radio drama: "Der Ackermann und der Tod" (The Ploughman and Death) 1924, based on an early modern German dialogue dealing with death and despair.

Besides countless classical renditions, Mary Stuarts, Don Carloses, primitive Fausts and so on, the subjects of death and the cosmos dominate again and again among the few original productions in the early medium. But what am I saying is: even then serious literature was scarce, - pure entertainment reigned.