By Seymour Rothman
Even Robert Ripley may not believe this. The first modern building-to-building radio broadcast anywhere in the world took place in downtown Toledo, Ohio, on August 1, 1907. It was duly, but briefly, reported in the next day’s Toledo News- Bee, and went on to become a much-forgotten fact in the history of the city.
There had been prior broadcasts elsewhere, but they were experimental, incidental, and even accidental. The Toledo broadcasts were different. They proved to the general public that radio broadcasting was real, ready, and here, well-almost. They were made to attract investors, and to sell the future of the medium to anyone interested. They featured the Audion Tube, which was to become to radio as essential as the wheel is to mechanisms.
What is more, the word “radio” came from Toledo! It was delivered in New York, but it was born in Toledo, the child of a Toledo telegrapher who had much to do with bringing radio to the world, and the first broadcast to Toledo.
That first historic broadcast took place between Room 1638 in the then-new Nicholas Building on the 600 block of Madison Avenue and Room 1252 of the Ohio Building (also known as the Toledo Edison Building) on the 400 block of Madison Avenue some 200 yards away; and while the news story gave due credit to Dr. Lee DeForest, inventor and perfecter of the radio, it referred to the Toledoan merely as “an assistant.”
The Toledo hero of this event was one Frank E. Butler, the work of his grandson and wife, Frank E. and Donna Butler, who assembled a detailed, well-annotated, but unpublished, biography, “The Standby,” from the many writings, documents, records, clippings and diaries left behind by Grandfather Butler, and put them together in a fascinating manuscript on the long, dramatic struggle to create radio.
Dr. DeForest, of course, is generally recognized as “The Father of Radio” and sometimes even “The Father of Radio and the Grandfather of Television.” A true admirer of Dr. DeForest might also add, “The Sire of Talking Motion Pictures,” but that is another story. There are many who say that he is not the father. The truth of the matter seems to be that Dr. DeForest had many enemies, and was not very lovable, despite the fact that he was married four times.
Why is Toledoan Frank Butler not famous? Although Dr. DeForest is generally credited with making modern radio possible, he was not one for sharing that credit, and it was not just because his credit was not very good. In Tom Lewis’ Empire of the Air, dealing with the start of radio, it points out that although DeForest held more than 200 radio-related patents, his critics claimed he stole most of them. He apparently did a great many unpleasant things in his lifetime. Some think that inventing the radio may have been the worst of them.
Butler was born in Monroeville, Ohio, in 1878. His boyhood heroes were Thomas Edison who came from nearby Milan, Ohio; as well as Henry M. Flagler, of nearby Bellevue, Ohio, who wound up building a railway all the way down to Key West, Florida, at a time when nobody wanted to go there, but made it successful; and S. V. Harkness, the Monroeville banker, who owned one of the four breweries in town, and got rich selling beer so cheaply that one could hardly afford to drink water.
John D. Rockefeller of nearby Strongsville, Ohio, also was known to young Butler, but he was not a hero. It seems the noted millionaire once borrowed a quarter from Butler’s father and never paid it back.
Young Butler was not much for schooling, but at age thirteen he started delivering telegrams, learned the key, and became an excellent operator. After all, Edison got his start as a telegraph operator. That was all the inspiration Butler needed.
He married Mary Agnes Houston in May 1900. It was a good marriage, but a short one. Both contracted typhoid fever and Mrs. Butler died. Shortly afterward he moved to Toledo as a train dispatcher and telegrapher at the Union Station. He did both jobs so well that A. H. Smith, who had been his boss in Toledo and eventually worked his way up to president of the New York Central Railroad, sent a request to have him transferred to New York where he would be the personal operator for Mr. Smith and other top executives. It was a great opportunity. He would live well, travel on luxurious rail cars, and be ever-present among the top men in rail- roading. Of course, he accepted.
On June 5, 1904, Mr. Butler prepared for the great transfer to New York. Then he decided to delay it for thirty-six hours. A World’s Fair was being held in St. Louis. Thomas Edison would demonstrate some inventions there. There was even talk of someone demonstrating wireless telegraphy. Sending telegrams through thin air without wires!!! Who could believe that?? This he had to see. He would take a quick trip to St. Louis first, and then get on to New York.
Inventor DeForest indeed had something for Butler to see there. His American DeForest Wireless Telegraph Company had a 300-foot high tower from which it demonstrated sending out the dots and dashes of the Morse Code, not only to a specially-equipped motor car as it was driven around the fair grounds, but even to the St. Louis newspapers some miles away.
Furthermore the tower was illuminated at night by the miraculous electric light bulbs such as those invented by Thomas Edison himself. (The tower, incidentally, originally had been erected at Niagara Falls so that tourists could view the falls from on high, but in the winter of 1903 ice forming on the tower kept falling off and breaking the windows of a museum below, so it was sold cheaply to Abraham White, president of the DeForest company.)
Butler soon made himself known to the demonstrators at the fair who, impressed with his knowledge of telegraphy, urged that he be employed to assist them. He hung around and eventually was hired.
Possibly another Toledoan may have helped in his hiring. Toledo’s famed dirigiblist, Roy Knabenshue, had his balloon at the fair. Butler knew Knabenshue and had watched Knabenshue and Tony Nassr build the flimsy giant silk balloon at the old Coliseum on Ashland Avenue. He had seen it fly over Toledo and land on downtown building roofs. He also knew that hydrogen, the most explosive element known to man, was used to provide the lift, and that the craft was propelled by a gas engine which ran on electrical sparks which could easily set off the hydrogen. There is some question whether today’s astronauts would risk flight on that device.
Someone suggested that sending Morse code messages from the tower to the balloon flying on high would be a sensational demonstration of wireless telegraphy. Of course, both Knabenshue and DeForest agreed. Someone who knew code would have to be aboard to accept messages and send replies. Why not send Butler?
Was it safe? Butler didn’t think it Knabenshue was certain it was. DeForest never thought to ask. Attached to the length of the balloon with netting was a long narrow board, which provided the footing. There were handrails on each side.
The balloon was guided by a rudder. Altitude was controlled by walking along the narrow boardwalk. Butler would have to do this despite having twenty pounds of equipment strapped to his back and only one free hand. How Butler was able to secure himself and his equipment in that flying machine is a question. How he could tell the difference between the dots and dashes he was receiving and the chattering of his teeth is another question. In any event, the venture was a success.
DeForest apparently was impressed by the willingness, the daredevil attitude, and the Morse ability of the young man. He offered him $7.50 per week to come to work for him in New York. Despite the fact that this was considerably less than the job he was turning down, he pounced on the offer. Inventing wireless would be more fun. He was placed in charge of building wireless stations in far off, inconvenient places for the U. S. Navy.
The job didn’t last long. The board of the DeForest Company was more interested in selling stock than in researching the invention. DeForest objected and resigned. Besides he was in trouble over possible patent infringements. The board offered his job to Butler. Butler turned it down and came back to Toledo.
Here he ran into another inventor, a Mr. Curtis, who held a patent on a device that made kerosene lamp flames burn white instead of yellow. It cost pennies to make. Young Butler borrowed some money and bought the rights to build and sell the device. He called it a Radiolite.
He started building them for pennies in a shack behind 415 Eleventh Street. They sold very well and he needed larger quarters. He borrowed some more money and rented half a floor in the Colonade in downtown Toledo, stocked it with supplies, and one night the place burned down. He was broke again. It was most discouraging.
During this time he had been receiving notes from the impoverished DeForest, mostly asking for small loans. He had rented a cheap room in the attic of the Parker Building in Manhattan to continue work on his wireless telegraphy. It wasn’t much of a room, but he had cleaned it up, added some plants and a bowl of fish. He did not eat very regularly, but he gave wireless telegraphy a lot of thought.
Butler decided to go to New York and see what was happening. What was happening mostly was that DeForest was not eating very regularly. The answer was Child’s Restaurant, and that’s where the word “radio” was born.
As Butler explained the merits of his Radiolite, DeForest was impressed, but he was even more impressed by the name. “I hate that name wireless telegraphy. It sounds so negative,” he said. “I like Radiolite. From now on let us refer to it as ‘radio’.” The two were together again.
To ease the financial burden Butler, with Dr. DeForest’s brother, Charles, created a business selling razor sharpeners, the Nev-A-Hone. Charles made the strops in DeForest’s office, and Butler sold them in the window rented from Hageman’s Drug Store right near Grand Central station. There was eating money, at least.
Then one day, after many frustrations, disappointments, changes, bad guesses and other uncertainties, suddenly there was radio!!!! It was strange. A bending of a little wire, a tapping with a screwdriver head onto a carbon button, and suddenly there was voice. Butler heard DeForest’s count on his earphone. It didn’t seem possible, but there it was, plain as could be.
Could the signal penetrate a wall? That was worth trying. The room adjoining the lab was occupied by a German involved in the business of manufacturing shoe polish. It was filled with tanks of turpentine and cans of greases and paints, each with an unpleasant odor of its own.
Explaining to this gentleman, who knew no more English than absolutely necessary, that they wanted to bring a device in his room and test it to see if it could hear words spoken quietly from the room next door was not easy, but finally he agreed. Maybe he just ran out of patience and decided to let them do what they wanted to do thinking maybe they would go away.
Back in his lab, DeForest spoke into his wireless telephone “Ein, tzvie, drei, feer-Auch du lieber and gotten himmel.” It was all the German he knew. It was all he needed.
The success emboldened DeForest to set up an antenna from a flagpole on the roof and just broadcast out into space, maybe just playing music at first. With words, one needs to be careful what one says.
There was almost no money available, of course, but Butler was dispatched to get a phonograph and some records as cheaply as possible. He visited many Bowery pawnshops and finally found a battered phonograph for $1.35. The pawnbroker even threw in two records-Verdi’s “Anvil Chorus” and a pop record sung by one Billy Murray, “Father And Mother Pay All the Bills and We Have All the Fun.” Now both men could experiment as the phonograph provided the voice.
Almost immediately thereafter three sailors on duty to receive wireless telegraph code from ships at sea in the Brooklyn Navy Yard were astonished to hear their dots and dashes interrupted by music, by Verdi, of all people. It raised quite a commotion, and the miracle was reported in the New York newspaper-music instead of dots and dashes. The next day, having read the report, Dr. DeForest revealed that he was the source of that strange doing. He could indeed send wireless voice out into the air. Investors were needed.
Maybe it was time to show it to someone less governmental than the army or navy. Maybe it was time to let the public in on it. But where?
Butler knew of an event. The annual Inter-Lake Yachting Association Regatta had been held for years fifteen miles from his Monroeville home at Put-In-Bay. It drew men of wealth from all over the lakes. It was indeed prestigious. Why, this very year, 1907, Merrill B. Mills, a Detroit millionaire who loved yachting so much he lived on one, was offering a lavish sterling silver trophy, the Mills Trophy, to mark the winner of that event.
Dr. DeForest wrote to the regatta commodore, William R. Huntington, suggesting that he could demonstrate this new-fangled radio broadcasting by announcing the order of finish as the race was ending. This information generally was handled by carrier pigeons. The radio would be much faster, and this historic demonstration could be made from the deck of his yacht, Thelma, to Squaw’s Harbor some ten miles away where newsmen and others could be assembled.
As it turned out, it almost did not turn out. The Thelma’s masts were not high enough to carry suitable aerials. That was easy to solve. Arms extending above the masts took care of the problem. Grounding the device was something else again. The beautiful mahogany hull did not make a good ground, and the metal propeller was no better. Something drastic had to be done. DeForest, over Butler’s objection, took to piracy.
The night before the race, while the commodore and his crew were out shopping and partying, the two took the boat out to deep water, and clumsily nailed a ten-foot copper plate onto the hull below the water line, and then returned the yacht to its base. Commodore and crew were waiting for them. Oddly enough, the story goes, the commodore forgave them inasmuch as it was for science, and the next morning DeForest sailed with the transmitter while Butler took his position with the receiver at Squaw’s Harbor some ten miles away. There he and a group of skeptical newsmen heard and reported the coming of the radio.
The broadcast was a success. Not only were the results accurately reported, making DeForest the first sports broadcaster in history, but he also played the records on the old phonograph, making him the first disc jockey, too. Thus, July 19, 1907, the first deliberate human voiced ship- to-shore broadcast occurred.
As the final boat came across, DeForest apparently delivered radio’s first ad lib, “Here comes the Oseketa. You spell it. I can’t.”
With the news stories in the local papers having drawn attention to radio, it was deemed wise to hold a demonstration in downtown Toledo. Butler hired Harvey Lucas to assist him. Offices on the top story of the Nicholas and Ohio Buildings were obtained. They faced each other, and the men could signal when they had an audience waiting to witness a broadcast.
A very tall tower was constructed on the Nicholas Building to hold the antenna. On the Ohio Building, a flagpole was used. The flagpole was not a great success. It tumbled through the glass roof of a bank below. A substitute antenna was devised, and the demonstrations went on.
It was, of course, a long time before public broadcasting hit Toledo. There were several stations set up that carried no regular schedules, and went on the air whenever they liked with whatever they liked.
Eventually, Butler’s close association with DeForest ceased. A school to train wireless operators, installers, and electrical engineers in this rapidly growing field was necessary. Butler opened the first school in the Nicholas Building and then went on to open similar schools in Detroit and elsewhere.
While his work under Dr. DeForest was seldom recognized, when he died on January 7, 1948, the New York Times carried a fifteen-inch obituary on his work with the inventor of the radio.