One hundred years ago this past Friday — July 10, 1926 — at 40 minutes past midnight at a frantic South Side jazz age party, Al Katz and his Kittens were playing the Moon Lite Gardens at the Chicago Beach Hotel in Kenwood. The crowd cried out “Valencia! Valencia!” the dance craze of the moment, and with a clatter of castanets, the group swung into the number.
“Its exotic rhythms sent gilded heels gliding across the glistening floor,” Radio Digest noted, after the tragedy. “Sparkling lights, gleaming shoulders, jeweled fingers, radiant faces, brilliant costumes, spotless linen and fathomless black revolved in a kaleidoscopic array.”
Twenty miles away in Homewood at the transmitter of radio station WOK, Thornton High School graduate Lester J. Wolf manned the control board, broadcasting the Moon Lite Gardens fun “throughout the Middle West into homes where lonely hearts were hungry for happiness and joy.”
At 19, Wolf lived at home with his parents and was one of the youngest people in the country to hold a commercial broadcast license.
Then a fuse blew. The signal went dead. Eager to get the station back on the air, Wolf reached for the faulty connection without first cutting the power and received a 6,000 volt shock. He fell to the floor but quickly stood up and told the studio director he was OK. But Wolf wasn’t OK. A moment later fell to the floor again, dead.
The Radio Digest called him “the first martyr in the field of broadcasting for public entertaining,” as if there might be many more. It’s hard to tell with a new industry, particularly one based on a terrifyingly lethal technology like electricity, joined to an invisible possible menace such as radio waves.
People always expect the worse. Radio did have risks — in the early years you had to hook up heavy wet cell lead batteries, basically big boxes of acid.
But such perils were overcome. In 1928, Chicago’s Galvin Manufacturing Corp. offered its very first product, the “battery eliminator,” a converter that allowed radios to run off AC wall current instead of batteries. The company soon went into the car radio business, changing its name to a mash-up of “motor” and “Victrola” — “Motorola.”
I think of Wolf, whose grave I encountered while wandering the Homewood Memorial Gardens cemetery, whenever the latest technology is portrayed as our collective doom. Right now, artificial intelligence will steal our jobs and maybe destroy the world.
Not too long ago, drones were going to kill us all.
“We must ban drones before it’s too late,” my pal Eric Zorn warned in 2015.
“Treat these small, unmanned flying vehicles the way the law treats machine guns and chemical weapons,” he wrote, “as devices so inherently fraught with potential peril that whatever positive uses they may have aren’t worth the risks they pose.”
Maybe that peril is still coming. But a decade later, it’s whistling all the way.
We shouldn’t fear new technology without remembering just how terrifying our most mundane old technologies were. Return to that electricity, powering the device perhaps in your hand now as you read this column.
Chicago newspaperman L. Frank Baum followed up his 1900 publication of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” with “The Master Key: An Electrical Fairy Tale,” about a young man, Rob Joslyn, who wires up his house and performs all sorts of electrical experiments. Of course, his parents were both proud and worried, neatly reflecting the excitement and anxiety greeting all new technology.
“Electricity,” Rob’s father said, “is destined to become the motive power of the world. The future advance of civilization will be along electrical lines. Our boy may become a great inventor and astonish the world with his wonderful creations.”
“And in the meantime,” his mother replied, “we shall all be electrocuted, or the house burned down by crossed wires, or we shall be blown into eternity by an explosion of chemicals!”
New technology is scary. But fear of the new says more about our fear of change than any real threats. I don’t want to suggest that all potential dangers are illusions. Climate change is certainly real and deadly, and we have barely begun to suffer from its effects.
But I would suggest that people obsess over illusionary risks because it’s easier than confronting actual perils. Thus, we fear shark attacks more than heart attacks.
When dealing with possible perils, it’s important to remember Lester Wolf and our tendency to exaggerate new concerns. Today, if an assistant radio engineer, assuming there still is such a job, were to electrocute himself, it wouldn’t end up on his tombstone.
The first person whose life is cut short by misbehaving AI will be a martyr to a dangerous new technology. Then we’ll shrug, adjust, and move on.