Word: static
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When he was just a kid, Roy Beebe decided that illness was unnecessary. He resolved to spend his life hunting for a cureall. In 1910 he saw Halley's comet through a homemade telescope and decided that human ailments are caused by static. He had quit school after the fourth grade and thus had no scientific prejudices. It was obvious to him that cosmic rays would clean static out of the human system and thus end all ills...
...paid any attention to him. Southern California was full of quacks with whom he would not stoop to compete. It was not until last spring, when he was 61 years old, that success finally came. Hundreds of people suddenly began turning up at his frame house to have their static removed and to chew on wheat kernels soaked in cosmic rays...
Then, as it must to all innovators, came criticism. Beebe's neighbors went to the city prosecutor, complained that Beebe was a nuisance. The neighbors. Beebe explained, were just full of static. His followers outnumbered the neighbors...
...Beebe house and tramping across the neighbors' lawns. The city manager was checking ordinances to see if Beebe had committed any violations. Beebe didn't seem to be paying much attention. He was preparing to publish a catalogue containing photographs of hair roots from the heads of static sufferers. After it is off the press, he prophesied, all previous methods of diagnosis will become archaic. Doctors will simply jerk a hair from a patient's head, put it under a microscope, and leaf through Beebe's booklet to find the trouble...
Detroit's WWJ was born August 20, 1920. Broadcasting was then mostly stutter and static, and reception was mostly a matter of cat's whiskers and crystals. When the station was just eleven days old, its listeners were invited to hold "wireless parties" in their homes, to hear the first U.S. broadcast of election returns. A month later, WWJ (then called 8MK) aired radio's first vocal program, a soprano singing The Last Rose of Summer...