Abstract
THE president of the Institution of Electrical Engineers for the current session is Sir Noel Aghbridge, engineering controller of the British Broadcasting Corporation. In his inaugural address to the Institution given on October 23, Sir Noel reviewed the growth of broadcasting in and from Great Britain from the beginning of the public service in November 1922 up to the present time. Prior to the War, the home broadcasting service utilized transmitting stations operating on wave–lengths in the long and medium wave–bands, agreed upon at various international conferences, for the use of all European broadcasting stations. As these wave–bands would accommodate only 126 transmissions in separate channels, whereas the actual number of stations provided for was 340, it is obvious that a considerable amount of sharing of wave–lengths between two or more stations was involved. As a result of the constant attention, research and development devoted to the subject by engineers and scientific workers, it is estimated that in 1939 the B.B.C. had achieved the position whereby nearly 90 per cent of the public could obtain good reception of two programmes, and something more than 98 per cent one programme. One of the graphs illustrating the address shows that the number of British wireless licences has increased at an almost uniform rate of half a million a year from 1922 until 1939, when some nine million listeners were licensed.
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Development of the British Broadcasting Service. Nature 148, 528 (1941). https://doi.org/10.1038/148528a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/148528a0