Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

 

Here is just one of those minor little oddities that help keep life on this earth from getting too dull.  The “Boston Globe,” December 17, 1928:

SANTA BARBARA, Calif, Dec 16 (A.P.) -There may be sermons in stones and books in the running brooks, but it was left for a Santa Barbara woman to reveal today that there is a Schubert melody in a pan of boiling vegetables. 

As the hoarse voice of a radio announcer burst through the kitchen steam of a quiet home here, and the strains of "Ave Maria" filtered from a pan of beans simmering on the electric range, the housewife might have been excused had she exhibited a touch of nervousness, because there wasn't a radio set anywhere in the house. 

But she didn't. She approached the range in a scientific spirit and stirred the beans vigorously.  In answer a whole chorus burst into a hunting song, followed by a crooning plantation melody. 

Radio experts admitted they were baffled by the phenomenon, but pointed out that music has been heard in hot air shafts connected with electric furnaces. The bottom of the pan might have acted as a diaphragm and reproduced a radio program picked up inductively by the electric power line, they added.

Believe it or not, on December 30 the “Red Bluff Sentinel” carried a sequel of sorts:

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 29.-And a radio program came right out of the lamp! 

Mrs. Wilmot Williams, San Francisco housewife. reported yesterday that she received a radio program from the parchment shade of her bedside lamp when she turned the switch.

An authenticated instance of radio music received from the element of an electric stove was reported in Santa Barbara this month when a housewife there heard a program through a pan of simmering beans.

There was just music in the air in late-1928 California, I guess.