"Taboo Topic" - December 1, 1937
 

An unidentified newspaper clip:  "In spite of NBC's recent censorship flurry, WNYC is broadcasting an address on venereal diseases at 5:15 PM today. The speaker will be Dr. William F. Snow, general director of the American Social Hygiene Assn. NBC stepped into a great commotion of newspaper headlines a few weeks ago by refusing to allow General Hugh Johnson to discuss this subject over the air. The controversy was closed a week later when NBC invited Dr. Morris Fishbein to discuss social diseases instead of the General. WNYC, New York's municipally owned station, is not governed by the network restrictions, of course."

Source: WNYC Scrapbooks, NYC Municipal Archives.

Thanks go out this week to Karl Eriksson at the Pavek Museum of Broadcasting in St. Louis Park, Minnesota for donating 15 original volumes from WQXR founder John V. L. Hogan's technical library! Hogan, an American radio pioneer, was a lab assistant to the inventor Lee de Forest and in 1907 participated in the first public demonstration of the audion tube (triode).  He is the father of single-dial radio tuning and discovered the "rectifier heterodyne," which significantly increased radio receiver sensitivity. His work in broadcasting and facsimile transmission was cutting edge and helped lay the groundwork for today's modern communications systems.

Among the Hogan-inscribed or stamped volumes are the Bell System Technical Journal for 1924 as well as Miessner's Radiodynamics Wireless Control of Torpedoes and Other Mechanisms, from 1916.