The B.B.C. has been the first in the world to exploit Simultaneous Broadcasting to its fullest advantage for a national system, and thanks to the co-operation of the Post Office engineers, it is possible to pick up a programme wherever it may take place within the British Isles and radiate it simultaneously from all distribution centres. Looking ahead still further and assuming that the wireless will supplement the wire line link, there is no reason why a simultaneous broadcast of something of fundamental importance to the whole civilised world should not take place some time in the future. In nine years it has been streamlined from a crude propaganda bludgeon into the most powerful single instrument of political warfare the world has ever known. Spreading with the speed of light, it carries the human voice seven times round the globe in one second. When Hitler makes a speech in the Kroll Opera House in Berlin, listeners in America and the whole world hear his words by short wave even before his own immediate audience hears them.
Radio speaks in all tongues to all classes.
All-pervasive, it penetrates beyond national frontiers, spans the walls of censorship that bar the way to the written word, and seeps through the fine net of the Gestapo. It reaches the illiterate and the informed, the young and the old, the civilian and the soldier in the front line, the policy makers and the inarticulate masses. So great is the importance of radio to-day that the seizure of a defeated nation's transmitters has become one of the primary spoils of war. A museum in that city tells the full story of the first broadcasting station in the whole of the Balkans. Broadcasting in the capital, Athens, started on March 25th 1938 when a second-hand 15 kW Telefunken transmitter was put into operation in the suburb of Liosia.