by Jerry
“Just about the time you left the country, television was beginning to make great advances. Of course, you were familiar with the moving picture and the combination of sound and picture in the filming of the so called talking picture. Television, you recall, attempted to carry images through the air by radio waves, just as the first radio carried sound. It was believed that the sound and the images could be synchronized as far as time was concerned. As well as I recall, they were just beginning to do this in a very simple way about twenty years ago. A man would stand in front of the broadcasting apparatus and made a short talk. His image would appear on the receiving plate a hundred miles away, and while the radio would broadcast his speech, television would reproduce the movement of his lips and his smile. I recall the first attempts that were shown in the theaters. A barking dog, a whistling train, a famous tenor singing a few notes, was as far as they could go. Later on, the technique was improved and the details of the images were made clearer, and, finally, the picture was projected on a screen, just as a regular moving picture and just as clear. About that time vaudeville players began to put on short sketches which were broadcast. It was really remarkable, the rapidity with which improvements were made in this new art.’
“Of course, the financial effect on the legitimate theater was at once anticipated by the theatrical trust. By a clever manipulation of the market, they secured control of all the companies owning the original patents. They realized that television was inevitable and that it might drive the legitimate plays and opera out of existence, as the movie had threatened to do. So they decided to control it. They refused to sell receiving apparatus but put them in private homes for a small yearly rental, plus a nominal charge for each performance they were used for. This arrangement brought them a good income, and made it possible for them to retain the services of their star performers.
“Besides, they started to broadcast other features, like parades, prizefights and tennis matches. Their charges were low, and they counted on the volume of business to bring returns. For example, this afternoon’s football game cost each person who had one of the television screens one dollar for the privilege. Of course, as many persons as could crowd in a room could see it for that dollar. Out of that dollar, thirty cents goes to each of the teams and the remaining forty cents to the company.
“The effect on the theater was at once seen, but no one realized just what this invention would do for sports. It seemed that everybody arrived at the same decision at the same time: namely, that it was easier to stay at home and see a prizefight or a tennis game for a dollar than it was to fight the crowds and pay anywhere from five to fifty dollars for poor accommodations. The attendance at all the sports fell off in an astonishing manner, and the various promoters would have been bankrupt had it not been for the generosity of the television companies. They could afford to do the square thing, because, while the actual attendance at the games fell off, the interest in the sports increased, and, finally, instead of seventy thousand people seeing a prize-fight, it was estimated that as many as fifty million people all over the country would stop everything and see and hear the fight in their own homes at the same time and at the small cost of a dollar a home.
“The time came when complete performances of an opera would be given in an opera house, without a single spectator. For the opera could be broadcast in the air to the owners of the television receiving screens. And the same thing rapidly became true of the sports. It may seem rather strange to you, but the last heavyweight championship fight took place with less than a hundred spectators at the ringside, and the two men fought just as fiercely as they used to, because they knew that an audience of fifty million were watching them.
“That is why there were no people out to watch today’s game, Mr. Ball. Actually, there were millions who were carefully watching every play, but they were in their homes or in a hundred thousand small moving picture theaters all over the country. They are still interested, but they prefer watching the game in comfort.”
“Well, that is almost too much for me!” exclaimed Ed Ball. “I have seen and-heard some peculiar things in the out of the way corners of the earth, but nothing like that. Now, how about the game that I saw today? What kind of a game was that, anyway? And what kind of players had you? And by the Seven Sacred Purple Cows of Benares; what were those funny little typewriters you boys worked over so hard?”
“I will tell you about that part,” said Rudolph Drach, the chief electrician. “The new game really falls into my field of science. Of course, Haggard has been telling you about the importance of television, and there is no doubt that it is important, but there would be no football game to show these millions of television fans if the electricians had not perfected the robot into a real football player. The game as it is played now has grown from a small beginning into something that is nearly mechanically perfect and, of course, this development has been caused by the inventions of a great many scientists. But really I was the man who first proposed it and put the first robot into uniform.”
“Well, what is a robot?” interrupted Ball. “I suppose I seem rather ignorant to you fellows, but I have been away from civilization for twenty years. So start at the beginning and make it simple; am I to understand that those players today were just some kind of funny machines?”
New Beginnings
“THAT’S it exactly,” Drach said quickly, “a robot is a complicated machine, made up of batteries and motors and springs. The first one was brought to New York from London in January, 1929. It was a rather crude affair, but it could walk and talk and obey a few simple commands. It looked like a machine—in fact, no one would mistake it for anything else. It has some radio apparatus in it, and the vibrations of the air by the voice would cause the radio apparatus to operate and set in motion a motor. By this means the machine man would wave his hand, start walking, or begin to deliver a speech which, of course, was nothing but a cleverly arranged phonograph in his interior. There was a great deal of excitement about it, but in a short time that died away, because the machines became so common, that they lost their thrill. About a year later I had a great deal of trouble in finding the right kind of a center for my football team, so I conceived the idea of using a robot just for practice. You see, I had played football while studying electrical engineering, and I thought I could coach for a few years to help out with my family expenses. I built this robot, geared him up to bend over and snap the ball back between his legs and to buck the line and a few simple movements. I would stand near him and shout the signal, and at the proper sound he would make the desired movement and then snap back into his normal position of bending forward with his hands on his knees. We made a fighting face for him, put him in football togs, and he became quite a favorite with the team. I found out that he was better than any center I could develop because I could always depend on his doing the same thing at the same time in exactly the same perfect manner. He was a tireless player. Later on I taught the quarterback to give him his signals, put heavier rubber muscles into his arms and legs and used him in practice games with the scrubs. Later I made two of them, and the boys were wild with delight over seeing the two machines plunge into each other.
“Then television began to hurt us. Coach Haggard told you about how it killed the attendance, but he did not explain how it hurt the game of football. Of course, two prizefighters might be willing to kill each other without an audience because they were making a half million or so out of it. But these college boys were playing for the applause, and when they stopped they just quit coming out for the team. This was especially true of the heavy men. The little fellows enjoyed the spectacular running and throwing the ball, even if there were no one to see them. But the big fellows did. not enjoy having their bones broken without anyone there to see it. We just had to have teams and games. We needed the money to finance our athletics. So, I proposed to some of the colleges that we secretly substitute a few robots to play center and fullback. We worked the plan for two seasons wit
hout the public tumbling to it. There were eleven players on each team, and the real men and the machines were almost undistinguishable.
“Of course, they had to be handled rather carefully. The matter of their signals was a most important one. If the opposing side learned these signals, they could give them at the wrong moment and confuse the whole play. This was not considered sporting, but it was being done at times in the stress of the battle.
“It remained for a final invention, to revolutionize the game of football. Electrical multiple-superimposed wave lengths were being studied more carefully and used in more peculiar and unheard of ways. One inventor startled the nation by setting a small gasoline launch out to sea, with the engine going, but no one on board. He directed the movements of this launch from the shore by sending wireless waves to a mechanism which moved the rudder. Three miles out he turned the little ship around and guided it safely back to the shore, even turning off the gasoline engine at the proper time. In a similar manner, automobiles were guided, with no one at the wheel, and even airplanes were controlled. The possibilities of such a governing of moving bodies were tremendous. Suppose five hundred planes were sent over an enemy city each loaded with high explosives, and when a certain button, was pressed on the switchboard at home the entire load of TNT would be dropped on a defenceless city? An entirely new kind of warfare would ensue. Suppose robots guided by radio were sent forward to attack an enemy’s position?
“But all these possibilities have nothing to do with football. At least, not as far as my telling you about it tonight. You are interested in the game and not in warfare. So, I will simply say that I began to experiment with the control of the movements of a football robot by electrical waves rather than by the spoken voice. I had several enthusiastic students help me, and at last we had the satisfaction of seeing a robot out on the field do practically everything that a man can do, and entirely under our control. We made a governing keyboard, the final evolution of which you saw today. Pressing one key made the robot raise his right arm, while another key started him running. By holding down that key and pressing another one he swerved to the left.
“As a machine, it was practically perfect, but in itself it had no intelligence. It was still necessary for the human mind to guide its movements. So, it became our task to select men and train them to use these machines; to sit in the grandstands and work the governing keyboards in such a way as to get one hundred percent efficiency from the robot ball players.
“We found that to properly work one of the machines required a very high grade of intelligence. And when it came to selecting eleven men who could work as a team, in perfect harmony with each other, so the eleven robots would act as one well-run machine, why, that was an almost invisible task. It was soon discovered that the best type of collegians were little men with clever brains. Chess and bridge players made good players, if they could be trained to use their hands quickly enough. Some of our best men have come from the music schools as violinists and piano players.
“Finally, the grand idea occurred to me. The television audience did not care much whether the players were machines or men, so long as they saw a real fast and interesting game. It became more and more impossible to obtain real players, so why not form teams of eleven robots and have the intercollegiate competition consist of the skill in making faster and better robots and in training? team of eleven undergraduates to work at the keyboards. I proposed that plan ten years ago, and it was enthusiastically adopted as a new game. But it was so superior to football that the old game was abandoned, and the new game received the old name. The papers now speak of the students who sit at the keyboards and the undergraduates who are able to build the most perfect machines. We still have coaches, but the electrical expert at every big college is the big man, and he is praised or blamed for victory or defeat.”
Ball Makes a Plea
“WELL, you were badly defeated today,” growled Ball, who was still suffering from the humiliation of seeing his Alma Mater so badly trounced.
“We sure were badly whipped,” agreed Drach. “Honestly, I do not know what did happen. I think, though, they have found some new wave over at Penn., and they used it today to disturb our governing currents. Some of our robots were badly burned, and one was entirely ruined inside. Personally, I am glad that the season is over. It has been a hard one on all of us, arid these boys who have been sitting over the keyboards every Saturday, are rather well shot to pieces, as far as their nerves are concerned. It has been a fairly good season, and I guess we made over five million for the University, enough to put up a new building. At the same time, it is hard work, and I doubt if it is really appreciated by most of the college. Of course, we are burned out. But we will get our pep back, and by next spring we will be putting in long hours in our experimental laboratory, building stronger and better robots. We will find out what Penn did to us, and we will learn how to block those waves and perhaps hit them with a new wave of our own invention.”
Ball looked at the two older men and then at the group of small collegians who had borne the brunt of the football season just passed. Then he had some pre-war stuff passed and proposed a toast to the good old college.
“I used to fight for her, boys,” he said. “I used to go out there and play like those robots you worked this afternoon. I recall the men who played with me, and I guess that we did not have between us as much brains as one of you little fellows have. But, by the Seven Sacred Pigs, how we did run and fight and sweat for the honor of the dear old school! I was not very much impressed with the game today, as a game, but I did admire your fighting spirit. Even when you knew you were licked you kept on pounding at those keys. So, I am strong for you, and I really love you, because, even though we are twenty years apart in time and about two thousand years apart in our ideas of real sport, you sacrifice everything to win for your college just as we did years ago. It is the same spirit, so, let’s drink to the dear old school, and to her success in the future.”
After the team left, Ball took the coach and the electrician to his room for a final talk.
“What I want to say, men,” he began, “is just this. What Penn did to us today was not sporting. As I understand it, they just about ruined some of our machines. That looks like dirty football. How about it?”
“It is all in the day’s work,” replied Coach Haggard, shrugging his shoulders. “Personally, I have always held out for straight machine football and no tricks, but Drach thinks they have a right to use any thing new that they are able to discover.”
Ball looked at the electrician, questioningly.
Drach drummed on the arm of his chair and finally replied.
“It is rather hard to tell just where the line can be drawn. I, personally, see little difference between disabling a machine by a new form of electric wave, and putting a human player out of the game by hitting him on the jaw. They say the game used to be rather rough when you played it, Mr. Ball, and you saw from today’s exhibition that it is still rough. Only today machines were hurt instead of men.”
The three men sat silently puffing on their cigars. After a long pause, Ball started to talk.
“I can talk a dozen foreign lingoes better than I can English, but I have something I want to say to you men, and I hope I can make you understand it. I believe that when you put machines in to take the place of men, you caused the human race to lose something. I am willing to admit that college sports were rather commercialized and specialized. And there is no doubt that, as exercise, it reached only a small percentage of the undergraduates. But they all went out to see the game, and they cheered and held snake dances and rallies, and the game meant something to them. It was a part of their life, it drew them together, it gave the old grads something to talk about and an excuse to come back to college once or twice a year and renew their youth. You have killed all that. Why, even the undergraduates do not come out to support their team, but prefer to see the game in their rooms or frat houses. There is actually about as m
uch interest shown as used to be shown in the old days when our team played intercollegiate chess.”
“At least, we are making money,” pleaded Haggard.
“Money is not everything,” retorted Ball. “I have so much money that I have not the slightest idea how much I am worth, and yet I have spent the best twenty years of my life collecting old eggs and bones for our museum. It is just a game to me, and I have played it just as hard as I used to play football. You say you made five million this season for the University. I could give you that much and not know it—but in all this I am thinking of men and not money. It looks dangerous to me, because there is no telling where it will stop. Suppose we have men to represent us in sports, machine men, and the same kind of machines to do our work for us. I can even imagine a golf game between two robots, directed by the experts from the gallery of the club house. We shall be apt to lose the use of our muscles. Look at those poor undergraduates who were on the team and had supper with us tonight. They may be brilliant at pounding the keys, but they could not even make a success of a half hour’s setting-up exercise. They are weaklings, and the whole nation may become like that. How about it? Don’t you think that something can be done to bring back the old days when men were men and gloried in the actual fight and conflict of sport, just for the love of it?”