You within sound of my voice

The machine was a gong, a wheel and a mailbag, and the point of the address was the second person. Amateur hours had failed twice on New York's WHN before a third try in 1934 put a gong in the studio, an idea the host, Perry Charles, took from a wrestling match; Major Edward Bowes absorbed the format, signed with Chase & Sanborn, and launched it nationally on NBC on 24 March 1935. Listeners voted by telephone, telegram and mail; he spun the wheel - 'Round and round she goes, and where she stops nobody knows' - and gonged the failures. By June the programme was the most listened-to in the United States, and at the summer 1936 peak the Library of Congress counts 10,000 applications arriving weekly, 600 amateurs auditioned, 16 acts on air, and a live audience of 2,000 in Radio City. The first broadcast told the country what it was for: 'You within sound of my voice are just as much part of this show as the youngsters that come to the microphone. Telephone your choice, telephone early, telephone often. You decide the winners.' A machine for one-sided intimacy with a working return path, funded by a coffee company: a listener who would never see the studio could end a stranger's act from a kitchen chair, and the vote landed - winners left with immediate professional engagement. The bill arrived afterwards. Applicants crossed the country on hope and were turned away; and Bowes, looking at the crowd of hopefuls below the window, was quoted saying, 'Look at those poor boobs down there.' The gong was the honesty of the arrangement: it never pretended to be anything but a verdict.