Radio: Riddle Ruckus | TIME

TIME

June 6, 1938 12:00 AM GMT-4

Back in radio’s early crystal-set era, gloomy prophets spooked telephone stockholders, predicting that the wireless voice would make wire lines relics of an obsolete communications system. Few prophets foresaw that radio would vastly increase the use of wire services as radio pipelines, and nobody would have guessed the telephonic congestion caused by two radio riddle programs last week.

Easy Money is a two-and-a-half-hour afternoon broadcast over WPG (Atlantic City). Presenting riddles at five-minute intervals, the station pays $1 to the listener who is first to telephone the correct answer. Innumerable wise contestants were jumping the starting gun by dialing the first four digits of WPG’s number, snapping the final digit as soon as they had the solution. Until the wires were cleared by mass attack on the fifth digit, that trick automatically put busy signals on the ten telephones with numbers beginning with the same four digits. Because of the oddities of the dial system, large numbers of calls often backed up the jam so far that it tied up all the numbers beginning with the same two digits, giving busy signals on 1,000 telephones. Businessmen yowled. “We’ll take it up with the FCC,” said the Bayless Pharmacy.

The embattled telephone company met the crisis by giving Easy Money number 5-5261 (only Atlantic City number assigned on the 5-5 series). The company thwarted gun-jumpers by making the connection on dialing the second 5.

Riddle Man on WWL (New Orleans) last week caused Southern Bell Telephone & Telegraph Co. worse trouble, brought in simultaneous jams of calls that blew telephone fuses. That problem was solved simply by the radio station. Conundrums were made harder.

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