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	Early History of RCA Radio Corporation of America (RCA) was Wall Street's darling high-flyer tech-stock of the 1920s. It made many investors and speculators millionaires. Bankers and barbers from New York to San Francisco knew the RCA stock market symbol alike. It had a virtual lock monopoly on "wireless" communications for the masses. There was no serious competition in sight. In essence RCA was the leading edge of the high technology of the day. Undoubtedly, it enjoyed the same dominance in its field as Microsoft commands today in Operating Systems and related peripheral software. In the five years prior to the Great Crash of 1929, RCA stock soared from about $11 to its September 1929 high of $114 (adjusted for the 5 for 1 stock split in February of that fatal year). That's an appreciation of 936% in only five years, equal to an annual compound return of a monumental 60%. Also unbelievingly incredible was the fact it never paid a cash dividend! Investors didn't care, since the stock value increased almost daily. At its 1929 peak RCA boasted a staggering price/earning ratio of 72:1. Microsoft During the past five years one would indeed be hard pressed to find a stock with more market appreciation and dominance in its field than MICROSOFT. Many struggling competitors have litigation pending against the software company's near monopolistic hold on its area of endeavor. Even the federal government is challenging Microsoft’s alleged unfair dominance. All this has inflamed investor’s interest in its stock. During the last five years MICROSOFT has soared nearly 700% -- equivalent to approximately a compound yearly stock price rise of 50%. Phenomenal! Just like RCA during its early history and meteoric stock price increase, MICROSOFT has never paid a cash dividend since going public. Needless to say, investors could care less. Interestingly, Microsoft’s price/earnings ratio was a very lofty 57:1 at its all-time high of $150.75 in August this year. Indeed high by today's standard. Recall the S&P 500 has an average PER of about 23. RCA - Vs – Microsoft Many analysts have already shown that the traditional measures of market valuations are TODAY more over-extended than in 1929 and 1973, just prior to each market crash. In each of the previous bear markets high-tech stocks were decimated. But since this writer's analysis began with RCA and MICROSOFT, the comparison is limited to these two stocks. The chart below shows the price movement of each stock. Please recall the RCA prices are adjusted back for the 1929 stock split of 5 for 1. Since the price changes of both stocks were similar, it facilitated super-imposing both curves on the same chart, thus allowing an easy visual comparison OF WHAT HAS HAPPENED, AND MORE IMPORTANTLY, WHAT COULD HAPPEN... in the event of another vicious Bear market like 1929 or 1973. Note (1): All Microsoft prices reflect the 2 for 1 stock split in 1997. Note (2): Radio Corporation of America split 5 for 1 in February 1929. Therefore, all prices were adjusted backwards to reflect the split. Multiply all prices prior to split by 5 for historical trading comparisons. From RCA's 1929 high of $114 the stock price dropped for the next three years, reaching it nadir of less than $3 per share in 1932. This represented a loss from its 1929 peak of 97% We must all remember RCA was the predominant technology leader of its day. Nevertheless, it lost 97% of its value. This writer does NOT suggest history will repeat itself. However, not to appreciate the vicious potential for loss in the best of stocks in a full-blown Bear market is to be imprudent... indeed financially reckless. If we are to experience another devastating Bear market, strong companies will survive just like RCA did. But it may take many l-o-n-g years to again reach all-time high market price levels.
	Radio Days
	NO OTHER MEDIUM HAS BROUGHT AMERICA CLOSER TOGETHER IN GOOD TIMES AND BAD.
	By John Barbour (Associated Press)

	A century ago the first man-made signals quivered throught the air in a kind of invisible, electrical dance. Those signals, later translated into voices and pictures, changed our lives forever. It began with a whisper, Guiglielmo Marconi's simple signal, the Morse letter "S," a little over a mile across his family estate near Belogna, Italy, in 1895. At first it was discounted as a novelty. It would be 14 years before the wireless proved its value, first as a shipboard call for help. It later brought the world into the nation's living rooms -- President Franklin D. Roosevelt in his Fireside Chats during the Great Depression saying tht all we had to fear was fear itself. It was Edward R. Murrow. standing on a London rooftop. describing the Nazi blitz. "Radio was" says Ken Mueller of Museum for Television and radio Broadcasting, "a unifying factor," at a time the nation needed it most. the decade between the Depression and World War II. For the 106 million Americans then, he says, "suddenly there was something they had in comon. Prior to that they could read the newspaper, but they were all reading different newspapers," Columnist Walter Winchell, it was estimated, between his newspaper copy and his broadcasts, had an audience of 50 million Americans. Many more than that saw Neil Armstrong land on the moon and say across 250,000 miles that his first step was one giant leap for mankind. the magical tube showed scenes of freedom marchers and snarling police dogs unleashed on children, campus violence, a president shot, another president resigning, helicopters on the attack in Vietnam, Marines landing on yet another sandy beach in Kuwait, Super bowls, basketball championships and cherished old movies. Now the long road through radio and television has reached another turning point. Aided and abetted by cable, the "broadcast" seems to becoming "narroweast" allowing viewers to choose their own programming, from cooking to old movies, from redecorading to college classes, from home shopping to political discussion, from wildlife to sex. Now viewers can have sex channels blocked from their television sets and advertisers can tailor-make their television ads to certain areas, singling out, say, the borough of Brooklyn from the rest of the city of New York. First signals received in 1909. That's a far cry from the first rudimentary signals in 1909 when the Italian ship Florida collided in heavy fog with the liner Republic. But the Republic's wireless brought help in a hurry and only six liver were lost. Three years later, when the Titanic went down, more than 700 were rescued from the icy waters because of quick response to the wireless call for help, "SOS." More of the over 2,200 aboard would have been rescued if the wireless operator on a bearby ship just over the horizon hadn't been off duty. From Marconi's hands the research fell to a small coterie of electrical engineers who would free the wireless from the confines of dot-dash codes to the actual transmission of the human voice and then pictures. But it was a slow, step-by-step journey taking some 25 years before the complex equipment moved from metal sulfide crystal to Marconi to the diode tube of radio broadcasts to Lee De Forest's electron tube that produced televisiion pictures. In 1919, David Sarnoff established the Radio Corporation of America funding research and legal support for such stormy geniuses as De forest and Edwin Armstrong, who in the early 1920s was RCA's biggest stockholder, Sarnoff began as a telegraph delivery boy for Marconi's pioneering company. In a nation trying to adjust to such rapid advances as automobiles and aircraft, the radio research was derailed by patent squabbles and shifty entrepeneurship. The patent problems became so severe during World War I that radio progress stagnated and the government moved in to put them on hold. But soon broadcast followed the dictum, send it and they will listen. Amatures create their own wireless sets. Amateurs discovered that a cylindrical oatmeal box, a crystal, a spool of wire, an aerial and earphones could become their own receiver. As more sophisticated receivers came on the market, broadcast stations proliferated. "Radio brought a sense of community, maybe a sense of nationality." Mueller says. It was what people talked about over coffee and at work the next day. With radio, says Ron Simon, a curator for the broadcast museum, "they could all turn on Jack Benny, they could all turn on FDR's Fireside Chat" Mueller says history chose a president who was perfect for the role. a great voice, calling his countrymen friends. "It was a guy speaking as if he were right there in your living room with you and letting you know this is what's going on and what I think we ought to do about it." Vaudeville was borrowed by radio and the comedians brought it to the airwaves, just when the country needed a laugh and couldn't afford the movies. Amos 'n' Andy bought minstrel comedy to radio and some experts say were responsible for much of the surge in the sales of radios, 4.4 million in 1929. And along came Eddie Cantor, the Marx Brothers, Fred Allen and his fued with Jack Benny, and of course George Burns and Gracie Allen. Tapping the listener's imagination. " An interesting story is Jack Benny." Mueller says. One of his props was his basement vault, and whenever he visited The Vault, the listener heard traps going off and guards saying who goes there. But when they brought the vault to television, viewers wrote in saying, "that's not the vault." "That was true of a lot of things you heard on radio. whether it was Fibber McGee's closet, or whatever. "Radio was the theater of the mind." Youngsters would lie in front of that cathedral of reveries, their minds re-creating Jack Armstrong and the Piper Hudson High boys, the dashing athlete who fought for the side of good. Radio became the family clock. Children were admonished to save eheir questions unitl after jack Benny, or told to go to bed when the program's over. Today's soap operas were born on radio, but radio soaps were more morality plays, more small studies in religion and petriotism, more iterations of goodness trumphing over evil. But nothing so stirred the nation, frightened it out of its collective wits, than Orson Welles adaption of H.G.Wells "the War of the Worlds" for the Mercury Theater on the Air. To a nation sensitized to the threat of war in Europe, Welles presented the invasion by Martians in such vivid terms that there was literally panic in the streets. It began " Ladies and Gentlemen. we interrupt our program of dance music to gring yhou a special bulletin from Intercontinental Radio News--" And Television is born. RCA's demonstration of television at the 1939 World's Fair in New York was supposed to jump-start the technology. but World War II got in the way. After the war. "so many of the formats, the programs, that started in radio, generated television shows." says tgelevision expert Ron Simon. The wave of quiz shows in the 50s was led by $64,000 Question." It ended with scandal on "Twenty-One" when Charles Van Doren admitted to being fed questions. At the same time, Federal Communications Chief Newton Minow called the whole horizon of television "a vast wasteland." The quiz shows were sort of the last gasp of live television that was produced and owned by the advertising agencies," Simon says. "Most of the great dramas that we associate with the "50s, "Marty,' "Twelve Angry Men" as well as the variety shows, were produced by outside advertising agencies and then brought to television." the agencies bought the time slots. The television industry was merely a passive conduit for their programs. But the quiz show scandal forced the netowrks to re-invent their role. They turned to Hollowood to produce programs. Norman Lear showed television how to blend comedy with social issues and the 1970s brought "All In The Family." "M-A-S-H," "Mary Tyler Moore." But for all televison brought us. the personal touch went out the old radio and never came back. No longer will we hear such sentiment as Eddie Cantor signing of with "I'd love to spend each Wednesday with you.." Or anything as personally simple as George Burns words: "Say good night Gracie." and Gracie Allen saying demurely. "Good Night." (Submitted by: John Milione)

*Meucci's Invention Gets 21st Century Fix (by: Diane O'Donnell) Advance Staff Writer*
	Antonio Meucci's invention was shocking in more ways than one. the Italian immigrant inventor discovered one-way electronic communication by chance while doing shock treatments on a patient in 1849. At the time of Meucci's initial communication invention. Alexander Graham Bell was a toddler. Meucci set up two-way communication devices throughout his house in Rosebank. Meucci called his invention "teletrofono" In 1871 Meucci filed a one-year patent for his invention. but could not afford to renew it. Shortly after filing the patent, Meucci was burned in an explosion aboard a steamship and his wife sold all of his working telephone models for $6. In 1876, Bell filed a patent for his own telephone invention.
You can be thankful Antonio Meucci developed the telephone, but you may not be as grateful when a telemarketer calls in the middle of dinner. Yesterday, at the former Rosebank home of the Italian inventor, now the Garibaldi-Meucci Museum, City and State officials gathered to discuss both aspects of Meucci's invention. Praising meucci as the true inventor of the telephone, May M, Chao, chairwoman and executive director of the state Consumer Protection Board, noted an unforeseeable draw-back of the invention. "Even a gifted and far-sighted inventor such as Antonio Meucci could not have imagined that one day his invention would be used to interrupt family dinners with telemarketing calls," said Ms Chao. To combat those annoying calls Ms. Chao cited the success of the governor's "Do Not Call" telemarketing registry program, which has the most registrants of the 28 participating states, including more than 43,000 registrants on Staten Island. Administered by the state Consumer Protection Board, the free registry give participants the ability to do away with most of their unwanted telephone solicitations for three years, by barring telemarketers froom calling listed parties. At the end of such time, a reminder notice is sent out for participants to enroll again. "It's fast, its easy and it's free to do and, more importantly, it works," said Ms, Chao of the registration precedure. To include your residential phone number in the program, call the board toll free at (866) 622-5569 or visit the board's Web site at www.consumer.state.ny.us
	May M. Chao, executive director of the state Concumer Protection Board, addresses the crowd at the Garibaldi-Meucci Museum in Rosebank. With her, from the left, are Dorothy Demaria of Huguenot; borough President james Molinaro; Richard Reetz, executive director of the Community Agency for Senior Citizens; Sen, John Marchi; John Dabbene, museum chairman and Emily Gear of the museum.
In addition to promoting the registry, yesterday's gathering also called attention to some long overdue credit for Meucci. Meucci was officially recogniced as inventor of the telephone in proclamation issued by Gov. George Pataki in April 2000 and in a House resolution sponsored by Rep. Vito Fossella in June. State Sen. John Marchi and Borough President James P. Molinaro have urged that a similar proposal pass in the Senate. Citing a childhood experience in grade school, Marchi, speaking to a crowd gathered at the museum, explained that he was marked wrong for putting Meucci's name instead of that of alexander Graham Bell as the inventor of the telephone on a test. "You can mark me any way you want, but you can't change the facgts," said Marchi, who remains adamant that the Italian immigrant's name was the correct answer. Nearly three decades before Alexander Graham bell became famous for inventing the telephone, Meucci had inadvertently discovered a way to conduct one-way communication through electricity. During an 1849 experiment in Havana, Cuba, where he lived for several years, Meucci administered shock treatment by placing a small metal plate into a patient's mouth. Upon flipping the electric switch in an adjoining room, Meucci was able to hear the patient's scream transmitted through the wires. In 1850 Meucci and his wife, Ester, settled in Rosebank, where he toiled away in his basement perfecting his electronic communication device. When his wife became paralyzed, Meucci developed a rudimentary communication system to speak with her from his basement work-shop to her second-floor bedroom. Calling his invention the "teletrofono," Meucci developed a working two-way communication model in 1857 and was written about in an Italian-language New York newspaper. In 1871 Meucci paid $20 for a one-year provisional patent for his invention. At the time, he was too poor to afford the $250 cost of a full patent, which Bell filed for in 1876. In the early 1870s meucci was hospitalized with severe burns from a steamboat explosion, During that time his wife sold off all of his working telephone models for $6 to meet their financial expenses. Despite personal setbacks, his inability to speak English and his lack of business savvy, Meucci attempted to secure his claim as inventor of the telephone through judicial actions. he died unrecognized in 1889 before his claim could be adjudicated.
	How Meucci would have reacted to the barrage of tele-marketing calls that have become a trademark of 21st Century life, is unknown, but if he's anything like Huguenot resident Dorothy DeMaria, he probably would have taken action. Fed up with coming home from work to find her answering machine tape used up with tele-marketing calls, and having her evenings interrupted with un-wanted sales calls, Ms Demaria attested to a more peaceful home life since enrolling in the program nearly a year ago. "It Really works," said Ms, DeMaria.

The death mask of Antonio Meucci and artifacts from his collection are on display at the Garibaldi-Meucci Museum In Rosebank.