Page:Open Skies (Kellermann).pdf/31

 of Wisconsin or elsewhere. However, Karl escaped the layoffs and was able to present his remarkable results at the annual meeting of the US National Committee for URSI, which was held in Washington DC on 27 April 1933. Karl described URSI to his family as “an almost defunct organization … attended by a mere handful of old college professors and a few Bureau of Standards engineers.”15 “Beside this,” Karl continued, “Friis would not let me give the paper a title that would attract attention but made me give it one [“A note on hiss type atmospheric noise”] that meant nothing to anybody but a few who were familiar with my work.”

Karl’s brother, Moreau, who himself was an influential leader of the URSI National Committee, was clearly impressed by his younger brother’s paper and apparently convinced the AT&T publicity department to issue a press release describing Jansky’s star noise.16 As Karl wrote to his father, “the science editors of the N.Y. papers were alert enough to realize the importance of the subject and yesterday afternoon pestered the life out of the publicity department.” The 5 May 1933 edition of the New York Times featured an “above the fold” article titled, “New Radio Waves Traced to the Centre of the Milky Way.” Other headlines on the same front page ominously referred to the anticipated invasion of China by Japan and Nazi threats at the French border. The following day, the Times “Week in Science” section noted that Jansky’s star noise was at the extreme end of the same electromagnetic spectrum that included the familiar visible spectrum that was the basis of all previous astronomical knowledge. On 15 May, the NBC Blue Network, which later became the ABC, interviewed Jansky and played three 10-second segments of Jansky’s star noise received at Holmdel and sent over the AT&T Long Lines. In describing his star noise during his interview, Jansky explained,

The observations show definitely that the maximum of hiss comes from somewhere on the celestial meridian designated by astronomer as “18 hours right ascension.” … But my measurements further show that the radio hiss comes from a point on that 18-hour meridian somewhat south of the equator, that is at about minus ten degrees in declination … that seems to confirm Dr. Shapley’s calculation that the radio waves seem to come from the center of gravity of our galaxy.17

Jansky’s extraordinary discovery was reported in national and international newspapers as well as in the 15 May edition of Time Magazine. The publicity generated by the media exposure resulted in the usual crank letters. As he wrote to his father, “I received a letter today from spiritualist [who] thinks I am receiving messages from the ‘other’ world [and] from some crank mathematician [who] advises me to watch for numerical messages based on the factor ‘2, 4, 8 etc’ indicating a ‘superior’ intelligence.”18 There is little doubt that Karl was aware of the impact of his discovery and that he relished the publicity. In October, he gave an invited lecture at the American Museum of Natural History in New York with the provocative title, “Hearing Radio from the Stars.”