Is AI going to kill us all? Radio, when new, also seemed a menace

     One hundred years ago last Friday — July 10, 1926 — at 40 minutes after midnight at a frantic South Side jazz age party, Al Katz and his Kittens were playing the Moon Lite Gardens at the Chicago Beach Hotel in Kenwood. The crowd cried out “Valencia! Valencia!” the dance craze of the moment, and with a clatter of castanets, the group swung into the number.
     “Its exotic rhythms sent gilded heels gliding across the glistening floor,” Radio Digest noted, after the tragedy. “Sparkling lights, gleaming shoulders, jeweled fingers, radiant faces, brilliant costumes, spotless linen and fathomless black revolved in a kaleidoscopic array.”
     Twenty miles away in Homewood at the transmitter of radio station WOK, Thornton High School graduate Lester J. Wolf manned the control board, broadcasting the Moon Lite Gardens fun “throughout the Middle West into homes where lonely hearts were hungry for happiness and joy.”
     At 19, Wolf lived at home with his parents and was one of the youngest people in the country to hold a commercial broadcast license.
     Then a fuse blew. The signal went dead. Eager to get the station back on the air, Wolf reached for the faulty connection without first cutting the power and received a 6,000 volt shock. He fell to the floor but quickly stood up and told the studio director he was OK. But Wolf wasn’t OK. A moment later fell to the floor again, dead.
     The Radio Digest called him “the first martyr in the field of broadcasting for public entertaining,” as if there might be many more. It’s hard to tell with a new industry, particularly one based on a terrifyingly lethal technology like electricity, joined to an invisible possible menace such as radio waves.
     People always expect the worse. Radio did have risks — in the early years you had to hook up heavy wet cell lead batteries, basically big boxes of acid.

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