High Note

Physics students at the University of California watched with amazement the antics of a gas flame in a glass tube on Dr. E. E. Hall's lecture desk. Near the tube was a radio transmitter. No one tampered with the gas supply, yet the gas flame was made to flare up, turn from yellow to blue and roar. Dr. Hall explained that seven miles away, in the General Electric Co.'s laboratory, Charles Kellogg, famed "bird man," was broadcasting notes from the phenomenal upper register of his voice. The vibrations, 15,000 to 20,000 per second, transmitted by radio, affected the gas flame as would the vibrations set up by a tuning fork in the experiment familiar to physics students. Sufficiently intense vibrations would have extinguished the flame. The color change resulted merely from the vibration of gas and flame, being similar to the effect produced upon a gas flame by increasing the pressure of its fuel.

Birdman Kellogg's larynx has long been a source of entertainment to the public and of revenue to him. He has been on and off the vaudeville stage for 15 years. His flame experiment was the result of thousands of "fan" letters he received after a radio lecture last month. He can "sing" a note so high that it is inaudible to the human ear. Such a sound can be made with a violin but no Tetrazzini, no Galli-Curci, could make it. With these notes topping his vocal scale Mr. Kellogg has learned to imitate and even improve upon the songs of birds; to imitate insect calls. His phonograph records, including a choral effect obtained by playing many records into one, are well known and remarkable. Sympathetic vibration has been another of his studies--finding the note that will make a dog howl, a small object tremble. He has propounded the theory that sympathetic vibration is the key to the mystery of how news travels with great rapidity over long distances among primitive tribes.

A lifelong vegetarian, stocky, muscular, soft-voiced, with a shock of greying hair and a flowing Windsor necktie, Mr. Kellogg has been an outdoor man all his days. On his valley ranch in California he grows corn twelve feet high, according to his less skillful neighbors, by singing to it.