Excerpt from Brown Alumni Monthly, Vol. 42: Summer, 1941

P P the story of Major Zale Dillon '17, supervisor of National Broadcasting Company's sound effects section, is the story of the development of sound effects in radio. He has grown up with the business.

At one time or another Major Dillon has produced sound effects for every show on the air today broadcast from New York studios of nbc. He played the first recording of sound effects when recordings began to replace live sound. He has lived through the days of crude sound when a piece of paper stuck in a fan was used to represent the sound of an airplane motor to the present time when echo chambers and filters twist the human voice into any shape desired.

According to Major Dillon, the greatest milestone in the development of sound effects was the introduction of recordings. Until that time, sounds used on the air were extremely crude, he explained. Every sound effects man had to build his own equipment which he could never do completely, and was continually called upon to improvise sound effects. In those days a scrubbing brush drawn across a drum represented the surf on the beach, and a derby hat was used to change the sound of an aeroplane motor paper in a fan - to the sound of a motor boat. It took three men to make a good train sound. The equipment included a mouth whistle, a bell, an air tank with Open jet to repre sent steam escaping, a hollow sound box with beater to get the choo'choo effect, and a rail click machine.

Nowadays, he continued, we have actual recordings of all these sounds. Among over 7500 discs are the sounds of many different kinds of trains - freight trains, passenger trains, streamliners, dinkeys, funicular railways, trolley cars, and French trains - and the sounds of many different kinds of airplanes doing a series of manoeuvres - war planes, commercial planes, navy planes, planes diving, looping the loop, landing, and tailspinning.

A second development in the history of sound effects more gradually introduced than the adoption of recordings was the standardization of equipment, according to Major Dillon. Today nbc has built up a collection of 27 doors of different types - squeaky doors, heavy doors, fire doors, office doors and house doors. There are rain machines, water splash machines and oscillation machines to reproduce the sounds of telegraph and ticker tape and other dot dash mechanisms.

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