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Simple Idea for Campus Safety Barry Farber The truck came through the small town late at night and went under a bridge with insufficient headroom. It wedged itself in the middle of the underpass with an awful screeching sound and all traffic was blocked. It was the biggest deal that town had known since the Civil War. The mayor, the chief of police, and prominent members of the town council showed up with overcoats over pajamas in stomp-down fury-mode. "We're going to take an acetylene torch and cut away the whole top of your truck," thundered the mayor. The police chief suggested it might be simpler to lift the center section of the bridge and free the truck that way. Another official said, "No. It'll be cheaper and quicker to get four tow trucks hitched like a team of horses to the front of the truck and just power it out from under the bridge." Then a six-year-old boy piped up and said, "Why don't you just let some of the air out of the tires?" There followed silence, broken by this hissing of air being released. I've always found that story amusing, and it came to mind in the wake of the most non-amusing catastrophy to hit America lately; the massacre at Virginia Tech. The media was badgering the university officials on their inability to let the entire student body know quickly that a gunman was at large on the campus. The president of the university gamely complained about the uncertainty of e-mail. Sure, it gets there promptly, but who knows when it will be read. There was much talk about the delinquency of the university in not having the elementary capability of sending the same mass e-mail to every student simultaneously. Story Continues Below
Did you ever have the feeling you were the original one-eyed man in the land of the blind? The argument over how to alert every single student, faculty member, and anybody else who happened to be on campus at once gave me that feeling. A technology for achieving that was first made known to me in early 1953, but literally nobody I've discussed it with has ever heard of it! Enroute to spotlighting the solution — becoming the six-year-old in the story — let me point out that dictatorships have no problem getting the word out to one and all. There are loud-speakers right there on the street in North Korea and earlier in Communist China blaring out propaganda, military music, patriotic songs, and anything else the government wants the population to hear. When I reached the Soviet Union from Sweden in 1956 I flipped on my transistor radio and to my surprise I was getting a station; at that very spot on the dial where I'd heard a Swedish station two days earlier. After a while I thought I'd try another station. There was none. No matter where you turned on the dial you got that same station. Your only choices were on or off; but the government could be sure all radios that were on would carry whatever announcement headquarters wanted disseminated. During the Korean War from 1950 to 1953, American airplanes equipped with powerful loud speakers flew over enemy territory broadcasting messages intended to weaken the fighting zeal of the communist troops. The psychological warfare boys never told us how effective those messages were, but reception, at least, was 100 percent. Christian missionaries have refined a method for reaching out to isolated tribes using that same technology in remaining stone-age parts of the world; the jungles of Ecuador and Peru, the Orinoco River Valley in Venezuela, the Sepik River Valley on New Guinea. There are always one or two members of those unreached tribes who filter through the jungle and go to work for an oil or a timber company. The missionaries learn enough of the language from those stragglers to prepare a message along lines of, "We are friends of yours from far away and we have great good news for you, and we'll be visiting you soon with gifts and gladness." Those messages played back from aircraft usually result in at least a guarded welcome by the tribe. It was considered a huge step forward when the fire department in my hometown got an iron lung to help resuscitate smoke-inhalation victims. Police may remember when the department got its first helicopter. We now need a much more modest advance, the equipment aboard a helicopter or small airplane to blast messages to everybody down below. Yes, there were many thousands of students to be alerted, but they were all in an area which, for anything that flies, is quite small. Everybody in Blacksburg, Va., on as well as off-campus, could have been given the word between 10 and 15 minutes after the decision was made. What amazes me is that nobody I've presented this to was even vaguely aware that such a thing is possible. Time may fly, but knowledge lags. I remember reading a story in Life Magazine in 1945, right after World War II, describing what had been going on in Switzerland which had been neutral but surrounded by Nazi forces all during the war. One Swiss invention described was the "Ipso-phone," a device that attaches to the telephone and answers the phone automatically and takes messages, and even lets you get your messages when you call your number from the outside. In other words, the Swiss had developed the answering machine in the early 1940s. I got my first one in 1968, and what amazed me was that for years people whose offices I visited were amazed when they saw me getting my messages automatically. And that was not in the Orinoco River valley. That was in New York City! So, maybe the "booming voice from the sky" is an idea that's already here but whose time has not yet come. It could be life-saving, and not just to warn about rampaging gunmen. Ask any six-year-old. Editor's note:
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