You may recall Arthur H Nockley, American broadcaster and spiritualist, best known for his pirate radio broadcasts from Lake Michigan in the 1940s.
We recently obtained a collection of the "Moment of Inspiration" commentaries he broadcast every morning, while starting the transmitter for a large mid-western radio station, until they caught him. (He was merely supposed to announce the usual FCC statement at the start of the broadcast day.)
Besides being very brief, most of them are fragmentary; Nockley's archive was presumed lost when his broadcasting studio (a converted tugboat, the Trudy) sank in a storm, only to be located by researchers decades later.
These recordings were recovered from a waterlogged box containing Dictaphone belts. Next, they'll be painstakingly assembled and cleaned; that's our job here at the institute.
Our first example is inexplicable, but won't take much time. He apparently just flipped open the microphone at the transmitter one morning, and started babbling away. Listeners were stunned.
Play (1:14)
