The Press: Cooing Hearstlings

One day last week the alert New York Evening Journal beat its rivals to the street by more than one hour with pictures of Sophie Crempa’s funeral (see p. 16). Because an hour is more than 60 minutes-as time is reckoned by afternoon newspapers, the Journal’s scoop was noteworthy. Its secret was to be found on the roof of the huge East River plant which houses both of William Randolph Hearst’s New York newspapers.

*Early this year City Editor Amster Spiro of the Journal saw in Editor & Publisher how Japanese newspapers use carrier pigeons. Promptly he bought eight pairs of pigeons from the U. S. Army, bred & trained them under an oldtime Army expert.

Today the loft on the Journal’s roof houses 76 cooing Hearstlings. The birds can fly 50 m.p.h. with a 2-oz. payload, are used within a 50-mi. radius. Film negatives and copy written on onionskin paper are placed in aluminum capsules, fastened to the birds’ backs with elastic. The Journal used 20 pigeons on the Crempa story, finds them useful in covering ship-news, trials, sports, outlying murders. From ships at Quarantine, 14 miles away, the Journal gets pictures of incoming celebrities in twelve minutes. Rival papers must wait two hours until the ship docks.†

Persians developed the art of training pigeons and the Greeks used pigeons to carry the names of Olympic winners to various cities. The French pigeon post during the Siege of Paris in 1871 was so successful that the Germans employed hawks and falcons to interrupt the service. Best means of frightening away birds of prey is to provide pigeons with bells and whistles.

Before the telegraph was perfected, the pigeon post enjoyed a great vogue among stockbrokers. It was used by news agencies to report yacht races before the invention of wireless. Its military use is today largely confined to fortress warfare, large flocks being maintained at the inland strongholds of Germany, France, Russia. Of late in the U. S., the military importance of pigeons has been recognized because of the ease with which telegraph and wireless facilities can be interrupted in modern warfare.

The U. S. Army has 5,000 pigeons, with some 2,000,000 privately-owned carriers in the “reserve.” After ten years of experiments at Fort Monmouth, N. J., the Signal Corps has developed a brood of 100 night-flying pigeons-first of their kind. Particularly useful in connection with military planes, they can fly through rain, sleet, fog, snow and around thunderstorms, are vulnerable to nighthawks but little else. They do not fly entirely by blind instinct, but apparently have their own system of avigation. The secret is supposedly in the ear, since the birds are unable to fly with their ears stopped up. U. S. distance record for homing pigeons is 2,150 mi. (Maine to Texas) at a speed of 700 mi. per day. The sport of racing homing pigeons, introduced in the U. S. about 1875, is still popular in Belgium, where nearly every village has its Societe Colombophile. The annual concourse national-Toulouse to Brussels (500 mi.)-was inaugurated in 1881, and similar races were sponsored by the London Columbarian Society.

*The Journal and American. Widespread, but unfounded, is the rumor that, because he considers its architecture ugly, Publisher Hearst has never set foot in the building. The .tabloid Daily Mirror in which Publisher Hearst has a large interest, is housed elsewhere. †For use of pigeons in reporting Milwaukee news, see p. 57.