That may sound complicated, but it’s simple, really. Just say that it happened at 8:30 p.m. everywhere, regardless of time belts and strictly in accordance with whether or not the area in question had or did not have daylight saving time. Simply that: 8:30 p.m. everywhere.
And 8:30 p.m. everywhere is just about the optimum moment for radio listening, which undoubtedly had something to do with it. Otherwise somebody or something went to an awful lot of unnecessary trouble, so to stagger the times that they would be the same all over the world.
Even if, at 8:30 on June 9, 1954, you weren’t listening to your radio—and you probably were—you certainly remember it. The world was on the brink of war. Oh, it had been on the brink of war for years, but this time its toes were over the edge and it balanced precariously. There were special sessions in—but we’ll come to that later.
Take Dan Murphy, inebriated Australian of Irish birth, being pugnacious in a Brisbane pub. And the Dutchman known as Dutch being pugnacious right back. The radio blaring. The bartender trying to quiet them down and the rest of the crowd trying to egg them on. You’ve seen it happen and you’ve heard it happen, unless you make a habit of staying out of waterfront saloons.
Murphy had stepped back from the bar already and was wiping his hands on the sides of his dirty sweat shirt. He was well into the preliminaries. He said, «Why, you — — — !» and waited for the riposte. He wasn’t disappointed. «— you!» said Dutch.
That, as it happened, was at twenty-nine minutes and twenty-eight seconds past eight o’clock, June 9, 1954. Dan Murphy took a second or two to smile happily and get his dukes up. Then something happened to the radio. For a fraction of a second, only that long, it went dead. Then a quite calm, quite ordinary voice said, «And now a word from our sponsor.» And there was something—some ineffably indefinable quality—in the voice that made everybody in the room listen and hear. Dan Murphy with his right pulled back for a roundhouse swing; Dutch the Dutchman with his feet ready to step back from it and his forearm ready to block it; the bartender with his hand on the bung starter under the bar and his knees bent ready to vault over the bar.
A full frozen second, and then a different voice, also from the radio, said «Fight.»
One word, only one word. Probably the only time in history that «a word from our sponsor» on the radio had been just that. And I won’t try to describe the inflection of that word; it has been too variously described. You’ll find people who swear it was said viciously, in hatred; others who are equally sure that it was calm and cold. But it was unmistakably a command, in whatever tone of voice.
And then there was a fraction of a second of silence again and then the regular program—in the case of the radio in the Brisbane pub, an Hawaiian instrumental group—was back on.
Dan Murphy took another step backwards, and said, «Wait a minute. What the hell was that?»
Dutch the Dutchman had already lowered his big fists and was turning to the radio. Everybody else in the place was staring at it already. The bartender had taken his hand off the bung-starter. He said, «— me for a — —. What was that an ad for?»
«Let’s call this off a minute, Dutch,» Dan Murphy said. «I got a funny feeling like that — — radio was talking to me. Personally. And what the — — — business has a bloody wireless set got telling me what to do?»
«Me too,» Dutch said, sincerely if a bit ambiguously. He put his elbows on the bar and stared at the radio. Nothing but the plaintive sliding wail of an Hawaiian ensemble came out of it.
Dan Murphy stepped to the bar beside him. He said, «What the devil were we fighting about?»
«You called me a — — — —,» Dutch reminded him. «And I said, — you.»
«Oh,» Murphy said. «All right, in a couple minutes I’ll knock your head off. But right now I want to think a bit. How’s about a drink?»
«Sure,» Dutch said.
For some reason, they never got around to starting the fight.
Take, two and a half hours later (but still at 8:30 p.m.), the conversation of Mr. and Mrs. Wade Evans of Oklahoma City, presently in their room at the Grand Hotel, Singapore, dressing to go night-clubbing in what they thought was the most romantic city of their round-the-world cruise. The room radio going, but quite softly (Mrs. Evans had turned it down so her husband wouldn’t miss a word of what she had to say to him, which was plenty ).
«And the way you acted yesterday evening on the boat with that Miss—Mamselle Cartier—Cah-tee-yay. Half your age, and French. Honestly, Wade, I don’t see why you took me along at all on this cruise. Second honeymoon, indeed!»
«And just how did I act with her? I danced with her, twice. Twice in a whole evening. Dammit, Ida, I’m getting sick of your acting this way. And beside—» Mr. Evans took a deep breath to go on, and thereby lost his chance.
«Treat me like dirt. When we get back—»
«All right, all right. If that’s the way you feel about it, why wait till we get back? If you think I’m enjoying—»
Somehow that silence of only a fraction of a second on the radio stopped him. «And now a word from our sponsor.»
And half a minute later, with the radio again playing Strauss, Wade Evans was still staring at it in utter bewilderment. Finally he said, «What was that?»
Ida Evans looked at him wide-eyed. «You know, I had the funniest feeling that that was talking to us, to me? Like it was telling us to g-go ahead and fight, like we were starting to.»
Mr. Evans laughed a little uncertainly. «Me, too. Like it told us to. And the funny thing is, now I don’t want to.» He walked over and turned the radio off. «Listen, Ida, do we have to fight? After all, this is our second honeymoon. Why not—listen, Ida, do you really want to go night-clubbing this evening?»
«Well—I do want to see Singapore, a little, and this is our only night here, but—it’s early; we don’t have to go out right away.»
I don’t mean of course, that everybody who heard that radio announcement was fighting, physically or verbally, or even thinking about fighting. And of course there were a couple of billion people who didn’t hear it at all because they either didn’t have radio sets or didn’t happen to have them turned on. But almost everybody heard about it. Maybe not all of the African pygmies or all of the Australian bushmen, no, but every intelligent person in a civilized or semi-civilized country heard of it sooner or later and generally sooner.
And the point is, if there is a point, that those who were fighting or thinking of fighting and who happened to be within hearing distance of a turned-on radio …
Eight-thirty o’clock continued its way around the world. Mostly in jumps of an even hour from time-zone to time-zone, but not always; some time-zones vary for that system—as Singapore, on the half hour; as Calcutta, seven minutes short of the hour. But by regular or irregular intervals, the phenomenon of the word continued its way from east to west, happening everywhere at eight-thirty o’clock precisely.
Delhi, Teheran, Baghdad, Moscow. The Iron Curtain, in 1954, was stronger, more impenetrable than it had ever been before, so nothing was known at the time of the effect of the broadcast there; later it was learned that the course of events there was quite similar to the course of events in Washington, D. C., Berlin, Paris, London …