May 5, 1933

Karl Guthe Jansky

The New York Times publicizes Jansky's cosmic-radio discovery

A front-page story grew out of a telephone company's hunt for annoying static — under a headline reassuring readers there was “No Evidence of Interstellar Signalling.”

5 May 1933, above the fold

The New York Times of 5 May 1933 put Karl Jansky's work on its front page above the fold, under the headline “New Radio Waves Traced to the Centre of the Milky Way.” The same headline carried an assurance that there was “No Evidence of Interstellar Signalling.”

The report publicized a Bell Telephone Laboratories announcement about mysterious radio static apparently arriving from the direction of the Milky Way's centre. What the paper did was turn an already presented scientific finding into prominent national news.

Not the announcement — the amplification

The science was not new that morning. Jansky had already presented “Electrical Disturbances Apparently of Extraterrestrial Origin” in April to a meeting of the US National Committee of the International Scientific Radio Union in Washington, and Bell Labs issued publicity after it.

Follow-up coverage came within days. A scholarly history reports that WJZ and the NBC Blue Network carried a live broadcast of the Holmdel “star noise” on 6 May, the evening after the front page ran.

What he had actually measured

Jansky's work at Bell Labs had begun as an investigation of noise limiting long-distance shortwave telephone service. Observing at 20.5 MHz — about 14.6 metres — on a rotating directional antenna array, he found that the signal's direction kept sidereal time, repeating every 23 hours 56.06 minutes, which separated it from a solar source.

The date marks the newspaper report, not the first detection; the decisive observations were collected during 1932. Jansky's paper gave an approximate direction — right ascension 18 hours, declination about −10 degrees, with substantial uncertainty in declination — and said association with a particular region was not yet definite.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 6 sources 2 audit passes

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