The Busy Air

P: Into the spreading television puddle leaped Columnist Elsa Maxwell with a squeal and a splash. Hard at work on the Continent, preparing the Elsa Telecruise of Europe for release in the fall, she predicted: "Television is going to kill the radio just like talkies killed silent movies." As for herself: "Although I am not young and beautiful, I know I can stand the television screen . . . My face can express my feelings."

Elsa's Telecruise would include "all sorts of interesting people, from foreign ministers to Christian Dior ... I am going to try mainly to show the American taxpayers that Europe is worth the sacrifice and the Marshall Plan is definitely a good investment for their money ... I believe in Europe and I believe in television." P: John Kieran of Information Please was preparing to do his part for television too. His supporting cast: a troupe of insects, birds, fish and animals. "We'll experiment," says Kieran. "We'll show animals under water. We'll make a hole in a fence and put food outside it and see how long it takes different animals to find their food." As writer and narrator of 78 ten-minute telecasts of Kieran's Kaleidoscope for the International Tele-Film Co., the gnomish doubledome will receive a $50,000 guarantee, plus a percentage of the gross.

Pundit Kieran, who doesn't yet own a television set, will not estimate how long it will take his show to find an audience. "I don't know about the television audience. It's interesting to me, that's all I know. Maybe out of 130 million people, ten million will be interested. The ones who are, they're what you might call like me--they're nuts."

P: Manhattan's 25-year-old telephone answering service, Telanserphone Inc., was experimenting with a new gadget for paging doctors: tiny 6 1/2-ounce radio receivers which a medico can carry in his breast pocket. Telanserphone would buzz subscribers by short wave anywhere within the 25-mile range of its sending tower. Says Company President Sherman Amsden: "It's a mechanical device, but it's as important as penicillin. We anticipate that we'll be able to save lives . . ."

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