Information, Please! was one of the most popular, and literate, shows on American radio, airing from 1938-1948 and running briefly as a TV show in 1952. Its format was novel: instead of quizzing contestants from the general public, listeners submitted questions to quiz the experts, and if they stumped the resident eggheads, they won money and (for many years) a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica. The program became a cultural icon, spurring Information, Please! quiz books, card games, almanacs, film shorts, and countless editorial cartoons and satires.  Anybody who was anybody wanted to appear on the show.

Its master of ceremonies was the warm and witty Clifton Fadiman (right), literary editor of the New Yorker magazine and a longtime member of Britannica’s Board of Editors. His brilliant and amusing three-member panel of savants routinely included Franklin P. Adams, the popular newspaper columnist, Shakespeare expert, and member of the fashionable Algonquin Round Table of New York writers; John Kieran, the amazing Bronx-accented sportswriter, linguist and Latinist, botanist and bird-lover, and master reciter of Western poetry; and Oscar Levant, pianist, composer, actor, raconteur, and all-around wit. Fadiman and his brain trust would often be joined by a special guest panelist, usually a famous writer, political leader, or Hollywood star. Throughout World War II, the popular show broadcast from cities across the United States, selling millions of dollars of War Bonds in the process.

The program was also hailed for its integrity, as explained in the PBS documentary “The American Experience: The Rise of TV Quiz Shows“: 

One of the most popular and intelligent shows was “Information, Please,” which called on the audience to send in questions to stump a panel of experts. The show aired for 14 years, until its finale in 1952, and was noteworthy not only for its success, but for its integrity. At the time, radio programs made their way on air in two ways. They were underwritten by big name sponsors, who were expected to be involved with the show, or they were funded by individual producers, making them self-sufficient. Dan Golenpaul, the producer for “Information, Please,” earned kudos when he fired the Reynolds Tobacco Company, which had run a series of untruthful commercials and also demanded that panelists on the show smoke its cigarettes.

The opportunity to win a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica for stumping the experts was an offer instituted shortly after the program went on the air, and it was an immediate hit with the public.  Within weeks of advertising the offer, mail to the radio show skyrocketed from 6,000 letters a week to more than 20,000.  Britannica salesmen, however, did encounter one problem: some prospective customers were now delaying their purchase of the encyclopedia because they hoped to win a set by appearing on the show.  To combat this, Britannica promised full cash refunds if, within three months, any purchaser of a print set won an Information, Please! prize, and this promise was maintained throughout Britannica’s long affiliation with the program.  Exactly 1,366 sets of the encyclopedia were given away to listeners of the show.

The Britannica Blog is proud to highlight one of these broadcasts each Friday.  So, “Wake Up!”—as the show’s announcer would say at the start of each broadcast. “It’s Time to Stump the Experts!”

Enjoy the show!

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For thousands of other classic radio broadcasts, visit Ken Varga’s ”Old Time Radio Network Library,” where he offers links to more than 12,000 free shows.

In the spring of 1994, an express-mail box of 4,000 pages of tobacco-company documents turned up on the doorstep of longtime industry critic Stanton Glantz, a professor at the University of California at San Francisco. The return address read “Mr. Butts,” the character from the Doonesbury cartoon strip who lives to addict children to smoking. Glantz assembled a team of medical doctors and policy analysts to comb through the papers, which he carefully lodged in the special collections division of the university library so that Brown & Williamson, the tobacco company in question, could not block public access to them.

The documents were astonishing, describing projects with codenames like “Ariel” to increase nicotine kick, giving behind-the-scenes look at the company’s maneuverings around various lawsuits and congressional inquiries, and showing beyond doubt that B&W, at least, was well aware of the cancerous effects of smoking decades ago, although it continued to maintain that causation has not been proved “and that we do not ourselves make health claims for tobacco products”—and that nicotine is not addictive.

If you are still smoking tomorrow, on World No-Tobacco Day, you might want to dip into the pages of Glantz et al.’s book The Cigarette Papers and turn to the section on B&W’s experiments with various additives to its products, including benzopyrene, cocoa, and deer tongue, among the dozens of other chemical additives that governments allow cigarette makers to put into tobacco products. Read Tara Parker-Pope’s book Cigarettes: Anatomy of an Industry from Seed to Smoke on the sheer enormousness of the cigarette industry, which now produces an estimated 5.5 trillion cigarettes each year, or a thousand cigarettes for every person on the planet.

Read Allan Brandt’s The Cigarette Century, in which, in 1882, future tobacco tycoon James Duke came to the realization that cigarettes would have to supplant chewing tobacco, pipes, and cigars in order to earn their keep. His Tobacco Trust, though soon broken up by federal regulators, was successful well beyond Duke’s plans, in part through the accident of changing cultural norms, in part because of deliberate recruitment of women and children as smokers. As Brandt relates, the major producers benefited, too, from conflict and empire; during World War I, General John J. Pershing said, “You ask me what we need to win this war. I answer tobacco, as much as bullets.” And read Richard Kluger’s Ashes to Ashes, which documents the first hundred years of the cigarette industry in the United States; by 1891, he notes, cigarette makers were clearing a 27 percent profit margin, an investor’s dream that remains roughly constant today, for all the billions that the industry shells out in legal fees and fines—a rich source of revenue for governments, along with cigarette taxes, for which reason tobacco is not outlawed outright, even though it is less socially acceptable to use it in public.

This holds true throughout Europe and North America these days; even Turkey, long a major tobacco producer and smoker’s haven, has outlawed smoking in most enclosed public places. The draconian bans seem to be having an effect: in the United States, where more than half of adults smoked in 1950, only about 20 percent do so today. Only East Asia, the tobacco marketers’ last hope, remains a holdout, and public-health officials project that it will one day align with the rest of the world in discouraging the practice.