Talk:Ora Nichols

A fact from Ora Nichols appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 16 May 2021 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that Ora Nichols was the first woman to run a radio sound effects unit?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2021/May. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Ora Nichols.

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Dates of birth and death

We need better sourcing for these dates. Ancestry.com is deprecated at WP:UGC. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:26, 27 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Discrepancy in sources

Hi all,

I'm currently working on a general research project on Ora Nichols, and have found a possible discrepancy in listed sources. From page 91 of Radio Drama: Theory and Practice by Tim Crook:

"Ora Nichols demonstrated that impressive sound effects could be achieved with small-sized yet intelligent application of mechanical technology. She discovered that whirring an egg beater close to a microphone made the sound of a lawn-mower. Decapitation could be represented with the chopping of a red cabbage into a wicker basket. [...] Alien beings who turned themselves inside out could be represented with the removal of a tight-fitting rubber glove covered in jelly from a human hand."

Of the various other examples listed, the only one I've found backed up as Ora's work was the egg beater/lawn mower sound, in the December 1934 issue of Radio Stars [1]https://archive.org/details/radiostars5619univ/page/n297/mode/2up I don't doubt that some of these were the work of Ora Nichols, but the example of the alien turning inside out doesn't seem to be able to be her work. Leonard Maltin's The Great American Broadcast, which the article also cites, mentions a very similar account of work done by Arch Oboler, on the series Lights Out. From page 89:

"Arch Oboler's most famous sound effect on the creepy series Lights Out was the sound of a man being turned inside out! It was accomplished, rather simply, by soaking a rubber glove in water and turning it inside out while a berry basket was crushed."

From my cursory searches on this effect, results all seemed to point toward Oboler as its creator. Furthermore, Lights Out ran on NBC, so it's not reasonable to believe that Nichols may have played a part in the sound's creation.

What I think is happening here is that in Radio Drama, the author is simply attributing these various sound effects to Nichols in the sense that she was the one who innovated the "small-sized yet intelligent application of mechanical technology" in the first place. Only one sentence actually begins with "She discovered," and this is also the only one that there is any backup (that I have found, but this could be not entirely true) on.

For this reason, I'm going to remove the glove turning inside out detail from the techniques section. Of course, if anyone sees or discovers any problems with my reasoning here, feel free to reverse the edit.

Thanks,

Andy 168.91.154.213 (talk) 06:33, 29 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, and thank you for your thoughtful analysis. I'm the editor who wrote that sentence, and I was, indeed, just taking the Tim Cook source at face value. But I find your removal of that part to be quite reasonable. I hope that you will continue to help improve this page. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:17, 29 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]