On Sunday, January 22nd, 1956 at 5:42PM a Santa Fe Railroad train was rounding the sharp curve at the Redondo Junction just southwest of Boyle Heights near Washington Boulevard and the Los Angeles River. The conductor blacked out, the train sped up to sixty-nine mile per hour and derailed. Thirty people were killed and more than one hundred were injured.   
  
It was perhaps a metaphor for the direction society was moving. Both atomic and communist fears were rampant. Social norms, race relations, and musical tastes were rapidly changing. While divorce, alcoholism and prescription medications were all on the rise.  
  
That Sunday, both Indictment and Fort Laramie debuted on CBS. The following Friday, January 27th, the revived CBS Radio Workshop took to the air with an adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.”  
  
The sound of artificial human life took three men and an engineer more than five hours to create. They used a ticking metronome, the beat of a tom-tom, bubbling water, an air hose, the mooing of a cow, a couple of “boings,” and three different wine glasses clinking against each other.   
  
The sounds were blended and recorded, then played backward on the air with a slight echo effect.   
  
Bernard Herrmann composed and conducted a slender musical score. “Brave New World” would air in two parts over the first weeks of production.

BW - EP115—003: The CBS Radio Workshop—The CBS Radio Workshop Launches