Radio Broadcasting

The story of radio begins in the development of an earlier medium, the telegraph, which was the first instantaneous system of information movement. Patented simultaneously in 1837 in the United States by inventor Samuel F. B. Morse and in Britain by scientists Sir Charles Wheatstone and Sir William Fothergill Cooke, the electromagnetic telegraph realized the age-old human desire for a means of communication free from the obstacles of long-distance transportation. The first public telegraph line, completed in 1844, ran 64 km (40 mi) from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore, Maryland. Morse's first message, “What hath God wrought?”—transmitted as a coded series of long and short electronic impulses conveyed his awareness of the momentous proportions of the achievement.
Telegraphy proved so useful and popular that over the next half century wires were strung across much of the world, including a transatlantic undersea cable (1866) connecting Europe and North America. The instantaneous passage of a message over a distance that required hours, days, or weeks to traverse by ordinary transport was so radically unfamiliar an experience that some telegraph offices collected admission fees from spectators wanting to witness the feat for themselves.
As society began to depend on the telegraph for everything from birthday greetings to the news of momentous events, the limitations of telegraphic communication became apparent. Telegraphy depended on the building and maintenance of a complex system of receiving stations wired to each other along a fixed route and requiring trained operators to transmit and receive messages. The telephone, patented by Scottish-born American inventor Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, made instantaneous communication possible via a desktop appliance available to untrained users. However, it required an even more complex system of wires and switching stations than the telegraph. Neither device could be used by ships at sea or reach the many remote communities that could not afford the costs of lines and stations.
Although neither the telephone nor the telegraph could address large numbers of people simultaneously, mass circulation newspapers and magazines benefited greatly from the two devices, translating wired reports into print for mass consumption. News agencies such as the Associated Press and Reuters are still often called wire services, referring to their beginnings as telegraph services.

Radio experiments:
Scientists in many countries worked to devise a system that could overcome the limitations of the telegraph wire. In 1895 Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi transmitted a message in Morse code that was picked up 3 km (2 mi) away by a receiving device that had no wired connection to Marconi's transmitting device. With this transmission, Marconi demonstrated that an electronic signal could be cast broadly (broadcast) through space so that receivers at random points could capture it. The closed circuit of instant communication was at last opened by a so-called wireless telegraph. The invention was also called a radiotelegraph (later shortened to radio), because its signal moved outward in all directions, or radially, from the point of transmission. The age of broadcasting had begun.

World War I and Early regulations
With the outbreak of World War I (1914-1918) in Europe, wireless transmission proved an invaluable military tool on land, sea, and air. Impressed by its strategic applications, and wary of its potential as an instrument of espionage and mass propaganda, U.S. president Woodrow Wilson banned nonmilitary broadcasting when the United States entered the war in 1917. Civilian equipment was confiscated under executive order, and regulatory power over broadcasting was transferred from the U.S. Department of Commerce to the Department of the Navy. The war also aided the development of radio technology, as governments on both sides of the conflict poured money into research. Armstrong, a decorated military pilot who served with U.S. forces in France, is credited with having made great improvements in air-to-ground and air-to-air radio systems.

The Golden age of Radio
Early evidence of a systematic scheme for broadcasting to the general public can be found in a 1916 memorandum written by David Sarnoff, an employee of Marconi's U.S. branch, which would become the Radio Corporation of America (now part of General Electric Company; see RCA Corporation). Sarnoff proposed “a plan of development which would make radio a household ‘utility’ in the same sense as the piano or phonograph.” Sarnoff's memo was not given serious consideration by Marconi management, and President Wilson’s suspension of nonmilitary broadcasting in 1917 made it impossible for the company to immediately explore Sarnoff's ideas. After World War I ended in 1918, however, several manufacturing companies in the United States began to explore and implement ideas for the mass-marketing of home radio receivers designed for casual use.
In an effort to boost radio sales in peacetime, the Westinghouse Electric Corporation (now CBS Corporation) of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, established what many historians consider the first commercially owned radio station to offer a schedule of programming to the general public. Known by the call letters KDKA, the station received its license in October 1920 and began service from a studio inside a canvas tent built on the roof of a Westinghouse factory. Frank Conrad, a radio hobbyist and veteran engineer with experience in civilian and military radio research, ran the project. Responsible for the station's programming as well as its technical operation, he aired various forms of entertainment, including recorded music generated by a phonograph placed before a microphone. KDKA charged no user fees to listeners and carried no paid advertisements; instead, the station was financed by Westinghouse to encourage people to buy home radio receivers.
Other manufacturers soon followed Westinghouse's example. The General Electric Company (GE) began broadcasting over station WGY, located at its corporate headquarters in Schenectady, New York. The chairman of RCA, Owen D. Young, gave Sarnoff permission to develop company sales of radios for home entertainment. Sarnoff soon opened stations in New York City and Washington, D.C., and in 1926 he began organizing the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), an RCA subsidiary created for the purpose of broadcasting programs via a nationwide network of stations.
Another important early broadcaster was the American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T, Inc.). Barred from manufacturing radios by the terms of its telephone antitrust exemptions, AT&T explored the possibilities of what the company called toll broadcasting (charging fees in return for airing commercial advertisements on its stations). The first known instance of an advertiser paying for a broadcast commercial took place in 1922, when AT&T accepted a fee from the Queensboro Corporation to air a 12-minute pitch for the sale of cooperative apartments on WEAF, the company’s New York City station. Fearing legal action by radio companies that might threaten its telephone franchises, however, AT&T sold its stations to RCA. In return for leaving the broadcasting business, AT&T was granted the exclusive right to provide the connections that would link local stations around the country to the NBC network.
The sale of radios more than justified the expense of operating broadcasting services for RCA, GE, Westinghouse, and other radio set manufacturers. According to estimates by the National Association of Broadcasters, in 1922 there were 60,000 households in the United States with radios; by 1929 the number had topped 10 million. But increases in sales of radio receivers could not continue forever. Broadcasters needed a new incentive to produce and transmit programs once the home radio market matured. The sale of advertising time loomed as a promising growth area.
In Britain, and in the many countries that followed its lead, broadcasting was developing in a different way. Radio owners paid yearly license fees to the government, which were turned over directly to an independent state enterprise, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). The BBC in turn produced news and entertainment programming for its network of stations. The editorial and artistic integrity of the BBC was to be insured by its funding mechanism, which was designed to isolate it from immediate political pressures.
In the United States, on the other hand, it was widely accepted that broadcasting was a commercial enterprise that should pay its own way without government aid or interference. However, there was some opposition to the development of broadcasting as a primarily commercial medium. Herbert Hoover, who as secretary of commerce was in charge of broadcast regulation, expressed his disapproval of commercialism at the 1922 Radio Conference in Washington, D.C., saying he found it “inconceivable that we should allow so great a possibility for service and for news and for entertainment and education to be drowned in advertising chatter.” By the late 1920s, nonetheless, the direction of broadcasting as an industry, art, and technology in the United States had shifted decisively to mass distribution of popular culture funded by commercial advertising.
Noncommercial broadcasting would play only a minor role in the rise of American broadcasting. In the agricultural Midwest, state universities saw radio as a natural tool for broadcasting educational programming to rural areas, and schools such as the University of Iowa, Ohio State University, and the University of Wisconsin established stations supported with funds set aside by state legislatures. There would not be a coast-to-coast noncommercial radio network in the United States until the formation of National Public Radio (NPR) in 1970.
In 1927 RCA initiated two transcontinental radio services through NBC, its subsidiary: the Red Network (usually just called NBC) and the Blue Network. The Columbia Broadcasting System (see CBS Corporation) radio service was established in 1928. Originally launched by the Columbia Phonograph Record Company as a means of promoting its recording artists, it was saved from bankruptcy after less than a year of operation by the Paley family of Philadelphia. William S. Paley, who took charge of CBS, and David Sarnoff, who now headed NBC and its parent company (RCA), would become the two dominant personalities in the American broadcasting industry for the next 50 years. As the radio networks grew in size, they were able to bring a consistently high level of entertainment to even the most remote corners of the nation. In 1934 a group of nonnetwork (or independent) stations, led by WGN in Chicago, Illinois, and WOR in New York City, formed a cooperative programming and news venture, the Mutual Broadcasting System, to compete against the network programs of NBC and CBS stations.
By 1934 almost 600 radio stations were broadcasting to more than 20 million homes in the United States. The radio had emerged as a familiar household item, usually built into a substantial piece of wooden furniture placed in the family living room. It became the primary source for news and entertainment for much of the nation. Despite the Great Depression that affected the economy of the United States during the 1930s, American commercial radio broadcasting had grown to a $100-million industry by the middle of that decade.
Radio in World War II
Radio broadcasting reached its height in global influence and worldwide prestige during World War II (1939-1945), when it carried war news directly from the battlefront into the homes of millions of listeners. This conflict became, in many ways, a “radio war.” American commentator Edward R. Murrow created a sensation with his eyewitness descriptions of street scenes in London during German bombing raids, delivering these accounts from the rooftop of the city’s CBS news bureau. American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt had often used radio to bypass the press and directly address the American people with his so-called fireside chats during the Great Depression, and he continued to do so throughout the war. The radio speeches of German leader Adolf Hitler helped set the conditions for war and genocide in Europe, and the radio appeal from Japanese emperor Hirohito to his nation for unconditional surrender helped end World War II following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.