The Broadcast Century and Beyond

The Roaring 20s

The 1920s began with an era of prosperity and high hopes as America emerged victorious from the First World War. By the end of the decade, the stock market crash and crushing poverty for many created a new sober society and a sharp contrast with the exuberance of the early twenties. Experiments in broadcasting were taking place around the country but station 8XK is generally considered to be among the first important stations to sign on (click here for Jeff Miller’s AM radio chronology). Frank Conrad, a Westinghouse engineer, broadcast the election returns of the Harding-Cox election and KDKA was born. KDKA is special because it provided broadcasting with a number of radio ‘firsts’, including the first religious services and first broadcast of a Presidential inaugural address.

Commercial radio began when WEAF, AT&T’s flagship station in New York, accepted money to advertise real estate in Flushing, New York. Follow the WEAF link, From Hawthorne to Hard-Sell, for Elizabeth McLeod’s essay describing how AT&T started. AT&T wanted to start a ‘toll broadcasting network’ that they called a National Radio Broadcasting System. Read the ad that ran in Science and Invention (1922) courtesy of Thomas White’s site U.S. Early American Radio History.

During the early 1920s, experimenters made their own radios by buying parts and assembling them. A World of Wireless has a picture and schematic of a cat’s whiskers radio. Back then you could order the parts from classified ads in the back of Boy’s Life magazine. This was the beginning of the ‘jazz age.’ It was truly exciting for teens who built their own radios to hear the new sounds of jazz and swing. If you want to know more about the history of jazz, try this brief history.

AT&T started to explore the physics of acoustics during this period. Many inventions such as the condenser microphone, stereophonic sound, the dynamic loudspeaker and the electronic cutting head for making records were outgrowths of Bell Lab’s work in broadcasting (from Recording Technology History Notes).

RCA was created as a patent sharing consortium after the war and it licensed the patents and resources it gained from American Marconi, General Electric, Westinghouse, AT&T and other members of the patent pool. RCA also took over the worldwide communication functions of American Marconi but it was also experimenting with broadcasting. In 1926, NBC was formed when RCA bought WEAF in New York from AT&T. NBC quickly found a place in many homes. Less than a year after its start, NBC had two networks (red and blue) in operation. RCA also developed research labs, now called Sarnoff Labs, as a means of providing protection to the key patent technology the company inherited.

Radio grew quickly during the middle and late twenties. The lack of regulation over the nascent industry led to interference problems. In February, the government passed the Radio Act of 1927 which created a regulatory body, The Federal Radio Commission, to oversee radio regulation. The Commission has come under fire for its lack of crisp decision making.