From private signals to public programs
The first wireless systems were not meant to entertain anyone. They were a way to send messages without wires, usually in the dots and dashes of Morse code, between two known points such as a ship and a shore station. Anyone who could hear the signal could in principle read it, but nobody thought of that as an audience. Wireless was treated as a rival to the cable and the electric telegraph, not as a medium for the living room.
Two technical changes opened the door to something different. The first was the vacuum tube, developed in the early 1900s by several inventors and refined over the following decade, which made it practical to amplify weak signals and to generate steady radio waves. The second was the use of those waves to carry the human voice and music instead of a simple on-off code. Reginald Fessenden is often credited with early voice transmissions in the first years of the 1900s, and a widely repeated story places a Christmas Eve 1906 broadcast at Brant Rock, Massachusetts. The details of that story are disputed, and historians treat it with caution. What is clear is that by the 1910s experimenters, including many amateurs, were sending speech and records over the air.
Experiments, amateurs and the war
Before World War I, thousands of hobbyists built their own transmitters and receivers, often with homemade parts. The sinking of the Titanic in 1912 drew attention to wireless as a safety tool, and governments began to license operators and assign wavelengths. During the war, the military took over much of the field, and civilian use was restricted in many countries. When restrictions lifted, there was a large pool of trained operators, surplus equipment, and public curiosity.
Early listeners usually used a crystal set, a simple receiver that needed no battery or amplifier and was heard through headphones. Tube sets with loudspeakers followed, and by the mid-1920s a radio was a piece of furniture that a whole family could gather around.
The first broadcasting stations
Several stations in different countries claim early or first status, and the answer depends on what counts as regular, licensed, public broadcasting. In the United States, KDKA in Pittsburgh is often cited for its broadcast of the 1920 presidential election returns in November of that year, though other stations, including one in Detroit, were also on the air around the same time. In Britain, the Marconi company made experimental broadcasts from Chelmsford in 1920, and the British Broadcasting Company began daily service in 1922. Similar stations appeared in Canada, Argentina, France, Germany and elsewhere through the early 1920s.
The early business model was unclear. Equipment makers wanted programs so they could sell receivers. Department stores, newspapers and universities launched stations for publicity. In Britain, a license fee on receivers funded the service, and the BBC became a public corporation in 1927. In the United States, advertising gradually became the main source of money, with sponsors attaching their names to programs.
What people heard
Programming in the 1920s began with whatever was easy to supply: live music from small studios, speeches, church services, sports and weather reports. Newspapers were at first wary, since radio could deliver election results and breaking stories faster than print. Over time, stations developed regular schedules.
- Music ranged from dance bands and orchestras to opera excerpts and country performers, and radio helped regional styles reach distant listeners. It also contributed to a shared popular music sound that was no longer tied to a single city.
- News bulletins grew into daily reports, and live coverage of events brought speeches and ceremonies into homes.
- Drama and comedy developed their own craft, using voices, music and sound effects to build scenes the listener imagined.
- Serials and variety shows gave listeners a reason to tune in at the same time each week.
Networks transformed this picture. NBC began linking stations by telephone lines in 1926, and CBS followed in 1927, which let one studio feed programs to many cities. Regulation followed too: in the United States, the Radio Act of 1927 created the Federal Radio Commission to assign frequencies and reduce interference among crowded stations.
Radio as a shared experience
By the 1930s, radio was a daily habit in much of the industrialized world. Presidents and prime ministers used it to speak directly to the public, and the “fireside chats” given by Franklin D. Roosevelt starting in 1933 are a well-known example. A 1938 dramatization of a science-fiction novel by Orson Welles became famous for the stories of listeners who mistook it for news, although historians debate how widespread the panic really was.
Radio also changed other industries. Record sales, live concerts and the film business all had to adapt to a medium that delivered entertainment free at the moment of broadcast. Recording improved with magnetic tape, which broadcasters adopted widely after World War II and which allowed programs to be edited and replayed instead of performed live twice. Advertising developed new forms, from jingles to sponsored shows, and the idea of a “prime time” audience started here before it moved on to television broadcasting.
After the golden age
When television arrived in the late 1940s and 1950s, many of the most popular radio programs and stars moved to the new screen. Radio shifted toward music, news and talk, with local personalities and disc jockeys. Portable transistor receivers, appearing commercially in the 1950s, took radio out of the living room and into cars, pockets and beaches. FM and later satellite and internet delivery added new ways to listen, but the basic pattern of scheduled audio reaching a wide audience dates from the 1920s.
The history of radio broadcasting has no single inventor and no single starting day. It was assembled from the work of scientists, engineers, amateurs and companies, and the choice of which moment to call the beginning depends on whether you mean the science, the first voice transmission, or the first regular schedule of programs.