However, these stations did not advertise in a way that the modern radio listener would recognize. This same groundbreaking group also made the first known attempt at television drama in 1928 (McLeod, 1998).īusinesses such as department stores, which often had their own stations, first put radio’s commercial applications to use. The WGY players created their own scripts and performed them live on air. As early as 1922, Schenectady, New York’s WGY broadcast over 40 original dramas, showing radio’s potential as a medium for drama. Many of these stations developed regular programming that included religious sermons, sports, and news (White). De Forest gave nightly broadcasts of music and news until World War I halted all transmissions for private citizens (White).Īfter the World War I radio ban lifted with the close of the conflict in 1919, a number of small stations began operating using technologies that had developed during the war. Ten years later, Lee de Forest used radio in a more modern sense when he set up an experimental radio station, 2XG, in New York City. In 1906, Massachusetts resident Reginald Fessenden initiated the first radio transmission of the human voice, but his efforts did not develop into a useful application (Grant, 1907). This service allowed subscribers to listen to specific music recordings on their telephones (White). In 1909, this innovation emerged in the United States as a pay-per-play phonograph service in Wilmington, Delaware (White). Around this time, telephones also transmitted opera performances from Paris to London. In Budapest, Hungary, for example, a subscription service allowed individuals to listen to news reports and fictional stories on their telephones (White). As early as the 1880s, people relied on telephones to transmit news, music, church sermons, and weather reports.
Wireless technology made radio as it is known today possible, but its modern, practical function as a mass communication medium had been the domain of other technologies for some time. This regulation also gave the president the power to shut down all stations, a power notably exercised in 1917 upon the United States’ entry into World War I to keep amateur radio operators from interfering with military use of radio waves for the duration of the war (White). Amateur radio operators quickly crowded the airwaves, broadcasting messages to anyone within range and, by 1912, incurred government regulatory measures that required licenses and limited broadcast ranges for radio operation (White). The technology needed to build a radio transmitter and receiver was relatively simple, and the knowledge to build such devices soon reached the public. However, the potential for broadcasting-sending messages to a large group of potential listeners-wasn’t realized until later in the development of the medium. Early radios acted as devices for naval ships to communicate with other ships and with land stations the focus was on person-to-person communication. When Marconi popularized wireless technology, contemporaries initially viewed it as a way to allow the telegraph to function in places that could not be connected by cables. By the 1870s, telegraph technology had been used to develop the telephone, which could transmit an individual’s voice over the same cables used by its predecessor. Cables across the Atlantic Ocean connected even the far-distant United States and England using this technology.
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The telegraph communicated messages through a series of long and short clicks. In fact, long-distance electronic communication has existed since the middle of the 19th century. Guglielmo Marconi developed an early version of the wireless radio.
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