II.

History

In the last quarter of the 19th century many scientists were attempting to transmit messages over distances without wires. They were not searching for a means of mass-communication, but simply exploring the possibility of using electromagnetic waves in order to communicate between two fixed points. Nevertheless, the history of “wireless” communication eventually became largely the history of broadcasting.

Radio had no single inventor, but grew out of several international developments. The pioneers of radio drew on the work of the British physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who published his theory of electromagnetic waves in 1873. However, it was the German physicist Heinrich Rudolf Hertz who first generated such waves electrically. Hertz managed to create an oscillating electric discharge, which radiated some of its energy in the form of electromagnetic waves. However, the waves produced were incapable of travelling great distances, and the problem of creating effective transmitters and receivers remained.

A.

Marconi

It was the Italian electrical engineer and inventor Guglielmo Marconi who then took the most significant steps, combining technical inventiveness with business acumen. He succeeded in developing both a suitable receiver, or “coherer”, and an improved spark oscillator, which was connected to a crude but effective antenna to transmit radio waves over significant distances. His transmitter was modulated with an ordinary telegraph key, and a crude amplification relay activated a telegraphic instrument at the receiving end.

In 1896 Marconi transmitted signals for a distance exceeding 1.6 km (1 mi) and applied for his first British patent. Within a year of his first demonstration he transmitted signals from shore to a ship at sea 29 km (18 mi) away. In 1899 he established commercial communication between England and France, and in 1901 he succeeded in sending a simple message across the Atlantic. He had demonstrated that radio waves could travel beyond the horizon, and had used his flair for the dramatic to bring the concept of radio to the attention of governmental agencies and business interests.

B.

Transmission of Sound

This was still only wireless telegraphy (the transmission of signals) rather than wireless telephony (the transmission of sound itself). However, on Christmas Eve in 1906 an American, Reginald Fessenden, managed to transmit both speech and music over several hundred miles out to sea from the Massachusetts coast. Over the next few years other demonstrations followed in the United States, Britain, and Europe.

The creation of the “vacuum tube oscillator” helped the steady transition from telegraphy to telephony, since it provided a continuous signal that was effective for transmitting speech, rather than just the short bursts of radio waves generated for early telegraphic messages.

It was, however, the development of the radio valve that proved to be crucial in advancing the transition from wireless to broadcasting. In 1904 the British electrical engineer John Ambrose Fleming experimented with the first thermionic two-electrode valve, or diode; a triode was created by the American Lee de Forest by inserting a third electrode into the valve. This device meant that a weak signal could be amplified. More sensitive wireless receivers could now be made, and radio-telephone messages picked up at far greater distances than had earlier been thought possible.

C.

World War I and the 1920s

The combination of continuous signals being sent out from transmitters and more sensitive receivers laid the technical basis for more wide-scale listening, but there was in the pre-World War I years still little appreciation of the medium’s social possibilities. Radio was thought of at this stage as a private means of point-to-point communication, rather than a more public means of mass communication: the very fact that signals were broadcast, reaching anyone with a receiver, rather than remaining confidential between the transmitter and the particular individual being addressed, was seen as a sign of the technology’s primitiveness.

The first significant users of radio—coastal, marine, army, and intelligence services—were, however, content with this approach. Indeed, World War I, with both British and German forces using radio to communicate to naval forces from the outset, and governments commandeering all wireless stations, seemed to entrench this pattern. World War I also stimulated technical research, boosted large-scale production of the thermionic valve, and introduced many soldiers, sailors, and airmen to radio. When these people were demobilized after 1918, the small and scattered bands of home enthusiasts with primitive receivers of their own were joined by a new and bigger wave of wireless “amateurs”, who began to show the social possibilities of radio as a medium of mass communication.

In the interwar years, cinema and popular newspapers were already providing ever larger numbers of people with entertainment and information on a national scale. Contemporaries noted a breaking down of barriers between classes and geographical areas. Individuals were being conceived of in large numbers as “masses”, and this meant mass markets for all sorts of consumer goods. So when the early wireless amateurs demanded something to listen to, companies such as Marconi in Britain and the General Electric Company and Westinghouse in America were keen to move beyond fitful and experimental broadcasts in order to stimulate a market for mass-produced radio receivers.

D.

Birth of the BBC

In 1920 the first true radio station (KDKA) began regular broadcasting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the United States. Within two years the number of stations in America reached into the hundreds, concerts were being broadcast regularly in Europe from The Hague, and in Britain, Marconi stations broadcast from Chelmsford, Essex, and then London.

It was in Britain that fears over the “chaos of the ether” led to the Post Office and leading radio manufacturers setting up the British Broadcasting Company (BBC). The first programmes by the BBC were broadcast in November 1922. In 1926 it changed from a company into a public corporation, with a monopoly of broadcasting in the country. By this time, radio manufacturing in America had for a brief period been growing faster than the car-making industry, and the number of listeners on both sides of the Atlantic ran into many millions. Radio had moved rapidly from being an attic experiment to a household utility.

E.

Propaganda

Indeed, it was the perceived power of the medium of radio to influence public opinion that shaped the development of international broadcasting. Its potential as a tool of propaganda was recognized instantly by the Nazis, who described radio as “the most modern, the strongest, and the most revolutionary weapon which we possess in the battle against an extinct world”. Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, Josef Goebbels, controlled the operations both of the national German broadcasting organization RRG, and of a whole range of so-called “black” stations, that pretended to come from behind enemy lines. He sought most famously to demoralize British listeners through William Joyce’s “Lord Haw-Haw” broadcasts from Hamburg, now remembered by their opening catchphrase “Germany calling, Germany calling”. The broadcasts succeeded in attracting a sizeable and regular audience, and at least one BBC official felt moved to warn that Nazi broadcasts in English were having some effect. Most other German radio propaganda was generally too crude to be effective.

F.

Post-War Developments

FM broadcasting and cheap, portable receivers were important developments that ensured radio’s survival just at the time when the rival medium of television had its biggest impact. The introduction of regular television broadcasts, falteringly by the BBC in Britain in 1936, and then more systematically on both sides of the Atlantic after World War II, ensured its displacement as the major mass medium of the 20th century. Until radio found new roles and new ways of reaching people, it faced a period of decline: between 1949 and 1958 the BBC’s average evening radio audience fell from just under 9 million to below 3.5 million listeners; during the same period, radio stations in the United States saw their earnings halved.