Genesis to 1920
In these early moments of the 21st century we tend to be surprised from time to time when we read a current news story about a “broadcast pioneer” or hear a radio interview or see a television program with one of the men or women who were involved at the very beginning of broadcasting. For most people—that is, anyone under 75 years of age—radio seems to have been around forever. For people not yet 40, the same seems to be true for television. Many of us are sometimes startled to learn that the not-too-old-looking grayheaded person we have seen in a TV interview or met in person is a television pioneer.
But when we consider that the first radio station in the United States was licensed by the federal government in 1921 and full commercial television operation authorized in 1941, we realize that broadcasting is, indeed, a 20th-century phenomenon.
Like all new inventions, however, neither radio nor television blossomed full grown out of the ether. As many inventors have said, they “stand on the shoulders” of those who preceded them. Each new discovery is based, either directly or indirectly, on previous work in a similar area of endeavor. Samuel F. B. Morse’s wire telegraph in 1835 led to Alexander Graham Bell’s wire telephone in 1875, which, in turn, set the stage for Guglielmo Marconi’s wireless, or radio, telegraph in 1895. The next logical step was a wireless telephone. No one knows for certain when the first human voice was communicated over the airwaves, but the predecessor of modern radio is frequently attributed to Reginald A. Fessenden’s work in 1906, with an acknowledgment to Nathan B. Stubblefield’s experimental transmissions as early as 1892. Finally, it took Lee de Forest’s invention in 1906 of the audion, a tube that could amplify the signal for distance broadcasting purposes, to make possible the development of radio as we know it today. De Forest is generally considered the “father” of American radio.
But even de Forest didn’t do it alone. His successes were dependent on the earlier work of the American inventor Thomas Alva Edison and the English engineer Sir John A. Fleming, and on dozens of other scientists—such as James Clerk Maxwell and Heinrich Hertz—before them. The groundwork for radio and television was laid in the 19th century.
The Ancients to the 21st Century
There has always been a need for mass communication. When the first caveman or cavewoman danced the first dance, it was for the purpose of conveying an event, an idea, or a warning to a group of cave dwellers. Cave drawings, many of which are considered artistic, did not have art as a purpose. They were meant to tell something to others. Distance communication to a group of persons has been sought throughout history: fire and smoke signals, drums, sunlight reflection, musical instruments, gunfire. War has always been a progenitor of inventions for distance communication. The Argonauts conveyed messages from their ships by using different sail colors. Julius Caesar constructed high towers at intervals so that sentinels could shout messages along the route; some historians estimate that a communication passed along by this means could progress 150 miles in only a few hours.
The ancient Greeks developed a system of signaling between ships by using flags. In medieval times, when gunpowder became a key ingredient of warfare, the number and frequency of cannon fire were translated into signals. When a town came under attack, the populace was warned through the ringing of bells. Trumpets were used as signals into the 20th century. The heliograph was used extensively for centuries, reflecting sunlight off a mirrored surface as far as 7 miles.
Native Americans used puffs of smoke to send information. Later they would use broadcast signals.
Native Americans used puffs of smoke during the day and torches and flaming arrows at night to send information. One of the most important pre-electronic distance information systems was the semaphore, an ancient Roman device redeveloped by Claude Chappe in France in 1794; the French government erected towers 5 miles apart and placed huge cross arms at the top of each. The semaphore continued to be used even after the inventions of the telegraph and telephone. In some parts of the world, carrier pigeons are still used as message carriers over long distances.
As early as 1267, the basic concept of using what we now know as electricity for conveying messages was suggested by the English philosopher Roger Bacon—who was promptly imprisoned for allegedly advocating “black magic.” Three hundred years later, in Italy, Giovanni Battista della Porta was ridiculed after writing a book on “natural magic” in which he proposed that magnetism could be used to transmit information. It wasn’t until the late 18th century that the notion of electricity as a useful tool was accepted, due to such inventions as the Leyden jar and to Benjamin Franklin’s experiments with lightning. The late 18th and early 19th centuries saw seminal discoveries in the nature of electricity by physicists all over the world, including Michael Faraday in England, André Ampère in France, George Ohm in Germany, and Count Alessandro Volta in Italy. The last three names are immortalized as standard terms for electric functions today.
Samuel F. B. Morse’s invention of the electromagnetic telegraph in 1835 opened the door to the distance communications of today. It took 6 years of struggle and rejection, however, before a grant from Congress in 1841 to run a telegraph line between Washington, DC, and Baltimore established the acceptance of the telegraph. Its success in conveying the results of the Democratic National Convention in 1844 enabled Morse to raise enough private funds to extend the telegraph to Philadelphia and New York, and within a few years telegraph systems had been constructed into other parts of the country. In 1861 Western Union built the first transcontinental telegraph line. During this same period, in 1842, Morse proved that distant signals could be sent underwater, as well, and in 1866, after a number of unsuccessful tries, Cyrus W. Field established a transatlantic underwater cable between Europe and the United States, linked in Newfoundland.
The importance of these new techniques for distance communication was reflected in the government’s assumption of regulatory powers. The Post Roads Act of 1866 authorized the postmaster general to fix rates annually for telegrams sent by the government. In 1887 the government authorized the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to require telegraph companies to interconnect their lines for more extended public service.
The transmission of voice messages by wire—as differentiated from the dit-dah signals of the telegraph—did not come about until 1876, when Alexander Graham Bell was credited with the invention of the telephone when, on March 10, he uttered these famous words over a wire to an associate: “Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.” The first regular telephone line was constructed in 1877, between Boston and Somerville, in Massachusetts.
But even the great Bell stood on the shoulders of those who came before. Decades earlier, scientists such as G. G. Page, Charles Borseul, and Philip Reis were experimenting with the electromagnetic transmission of sound. In 1837, for example, Reis discovered that the magnetization and demagnetization of an iron bar could cause the emission of sounds. Some historians credit Reis with the initial development of the principle of the telephone. With the founding of the Bell Telephone Company in 1878 and the incorporation of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) in 1885, the growth of distance communication in America was assured.
Yet the telephone was not immediately praised or even accepted. Just as with later inventions, such as television, the telephone created visions of control of the masses and invasions of privacy. A cartoon in the New York Daily Graphic of March 15, 1877, for example, illustrated what the artist called the “terrors of the telephone” by showing a speaker at a telephonelike device mesmerizing masses of people listening simultaneously throughout the world. Of course, the opposite was also present: cartoons, articles, and even popular songs lauded the potential wonders of the telephone, including the distance dissemination to mass audiences of music, information, drama, and education, precisely what radio broadcasting was initially lauded for when it began. In fact, in 1881 a French engineer, Clément Ader, filed a patent for “Improvements of Telephone Equipment in Theaters” for the purpose of putting telephones on theater stages so that subscribers could hear the performances at home. Ader’s Paris Opera Experiment was an example of wired broadcast transmission.
Even before wired voice transmission came into use, scientists were seeking means of wireless transmission. In 1864 a Scottish physicist, James Clerk Maxwell, predicted the existence of radio waves—that is, waves on which communication signals could be carried, similar to the signals that could be carried over telegraph wires.
This area of study became known as electromagnetic theory. As early as 1872, a patent for nonradiation wireless was obtained in the United States by Mahlon Loomis, and in that same decade William Cookes developed the first cathode-ray tube. But actual distance transmission still hadn’t been invented. In 1887 theory turned into reality when a German physicist, Heinrich Rudolf Hertz, projected rapid variations of electric current into space in the form of radio waves similar to those of light and heat. In 1892 he sent electric waves around an oscillating (regularly fluctuating) circuit. So important were Hertz’s contributions that his name has been adopted as the measure of all radio frequencies.
James Clerk Maxwell theorized the existence of electromagnetic waves.
Courtesy David Sarnoff Library.
Although aural transmission was still being perfected, even back in the 1880s scientists were experimenting with visual transmission potentials that 40 years later would turn into television. In 1880 a Frenchman, Maurice Lablance, developed the principle of scanning, in which an image is converted to electric signals by a line-by-line registration of its features. This principle would become the basis for video technology. A German scientist, Paul Nipkow, implemented this principle in 1884 by designing the first mechanical scanning disk. Before the end of the century, in 1897, the German physicist Karl Ferdinand Braun produced a cathode-ray oscilloscope that could visually observe electric signals—but that would take a backseat to radio.
It is the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi who is credited with the first successful demonstration of the wireless, or radio, telegraph. In 1895 he sent and received a radio signal, and in 1899 showed that it could be done at a distance, across the English Channel. Later that year Marconi came to the United States to report the America’s Cup yacht race by wireless for the New York Herald, and while here he formed the American Marconi Telegraph Company, which would later prove to be a key power in the establishment of radio stations. That same year, 1899, the U.S. Navy tried out wireless communication.
During the same period, an immigrant to America from Serbia, Nikola Tesla, invented the system of alternating current and experimented with various forms of wireless transmission. One of the world’s greatest inventors in the last of the 19th and the early 20th centuries, he has been largely neglected by historians. In fact, Marconi received the Nobel Prize for an invention that appeared to be adapted directly from a prior Tesla invention. Eventually, in 1943, Tesla was legally recognized as the inventor of radio transmission, his early patents given precedence over Marconi’s.
Radio broadcasting, however, was still some years off. As noted earlier, some attribute the first wireless transmission of a human voice to the inventor Nathan B. Stubblefield, who in 1892 spoke the words “Hello, Rainey” to an assistant a distance away in an experiment near the town of Murray, Kentucky. Yet the basis for AM radio is the electron tube, and it is generally assumed that at the time of Stubblefield’s experiments it had not yet been invented, and that Stubblefield used both induction and conduction at very low frequencies. Although in 1883 Thomas Alva Edison had observed the emission of electrons from a heated surface, such as a tube’s cathode, the discovery of the electron is credited to the British researcher Sir J. J. Thomson for a series of experiments he conducted in the 1890s. Nevertheless, further steps, specifically an electron tube and amplification, were necessary before the electron could be used for broadcasting. Sir John A. Fleming and Lee de Forest took those steps some years later. De Forest, noted earlier as the father of American radio, presaged the future as the 19th century came to an end. In 1899, in his doctoral dissertation at Yale University, de Forest wrote on the spread of the radio waves discovered in the preceding decade by Heinrich Hertz. It took yet another decade to enter the Broadcast Century.
Guglielmo Marconi was the first to successfully demonstrate the wireless telegraph.
Courtesy RCA.
The First Decade, 1900–1909: The Wireless Arrives
The first decade of the 20th century saw a rapid advancement in the inventions, business organization, university experiments, and citizen interest required to make radio a reality. Several names—Fessenden, de Forest, Fleming, and Marconi—were principally responsible for the development of broadcast radio before the end of the decade.
At the same time that a Canadian, Reginald A. Fessenden—who was later to be credited with the first true radio broadcast—was working for the U.S. Weather Bureau to experiment with disseminating weather information by wireless, Marconi was setting up an experiment that would get worldwide headlines and become a significant spur to further radio development. In 1901 Marconi and his assistant, George Kemp, listened to a telephone receiver on top of a hill in Saint John’s, Newfoundland, and heard the Morse code signal of three dots, for the letter S, which was being transmitted from Cornwall, England, more than 2000 miles away. That same year the U.S. Navy, influenced by Marconi’s previous successes, replaced its visual signaling and homing pigeons with the wireless telegraph. Other U.S. government agencies, including the army and the Department of Agriculture, conducted experimental operations with the wireless.
Marconi’s wireless audio crosses the Atlantic in 1901.
John Ambrose Fleming, developer of the diode tube.
Ships of various nations adopted the wireless, and its success at protecting life and property became so widespread throughout the world that in 1903 an international conference was held in Berlin to discuss common distress-call signs for ships and to promote wireless communication between ship and shore—which was not yet in practice—as well as between ships. A few years later the international distress signal, SOS, was adopted and remains in use today.
The next goal was to transmit the human voice comparable distances over the wireless. Both de Forest and Fessenden were confident that it was possible to do so. In 1902 each established a communications business: Fessenden’s National Electric Signaling Company and de Forest’s Wireless Telegraph Company. Fessenden believed it was necessary to go beyond Marconi’s basic approach, and instead of a wave interrupted with intermittent impositions, he advocated a continuous wave on which modulations would be superimposed. He had demonstrated in 1901 that it could be done, and in 1902 he developed an electrolytic detector. Two years later, in England, the engineer Sir John A. Fleming developed the glass-bulb detector, which was a simple electron tube, a diode, that was necessary to receive voice signals. But the diode couldn’t amplify the electronic signals.
Other experimenters were engaged by the wireless. A professor at the University of Graz in Austria, Otto Nussbaumer, was doing almost the same thing as Fessenden and Fleming. He invented a detector circuit that peeled off the sound at the receiving end, enabling him to send sounds rather than just dots and dashes. Using an experimental transmitter, he yodeled an Austrian folk song that was heard in the next room, ostensibly the first “music” ever transmitted by wireless. But he, too, lacked the means for amplification necessary for true broadcasting.
De Forest took the next step. He added a third element, or grid, to the Fleming vacuum tube and in 1906 filed a patent for his tube, calling it the audion. This “triode” tube enabled the signal to be amplified, making possible distant voice transmission over the wireless, and ushered in the age of radio. The following year, de Forest formed the de Forest Radio Telephone Company, which began broadcasting in New York. An entry in his diary that year stated: “My present task is to distribute sweet melody broadcast over the city and sea so that in time even the marine far out across the silent waves may hear the music of his homeland.”*
The de Forest audion tube made radio broadcasting possible.
Diagram showing the construction of a typical crystal detector of the 1920s.
But Fessenden had already beaten de Forest to it. Using a high-frequency alternator, on Christmas Eve in 1906, radio operators on ships in the Atlantic Ocean hundreds of miles off the U.S. coast heard something unprecedented on their earphone receivers: a person speaking, then a woman singing, then someone reading a poem, followed by a violin solo, and verses from the Bible. Imagine the surprise of the wireless operators, accustomed as they were to the familiar click and clack of the telegraph, when they heard voices and music emanating from their receiving apparatus. Transmitting from Brant Rock, Massachusetts, Fessenden himself played the violin and read from the Bible. He ended by wishing his audience a Merry Christmas and promising to broadcast again on New Year’s Eve. This was the first distance radio broadcast.
De Forest, however, ultimately got the most acclaim. Before the decade ended, he had established himself as the foremost practitioner of radio. In 1908 he and his wife, Nora Blatch, broadcast from the Eiffel Tower in Paris and were heard as far as 500 miles away using a high-frequency arc, not a vacuum tube. They returned to the United States as celebrities. Technically, reasons had been established for stations to begin surfacing around the country, although the apparatus of the medium had not yet fully evolved.
But distance broadcasting was not yet to be. First, where would the backing come from? It would be more than a dozen years before the concept of advertising would establish the economic base for broadcasting.
Second, what would be the purpose of a radio station except for experimental purposes? Who would listen? The general public had no receivers, although there was growing interest by citizens who began to seek transmissions from the experimental stations through homemade crystal detectors that had been developed in 1906. Three entities were most interested in radio: the pioneers, who wanted to see their inventions reach their ultimate potentials; physics, engineering, and other science departments in colleges and universities, which added the study of this new electronic phenomenon to their courses; and the maritime service, through which radio received its greatest boost in the early years of the next decade.
Two significant events occurred in 1909. First, a steamship, the SS Republic, sank after a collision at sea, but most of the people on board were saved with the help of the wireless. Second, Charles D. “Doc” Herrold, an engineer who had been involved in some of the early experiments with radio transmission, and his wife, Sybil, began broadcasting over a transmitter he had built in San Jose, California. Although some historians say that Herrold’s station, ultimately called KQW, is the country’s oldest, it did not broadcast to the general public on a regular schedule; that designation is acknowledged to belong to KDKA in Pittsburgh, which did so more than a decade later.
The Second Decade, 1910–1919: Toward the Radio Music Box
Few new inventions have taken as much time as radio did to become exploited or made available to the general public. Despite the fact that by 1910 the technical development of radio was nearly advanced enough to warrant the establishment of stations nationwide, it didn’t happen then. For one thing, the medium still lacked a fully developed vacuum tube. For another, many people continued to think of radio primarily for point-to-point information exchange, and general understanding of its value for broader purposes took a little more time. Perhaps the continuing preparation during this decade guaranteed radio’s immediate success when regular broadcasting finally began in 1920. Throughout the decade, innovative applications of wireless voice distance transmission added more and more proof of radio’s potentials.
It was de Forest who began the decade with the most dramatic demonstration. Building on Clément Ader’s attempt at the Paris Opera almost 30 years before, de Forest hung a microphone over the stage of New York’s Metropolitan Opera House, set up his arc transmitter backstage, and strung an antenna on the roof, using a long fishing pole as a mast. Because few individual members of the public had radio sets, de Forest put receivers in several public locations in New York. While, as the New York Times reported, interference “kept the homeless song waves from finding themselves,” the experiment was considered successful. Some people at various distances had heard parts of Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci with the voices of Emmy Dustin and Enrico Caruso, the latter the greatest singer of the time and arguably of all time. This event further spurred the interest of budding engineers and amateurs in radio, and whetted the public appetite for what could come.
Radio pioneer Lee de Forest sends a message over his wireless apparatus, a radiotelephone.
Courtesy Smithsonian Institution.
Only two suppliers were making radio parts available, but nonprofessionals bought tubes, transmitters, and antennas and began sending out signals. Radio was an oddity, to some equivalent to a circus sideshow, and in fact wireless demonstrations became attractions at fairgrounds. Department stores, as a means of attracting customers, had radio demonstrations. Radio was like a toy, a hobby, and amateurs soon found that in some areas there were so many signals that they were interfering with one another.
Governments realized the significance of the new device and understood the value of wireless radio for health and safety. Its use in the maritime services had resulted in several international conferences to establish common practices, but because the United States had not yet become a signatory to the agreements of a second Berlin conference—held in London in 1906, following the first one in 1903—the international community withdrew an invitation for the United States to attend the third conference, scheduled for 1912. Congress then quickly enacted the Wireless Ship Act of 1910, the first legislation dealing with radio, which adopted the international regulations.
Two years later, the tragedy of the Titanic emphasized the importance of wireless radio. Although the luxury liner had received wireless warnings that icebergs were in its path, its radio operator refused to heed the warnings, telling the other operators to clear the air so that he could complete sending personal messages from the ship’s passengers to Europe and America. After the Titanic hit an iceberg and began to sink, SOS signals were sent; however, most operators on nearby ships had gone off watch and only the Carpathia responded to the SOS and saved many lives.
Diagram of a detector, serving as an element in a 1911 receiving set.
The Titanic disaster proved once and for all the worth of wireless radio for safety purposes. As the now disputed legend has it, it also provided a young wireless operator at the Wanamaker Department Store in New York with the publicity and impetus to later mold American broadcasting into his image. Legend has it that 21-year-old David Sarnoff picked up a signal that the Titanic had run into an iceberg, and that he stayed on duty for 72 hours, informing authorities and passengers’ families and friends of what was occurring. Although it is generally accepted that once Sarnoff learned of the disaster, he did stay at the Wanamaker store wireless for 3 days, there is some question as to when and how he heard of the sinking, inasmuch as it happened after the store had been closed for the day and took place more than 1000 miles away, beyond the accepted range of radio signals at the time.
Nevertheless, Sarnoff was able to follow up on the publicity he received and became a pioneer and a leader in the growth of the new medium.
The wireless helps save lives and makes the front page.
Courtesy the New York Times.
On the governmental side, the Berlin International Radio Telegraphic Convention met in London that year, 1912, and enacted regulations to further wireless conformity and compatibility, including the assignment of call letters for radio stations and the establishment of radio regulations by each signatory country. To comply, the United States enacted the Radio Act of 1912, generally considered to be the forerunner of later regulatory acts—the Radio Act of 1927 and the Communications Act of 1934. Many consider it to be the first law in this country—the 1910 Wireless Ship Act notwithstanding—to regulate radio communications. The Radio Act of 1912 dealt with the character of emissions and the transmission of distress calls, set aside certain frequencies for government use, and established licensing of wireless stations and operators, placing implementation under the Secretary of Commerce and Labor. The act stated, in part,
that a person, company or corporation within the jurisdiction of the United States shall not use or operate any apparatus for radio communication … except under and in accordance with a license … granted by the Secretary of Commerce and Labor … that every such license shall be in such form as the Secretary … shall determine and shall contain restrictions … that every such license shall be issued only to citizens of the United States … shall specify the ownership and location of the station … to enable its range to be estimated … shall state the purpose of the station … shall state the wavelength … authorized for use by the station for the prevention of interference and the hours for which the station is licensed to work.
The science and business of radio developed simultaneously. In 1913 a young radio amateur, Edwin H. Armstrong, developed a feedback, or regenerative, circuit that greatly increased amplification; he patented the circuit the following year. (Years later, Armstrong would become better known as the inventor of frequency modulation, or FM, radio.) At the same time, the infamous radio “patent wars” were beginning. In 1913 AT&T, seeking to establish a wireless monopoly, began to buy up some of de Forest’s patents. In 1914 the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company sued the De Forest Radio Telephone Company over rights to the audion tube. Elements of the device—incorporating discoveries by Edison, Fleming, and de Forest—were partly owned by both companies. A court decision in 1916 left neither of the then-principal litigants, Marconi and AT&T, in control of the audion. Even the new Armstrong regenerative circuit patent was challenged—by de Forest. Patent litigation served to tie up the development of radio for years.
Engineering achievements, however, moved on. In 1915 AT&T transmitted the human voice across the continent for the first time, using repeater stations between New York and San Francisco, generating sound waves through small equipment at each repeater site. That same year speech was sent across the ocean from Arlington, Virginia, to the Eiffel Tower in Paris. De Forest demonstrated radio at the San Francisco World’s Fair, receiving broadcasts from “Doc” Herrold’s station in San Jose, albeit a short distance in communication today but impressive at the time. At the General Electric Company, a scientist named Ernest F. W. Alexanderson perfected an alternator that considerably improved the quality and reach of the radio signal, and the Marconi Company, in an attempt to expand its dominant role in radio, immediately began negotiations for the purchase of Alexanderson alternators.
While all of this was happening, a development in the music field indicated perhaps more than anything else the kind of growth and programming radio would have. Musicians and music publishers were becoming concerned about the use of music without compensation on the new experimental radio stations. Thus, they organized into the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) to protect their creative works. It was to counter ASCAP that the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) was formed less than a decade later. Both organizations continue to play key roles in broadcasting today.
Professors and students in physics and engineering departments of colleges and universities broadcast informal programs as practical applications of their principal study, electronic theory. Their work took on a pragmatic approach: Who was interested in information that could be received over a radio set? The most significant broadcasts were from Midwestern universities to farmers, providing reports from time to time on weather conditions, crops, producer prices, Department of Agriculture advisories, and other things that an isolated farmer might otherwise have to wait days to learn. Such broadcasts grew throughout the decade, resulting in many of the regularly scheduled stations in the early 1920s being licensed to colleges and universities.
In 1916 de Forest further demonstrated the future of radio by broadcasting music and presidential election returns from New York, spurring increasing interest by the public. Parenthetically, his election broadcast is most remembered because he misinterpreted the returns and declared Charles Evans Hughes, rather than Woodrow Wilson, the winner.
A memorandum purportedly discovered in the back of a desk at the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) 30 years later might have considerably speeded up the development of radio had it not been allegedly pigeonholed by the officials of the Marconi Company. David Sarnoff, then the commercial manager for the American Marconi Company, wrote to his general manager, Edward J. Nally, that the company should market a “radio music box.” He advocated the development of a plan that would make “radio a ‘household utility’ in the same sense as the piano or phonograph.” The memorandum is a most accurate prognostication of what could have happened, and did happen, to radio. Some cynics have wondered why the memo remained unknown for so many years, even during Sarnoff’s reign over the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and NBC, before it was discovered.*
DAVID SARNOFF
I have in mind a plan of development which would make radio a household utility. The idea is to bring music into the home by wireless. The receiver can be designed in the form of a simple “radio music box,” placed on a table in the parlor or living room, and arranged for several different wavelengths which should be changeable with the throwing of a signal switch or the pressing of a single button. The same principle can be extended to numerous other fields, as for example, receiving lectures at home which would be perfectly audible. Also, events of national importance can be simultaneously announced and received. Baseball scores can be transmitted in the air. This proposition would be especially interesting to farmers and others living in outlying districts.
Sarnoff’s “radio music box” memo, sent to the management of the American Marconi Company in 1916. Recently, some scholars have questioned the existence of this memo, suggesting that it was written years later to enhance Sarnoff’s status in radio history.
An older Sarnoff as chairman of RCA.
Courtesy RCA.
Not only did the patent wars continue to delay the full arrival of radio, but the war in Europe also intervened. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, all radio equipment, both commercial and amateur, was either sealed or appropriated by the U.S. Navy. From August 1, 1918, to July 31, 1919—even after the war was over—the government ordered federal control over telephone and telegraph communications as a war measure. In one sense, this action preempted the civilian development of radio; in another sense, scientists and engineers working for the government were able to have the resources and equipment to refine the technical aspects of radio. Interestingly enough, radio was not used by the armed forces for battle purposes as much as one might presume. It was tried out primarily for airplane-to-ground communications. On the home front, however, the government ensured the future of radio by establishing radio schools to train personnel for federal positions, and in 1917 it built three high-powered wireless transmitters designed to cover the South Pacific—at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii; at San Diego; and at Cavite in the Philippines. Another war occurrence resulted in a further significant step forward for radio. In 1918 the cutting of transatlantic cables by the German enemy limited messages between the United States and Europe. Utilizing the Alexanderson alternator to generate unprecedented high power, the United States was able to communicate with the American Expeditionary Forces and its allies through wireless telegraphy. The Alexanderson alternator helped President Wilson use radio to speed the peace process by enabling him to send, by Morse code directly from New Jersey to Europe, his famous “Fourteen Points.”
After federal control expired in July 1919, private activity in radio resumed more strongly than ever. Although the navy attempted to retain permanent control over all radio use in the United States, Congress prevented it from doing so. Literally thousands of licenses were issued by the Secretary of Commerce for amateur and experimental radio stations.
The same names continued their leadership in the field, although it was clear that de Forest was being squeezed out by the Marconi Company and AT&T. Patent struggles and inventions continued apace. In 1918 Edwin Armstrong invented one of the most important wireless technological advancements, the superheterodyne system, and the British Marconi Company renewed its negotiations with General Electric (GE) to buy the Alexanderson alternator. This set the stage for the emergence, at the end of the decade, of media giants that for years to come would do battle and dominate radio.
The Department of the Navy and many members of Congress were concerned about the possible sale of the Alexanderson alternator, fearing that a foreign organization might then gain considerable control over U.S. communications facilities. At the government’s urging, GE arranged through its chief attorney, Owen D. Young, to give British Marconi the Alexanderson alternator in Britain in exchange for GE’s purchase of the American Marconi Company, thereby expanding GE’s communication power, including ownership of a number of maritime and international stations. GE, however, was interested in manufacturing equipment, not operating stations, and it formed RCA to do the latter. GE officers Owen D. Young, Edward J. Nally, and—yes—David Sarnoff became, respectively, chairman of the board, president, and commercial manager of RCA. It wasn’t long before RCA became a principal player in the new radio game, joining a patent pool with GE and AT&T to square off against another major player, Westinghouse.
By the end of the 1910 decade, there were some 20,000 or more amateur radio participants. Some 8500 had licenses to operate their experimental sets, and they were poised to provide the talent for the new medium.
While the birth of modern radio was about to take place, work on a new medium, television, had already begun. One of its key participants, Vladimir Zworykin, arrived in the United States in 1919, having worked with an early television experimenter, Boris Rosing, at the Saint Petersburg Technological Institute in Russia. Within a year he would be working at Westinghouse, where he began some of the leading TV experiments in this country.
This became RCA’s worldfamous trademark: “His Master’s Voice.”
Courtesy RCA.
Wireless station and antenna site, circa 1919.
Courtesy Zenith.
Charles “Doc” Herrold of San Jose, California, is an obscure broadcasting pioneer whose most important work took place between 1912 and 1917. Although today most historians believe Herrold’s claim that he was the first to broadcast radio entertainment and information for an audience on a regularly scheduled, preannounced basis, he is dismissed as a minor figure because he didn’t have a long-lasting impact on the industry. Herrold can be compared to many of the modern-day Internet pioneers: an innovator with new, even revolutionary ideas, but with bad timing. Herrold was too soon.
Charles “Doc” Herrold.
Courtesy of Mike Adams.
The first evidence of Herrold’s use of a crude radiotelephone to “broadcast” to an audience is found in a 1910 published statement by Herrold: “We have been giving wireless photograph concerts to amateur men in the Santa Clara Valley.” Between 1912 and 1917 he operated a radio station, on the air every day, programming music and talk for an audience. That he accidentally stumbled onto what today we recognize as radio broadcasting may have evolved out of his role as the headmaster of a wireless trade school. Former students told of broadcasting the popular music of the day to an audience of friends and families, very much like college radio today.
*Wireless transmissions were enhanced by using a device called the high frequency arc (also know as the Poulsen arc). The early experiments of de Forest, and to some extent others, were significantly aided by this innovation.
*Recent scholars have concluded that the memo was likely composed long after radio had entered the home. Documents at the Smithsonian, according to Elliot Sivowitch, appear to support the existence of a 1916 radio music box demo by Sarnoff. The debate continues.