In the midst of the Industrial Revolution, radio emerged as a composite of a number of landmark inventions: the telegraph by Samuel F.B. Morse (1791-1872) in 1836, the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) in 1876, and the phonograph by Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) in 1877.
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TECHNICAL DEVELOPMENTS
The story of radio is one that begins nearly a century before its invention. When philosopher Gian Domenico Romagnosi (1761-1835) reported in an Italian newspaper in 1802 that he had discovered a profound relationship between electricity and magnetism, there was no fanfare from the scientific community. Years later in 1820, Danish scientist Hans Christian Orsted (1777-1851), then unaware of Romagnosi’s earlier findings, “discovered” the same principle of electromagnetism unintentionally as he was preparing for one of his lectures. A compass needle jumped and sealed the fateful relationship when he turned the battery current off and on. English scientist Michael Faraday (1791-1867) experimented further with this concept in 1831. Morse, a Massachusetts native, relying on Orsted’s prior work, invented the electrical telegraph in 1837. Charles Wheatstone (1802-1875) also filed a patent that same year in Great Britain. Morse would continue to increase the signal of the telegraph with the assistance of a colleague at New York University, chemistry professor Leonard Gale.
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In the late nineteenth century, British, American, and Indian scientists, and inventors from around Europe, invested time and money into understanding the principles and practice of reception and transmission of radio waves, what would become known as “radio.” It was not until 1878 that David E. Hughes (1831-1900) discovered noise from radio waves as they emitted from his telephone receiver, and this spurred others toward the goal of radio communication. He invented the microphone in the same year. As an avid musician from his youth, he sought a way to reproduce music. Scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs in Europe and the U.S. competed to unravel the mysteries of sound transmission over the next two decades. At the 1881 Paris Exposition International d’Electricite, opera was transmitted through several strategically placed microphones and listener headsets. This theatrophone paved the way for long distance transmission of entertainment and speeches.
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The history of the discovery of radio was contentious, especially with regards to sorting out the contributing inventors along the way. As the nineteenth century came to a close, Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937) received accolades for his telegraph message sent without wires. In 1893, Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) presented and published his blueprint for wireless radio across the U.S. On May 7, 1895, Russian physicist Alexander Popov (1859-1906) demonstrated radio waves transmission and reception to his peers (on what later became designated as the annual “Radio Day”). One year later a British radio patent was awarded to Marconi and, by 1897 he had established an experimental radio station on the southern coast of the United Kingdom. Tesla also applied for two radio patents in the U.S., but these were later overturned by the U.S. Patent Office in favor of Marconi in 1904. The U.S. Supreme Court reinstated Tesla’s patent in 1943 after a long court battle, unfortunately after his death.
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Quebec native Reginald Fessenden (1866-1932) is often credited with airing the first radio broadcast. At age 20, he was hired by Edison, and is believed to be the first person to relay voice and music over the airwaves with wireless technology. On December 24, 1906, at 9 p.m., several ships at sea heard the broadcast as he played a recording of Handel’s “Largo” from Brant Rock, near Boston, Massachusetts. He then followed it by playing the melody of “Oh Holy Night” on his violin.
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PROGRAMMING DEVELOPMENTS
The nineteenth century was dominated by a thrust toward mass production, yet romanticism in the arts and technical improvements to woodwind and brass instruments and the piano served to liberate musicians. Philosophers like Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) feared that the quest for progress was draining the human soul and passion. Thoreau espoused the virtues of sound and solitude from his cabin near Walden’s Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, against a backdrop of increasing industrialization. He was fascinated by the sound of the train that ran along the borders of his property, and believed it symbolized the arrival of a new era of commerce and communication. He described technology as a beast that roared through his woods, and wrote of a solitude that he believed was becoming extinct. The human voice would be manufactured and duplicated through technology in the coming years thanks to inventors like Edison, and radio would ultimately be the result of the synthesis of these inventions.
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Edison made history with his recording of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on the first tinfoil cylinder phonograph in 1877. His phonograph was intended as a dictation device to provide authenticity to legal documents, and the reproduction of music was an unintended consequence. By the early 1900s, factory foremen would play music to increase their workers’ production. The music industry flourished as entrepreneurs and competitors rushed to seize their share of the market. Radio station owners soon realized that records would provide an efficient means of filling air time, without the expense of live programming. Early radio was initially experimental, but it became increasingly limited to classical music, educational programming, and some jazz. Radio offered a way to manage and organize music in society: because it developed within the context of industrialization, it emerged as an industry of efficiency, production, and sales.
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In the early years of the twentieth century, Marconi had opened a radio factory in England, and Tesla built a radio antenna tower on Long Island, New York, that he envisioned would evolve into a universal center for transmission across the globe. The very act of transmission had become a commodity. But Tesla failed to achieve the success he dreamed of, after investors backed away from his project’s escalating costs. Since its inception, the radio industry measured its success in production units, originally determined by the number of radio sets sold, and then by the number of commercials aired on a specific radio station. Radio’s drive towards commercialism would make it more difficult for nonmainstream expressions of music to find outlets across commercial and public airwaves.
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For example, Luigi Rossolo’s Art of Noises (1913) attempted to expand the definition of music to include industrial noise, going beyond traditional forms such as classical and jazz. Russolo (1885-1947) performed a series of concerts using what he called Intoners or sound machines, as he attempted to incorporate the culture of industrialization into music. He positioned noise as a logical progression in music, and in this way, art would imitate the sounds of the era. Industrialization produced a new type of modern noise that challenged prior ways of interpreting life through one’s acoustical environment. Emily Thompson demarcates this transition as the beginning of the soundscape of modernity, which ultimately created a unique culture of listening—and cultivated a new breed of visionaries—that began at the turn of the twentieth century.
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Before his death, Russian futurist Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-1922) became known as the Great Sorcerer of Radio. In essays such as “The Radio of the Future,” he envisioned the medium as the central disseminating point for all world knowledge, and a means to send messages of healing. In 1933, F.T. Marinetti and Pino Masnata’s manifesto La Radia called for the re-invention of radio as a medium and space for creative authorship. In the years between the two World Wars, radio in Europe offered a plethora of experimentation and potential, more so than in the United States where broadcasting was shaped into an industry.
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American radio was soon programmed to assimilate national and local audiences, and create a universal popular culture, or in some cases, propaganda. Music playlists were comparatively limited in relation to the wide variety of songs and genres in existence. The earlier vaudeville skits heard on the phonograph in the late nineteenth century had introduced audiences and investors to audio theater’s possibilities, and radio drama emerged as a new form of entertainment and political expression in the U.S. and Europe by the early 1920s. Europe’s early legendary experiments with radio included Radio Berlin’s many “Playhouses.” In the United States, black radio drama such as “Destination Freedom” would serve as a political and creative expression in the 1940s, although Jack L. Cooper had already made history as the first African-American talk radio personality with his career debut in 1929. Cooper envisioned his role as one of empowering his listeners, at a time of limited minority access to the airwaves.
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As radio began to mature, its power became evident during the war years. Radio had the power to make stars and villains, protagonists and antagonists, in a moment. A series of broadcasts filled the U.S. airwaves during World War II with anti-American propaganda, and subsequently public clamor called to hunt down the culprit. Iva Ikuko Toguri d’Aquino, a young American woman, became inadvertently identified as Tokyo Rose, a fictitious person. She was fined and imprisoned for treason based on false testimony, and eventually pardoned by U.S. President Gerald Ford. During this time, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Radio rose in power as a credible voice to listeners, and became the primary broadcast weapon to counter Nazi propaganda across Europe. A number of listeners complained about the BBC’s dull programming; yet World War II solidified the state controlled corporation as a voice of uncompromising social responsibility, in contrast to the corporate American model reliant on fickle network ratings and program sponsorship. Around the same time, U.S. government funded Radio Free Europe was founded in New York in 1949, with headquarters in Munich, Germany. The broadcasts were financed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and designed as part of the nation’s psychological Cold War campaign. The first program aired in 1950 on the U.S. Independence Day, launching a new chapter in radio’s history.
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Further Reading
Archer, Gleason L. (1938) History of Radio to 1926. New York: American Historical Society.
George H. Clark Radioana Collection, 1880-1950. Smithsonian Institution: National Museum of American History Website.
http://invention.smithsonian.org/resources/fa_clark_index.aspx
Fessenden, Helen. (1940) Fessenden, Builder of Tomorrows. New York: Coward-McCann.
History of the BBC. (2006). http://www.bbc.co.uk/heritage/story/
Marvin, Carolyn. (1998) Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late 19th Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Newman, Mark (1988). Entrepreneurs of Pride/Profit: From Black-Appeal to Radio Soul. NY: Praeger.
Sterne, Jonathan (2003). The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke University Press.
Thompson, Emily Ann (2002). The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Accoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933. Boston: The MIT Press.
Walker, Jesse (2001). Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America. NYU Press.
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Phylis Johnson and Jay Needham
Professors of Radio and Sound Studies
Southern Illinois University, USA
