Many-to-many communication. Citizen control of a remote political process.A new culture and a new economy. Sound familiar? Such was the hype for a technological revolution 75 years ago - radio.
In the beginning, when the frontier was wide open, 12-year-old Maynard Mack wanted to see what the fuss was all about.
He'd heard about the hip new technology. He'd been told about the miracles the future would bring. And he'd picked up a few copies of the latest specialty magazines. But the prefab boxes he saw advertised in those pages were hard to come by and far too expensive for a country kid from Ohio. "They may have been available for sale somewhere, but I certainly never saw them," Maynard says.
So he assembled his equipment on a wing and a prayer. Yet even as he was entranced by the new medium, Maynard - like thousands of other amateurs - didn't know what would become of his efforts.
The high-powered corporate executives didn't know either, but they were sure they wanted a piece of the action. The pundits didn't know, despite their predictions that the new technology would bring the blessings of Knowledge, Culture, and Democracy into every home across the land. And the politicians in Washington didn't know, though they recognized that the frontier was developing so quickly that hordes of voters would soon be breathing down their necks.
They all knew they were onto something. "Let us not forget that the value of this great system does not lie primarily in its extent or even in its efficiency. Its worth depends on the use that is made of it.... For the first time in human history we have available to us the ability to communicate simultaneously with millions of our fellowmen, to furnish entertainment, instruction, widening vision of national problems and national events.
An obligation rests on us to see that it is devoted to real service and to develop the material that is transmitted into that which is really worthwhile."
Mitch Kapor? Newt Gingrich? Al Gore? Alvin Toffler?
Nope. Herbert Hoover, speaking in 1924 as the Secretary of Commerce. And the "great system"? Not the Internet. Nor the Infobahn. It was radio. Plain ol' broadcast radio.
In 1922, the "radio craze" was taking the country by storm. Journalists wrote ecstatic articles describing the newest developments in wireless technology. Politicians hailed radio as the latest product of American entrepreneurial genius. The term "broadcasting" - previously used by farmers to describe the "act or process of scattering seeds" - was rapidly becoming a household word, complete with all its contemporary mass media connotations. Radio stations were popping up like dandelions across the land. Meanwhile, back in Ohio, young Maynard Mack kept track of these advances by poring over the pages of the nearest big-city newspaper, Cleveland's The Plain Dealer.
Maynard didn't want to miss out on the fun. So he gathered together a mad scientist's assortment of hardware - a few scraps of plywood, a couple yards of wire, two or three control knobs, a cylindrical oatmeal carton, and a surplus vacuum tube he got from the chemistry department of the local college - and went to work building himself a radio receiver based on a set of plans he'd seen in a magazine.
That's what you did if you were an inquisitive kid growing up in the early 1920s, says Maynard, now a retired Yale University literature professor. You went cruising along the frontier of high-tech electronic communications. In other words, you built a crude, homemade radio receiver, strapped on a clunky set of headphones, and tried to listen to the signals being exchanged through the ether. Maynard remembers that sometimes he'd hear nothing but static for hours on end. Sometimes he'd, struggle to decipher a few stray dots and dashes of Morse code conversation hammered out by other amateur radio enthusiasts on their jury-rigged transmitters. And when he really struck gold, he'd manage to catch one of the nighttime music or news programs emanating from KDKA in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, one of the nation's first radio-broadcast stations. "Back then, you had to make your own entertainment," Maynard muses.
If Maynard Mack had been born 60 years later - in 1970 instead of 1910 - he still might have kept busy manufacturing his own entertainment. But in 1982, he would have been staying up late to construct a Frankenclone PC up in his bedroom. And nowadays, he'd probably be puttering around with motherboards and high-speed modems instead of all those goofy radio parts. Maybe he'd spend hours surfing the Web, skimming Usenet groups, or loitering in America Online chat rooms. That's what you do if you're an inquisitive kid growing up in the 1990s. You cruise along the frontier of high-tech electronic communications. You get Wired, you go online, and you explore the world of activity unfolding in cyberspace. But when Maynard Mack was growing up, the goal was to get wireless.
Get Wired! Get wireless! They may sound contradictory, but historically, they mean the same thing. It's about riding the wave. Actualizing tomorrow. Plugging in. Checking it out. Getting the scoop on the Next Big Something.
Today's Next Big Something is so wrapped in hype it's tough to see what's really going on. And as the hype solidifies into conventional wisdom, almost anyone can recite the narrative. It goes like this: The online revolution is happening now. The revolution will facilitate interaction through the digital exchange of information. By exchanging information, we grow closer as a community. By exchanging information, we become free. Blah, blah, blah.
But what if conventional wisdom is wrong? What if the crystal-ball narrative doesn't turn out as planned? What if, a decade or so from now, we wake up to find that the digisphere has been overrun by swarms of inane mass marketeers - people who believe that "interacting" is something you do with a set-top box that provides only an endless stream of movies-on-demand, bargains overflowing from virtual shopping malls, and spiffy videogames?
It has happened before.
This isn't the first time a new medium has come along, promising to radically transform the way we relate to one another. It isn't even the first time a fellowship of amateur trailblazers has led the charge across the new media hinterland. Radio started out the same way. It was a truly interactive medium. It was user-dominated and user-controlled. But gradually, as the airwaves became popular, that precious interactivity was lost. We need to understand how that happened.
We've come a long way since the early 1920s - so far that it's difficult to imagine a time when the radios now on our bed tables and in the dashboards of our cars were worshipped as objects of cultic fascination and mystery. Radio long ago lost its shimmering, high-tech gloss.
Since the early 1920s, a science fiction writer's dreamscape of new communications technologies have come along to nudge radio from the spotlight. In the 1950s, we got black-and-white televisions. In the 1960s, color television. In the 1970s, cable. Then came infatuation with VCRs. Satellite dishes. Cellular telephones. And now we've got PCs with online hookups.
The glitter may be gone, but broadcast radio is alive and well. After all, radios are a fixture in 98 percent of American homes and in almost as many automobiles. Radio broadcasting remains a staple of our mass-media diet. We listen to it while getting dressed in the morning. During the daily commute. At work. Or while doing chores around the house. And as we continue to tune in, we also transform radio's most adept practitioners into national celebrities. Rush, Garrison, and Howard, to name a few.
But 75 years ago, there was no such thing as a radio celebrity. Radio sets were an expensive novelty. In 1922, for example, when less than 0.2 percent of American households owned a radio receiver, the average radio set cost a whopping 50 bucks. (At the time, US$50 was about 2 percent of an average American family's annual household income - which means that a radio would have set you back about as much as a well-equipped home computer today. Few anticipated that listening to the radio was an activity that would someday appeal to broad segments of the population. Seventy-five years ago, radio broadcasting resembled the PC industry during the days of Jobs and Wozniak - it was an infant technology struggling to establish a niche for itself in the food chain of modern mass communications.
Yet even during those early days, enough people were listening for the medium to catch on.
Radio listeners fell into two categories. First, there were the professionals. These were people who worked for companies that sought to turn a profit from wireless technology - business giants like General Electric Corp., Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Corp., the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, and the newly formed Radio Corporation of America (RCA). The men at the helm of these corporations thought radio had only limited consumer appeal. As if mesmerized by the old media paradigm of the telephone, they convinced themselves that the future of wireless radio lay in the direction of targeted, point-to-point communications. Specifically, they concluded that radio was naturally suited for use in environments where wired telephone networks were either too expensive or too impractical to operate. Thus the professionals went to market offering well-heeled clients premium services such as ship-to-shore maritime communication and intercontinental messaging services.
Then there were the amateurs, who didn't care much about radio's profit-making potential. They got involved with wireless because they were fascinated by the new technology. The amateurs were hackers, basically - hobbyists, tinkerers, and techno-fetishists who huddled in their garages, attics, basements, and woodsheds to experience the wondrous possibilities of the latest communications miracle. Unlike the professionals, the amateurs didn't view radio exclusively as a tool for point-to-point communications. They also used it to communicate with anyone who happened to be listening.
The airwaves were wide open - more or less. The professionals had ignored the mass-market potential of wireless technology, leaving plenty of room for amateur enthusiasts to stake their claims along the bandwidth spectrum. Licensing requirements issued by the Department of Commerce were reasonably easy to meet for anyone who wanted to set up a transmitter. (Proficiency in Morse code was the most daunting requirement.) And once you got on the bandwagon, there was a whole community of like-minded early enthusiasts who were eager to welcome you aboard. It wasn't fancy, but then again, neither was Arpanet back in the days when Vint Cerf was calling the shots.
In his 1928 history, The Electric Word: The Rise of Radio, author Paul Schubert describes what it was like to be one of those primordial broadcasters in 1917, the period just prior to America's entry into World War I. "Before the war, " Schubert writes, "there had been some five thousand lic-ensed radio amateurs scattered throughout the nation, most of them youngsters. Limitations on power and wavelength had made the achievement of great distances generally impossible by them, but through their organization, The American Radio Relay League, they had been able to exchange communications from coast to coast. And they had filled one most important place in radio activities - they served as a cooperating audience to the serious experimenters who were striving to perfect the more subtle utilizations of the art."
Just after World War I, the radio ranks swelled even further, as thousands of Army-trained radio operators were demobilized. At the time, transmitting equipment was confusing, temperamental, and hard to come by, but figuring out how to get it all together and make it work was part of the sport (as anyone who's ever spent a few hours wrestling with initialization strings for a SLIP connection understands). And in the end, it was worth the effort. After all, there was nothing like the intoxicating rush that came from connecting with strangers in ways that had never been possible before.
"I think I can sympathize with and understand the passion of the wireless amateur who goes fishing in the electrical ocean, hoping to draw a congenial spirit out of the unknown depths," a contributor wrote in a 1924 edition of Radio Broadcast magazine. "This type of amateur sits in his laboratory and sends out a little message, baited with 10 watts, say, and then listens with a beating heart for a response from the void. Usually his cry is in vain. He draws a blank. But sometimes he hears, mixed up with his heart throbs, a reply from another 'brass pounder' calling him by his sign letters. What a thrill!" Tuning in was something that was done actively - not passively. For the thousands of amateurs who owned radio transmitters, the ether crackled to life as a two-way communications medium, whenever they strapped on headphones to begin tapping out Morse code or speaking into the microphone. Meanwhile, there were thousands more, like Maynard Mack, who chose the easier path - setting up a receiving outfit without the transmitter. But they too were encouraged to get in on all the interactive programming by sending amateur broadcasters "Applause Cards" - postcards confirming receipt of their transmissions. "Although not a hundred miles from N.Y. I must write to tell you how I heard your signals last night," a Connecticut listener scribbled after hearing a 1920 broadcast by station 2XB in Manhattan. "I happened to catch a part of the 10:45 period. At 11:15 when I found you were on a longer wavelength than I expected, heard every word beautifully. Monday night we are having a little company to listen to you and if you can acknowledge by a word or two to me, will be more than delighted."
For a while, the amateurs had a pretty good thing going. It was all very nice and ever-so civil. While blazing a path through the airwaves and attracting a growing following among members of the general public, the amateurs built an iconoclastic virtual community within the static-plagued nether world of the broadcast ether. In the early 1920s, it was a community spearheaded by thousands of precocious young Americans who could easily "talk inductance, capacity, impedance, resistance, and the other technical terms with a pretty thorough grasp on their meaning and a good appreciation of their application in radio work," according to Electrical World magazine. It was a wireless community that operated according to its own set of rules, protocols, customs, and taboos. Creative experimentation with radio programming was encouraged. Monopolizing bandwidth was considered bad form. And blatant commercialism was completely uncool.
Radio Broadcast magazine was a mouthpiece for the amateurs and the burgeoning broadcast audience. It was also a focal point for the articulation of their values and their interests. Radio Broadcast sought to chronicle the ways in which the advent of a new communications medium promised to permanently alter the face of culture and society.
Thumbing through back issues of Radio Broadcast is an eye-opening experience: it is startling to discover how much like us our radio precursors were. They spoke with similar enthusiasm and asked many of the same questions. They believed in their new technology, and they believed that it should be harnessed to help make the future better than the past.
"Will Radio Make the People the Government?" demanded a headline in a 1924 issue of Radio Broadcast. Political columnist Mark Sullivan was reluctant to answer the question definitively, but he had little doubt that the confluence of radio and politics was destined to profoundly impact on American democracy. "The fundamental merit of the radio in Congress will be that it will enable the public to get its information direct," Sullivan prophesied in proto-Gingrichian tones. "At present, aside from those speeches from men who, because of one distinction or another, have all their speeches printed in full - aside from these, the public is now dependent on the vicarious censorship of the newspaper reporter. It is the reporter who ignores some speeches, makes mere allusions to some, and transmits extracts from others. In all this exercise of judgment and taste, there are the aberrations that inevitably accompany any individual judgment." But radio would change all that. "The person who wants to listen to Congress will be able to do so, and there will be many who will want to listen."
Others speculated that radio would put politics on a more rational footing and bring civility back into the campaign process. "There is no doubt whatever that radio broadcasting will tend to improve the caliber of speeches delivered at the average political meeting," a Radio Broadcast editor wrote in his monthly column. "Personality will count for nothing as far as the radio audience is concerned. Ill-built sentences expressing weak ideas cannot succeed without the aid of forensic gesticulation. The flowery nonsense and wild rhetorical excursions of the soap box spellbinder are probably a thing of the past if a microphone is being used. The radio listener, curled comfortably in his favorite chair is likely to criticize the vituperations of the vote pleader quite severely. Woe be unto the candidate who depends for public favor upon wild rantings and tearings of hair." Politics would not be alone in feeling the impact of radio's growing reach. Religion, too, was destined for dramatic transformation. On January 2, 1921, the Reverend Edwin J. Van Etten of the Calvary Episcopal Church on Shady Avenue in Pittsburgh became the first minister in the United States to broadcast a church service by wireless radio. (The pilot broadcast went without a hitch, with the help of two wireless engineers - one Jewish and one Catholic - who spent the duration of the service camouflaged in choir robes.) Response to the experiment was strong, and in subsequent months, donations from the Calvary Church's "Unseen Congregation" flowed in steadily. But as more and more churches took to the airwaves, Van Etten developed a strangely Darwinistic view of the trend he had unleashed.
"Broadcasting of church services will prove something of a disintegrating force on the church organizations," he warned in a 1923 issue of Radio Broadcast. "Only the fittest preachers will survive, and struggling churches will, more or less, go to the wall."
Apparently, such fears were shared by Van Etten's superiors. A few months later, Episcopal Bishop Stearly wrote a letter to Radio Broadcast asking, "Why go to your parish church when you can sit at ease in your parlor and hear the heavenly music of a capable choir and be charmed by the fervid eloquence of a magnetic preacher? There seems to have entered into our crowded and throbbing life another ally of those forces which make difficult the assembling of the faithful for praise and prayer.... Now it becomes necessary for the clergy to make the church more attractive than the world's entertainments, to discover to men the possibilities within it for strength and refreshment, and the gifts of grace in its bestowings, more precious than earthly things."
The future of radio was so bright even the sacred aura of the Almighty looked faded by comparison.
Nevertheless, the editors of Radio Broadcast had their own demons to contend with. All of a sudden, radio broadcasting had become wildly popular. Everyone was taking to the airwaves - broadcasters and listeners alike. In early 1921, only five stations had received the new "broadcast class" licenses that were being issued by the Department of Commerce for transmissions of "market or weather reports, and music, concerts, lectures, etc." By early 1923, that number had shot up to 576. Meanwhile, as radio receivers got easier to use and broadcast programming more interesting, hundreds of thousands of Americans started tuning in for the first time. Hardware practically flew off dealers' shelves as sales of radio receivers jumped sixfold, from $60 million in 1922 to $358 million in 1924.
As more and more listeners began hearing an ever-growing variety of radio broadcasts, programming tastes became increasingly sophisticated. Newcomers didn't want to hear radio geeks chatting among themselves in Morse code. Like newbies on America Online, they wanted their information to arrive in neatly wrapped packages. They wanted to hear professional-quality programs broad- cast with professional-quality transmitting equipment. They wanted to be entertained and informed. That meant live music. And speeches. Sporting events. News and weather reports. And they wanted it all to come in crystal clear, with little static or interference.
The sudden popularity put the squeeze on broadcasters, because meeting the expectations of this growing audience was an expensive proposition. Not only did it cost anywhere from $3,000 to $50,000 and up to build and equip a broadcast station, but there were plenty of operating costs to account for even after the station was up and running - staff salaries, equipment maintenance, compensation for musicians and performers. All these costs were borne by broadcast station owners, while broadcast listeners paid nothing at all for the programming they received and enjoyed. And nobody had yet figured out an acceptable way to recover all that station investment, as the idea of "direct advertising" remained beyond the pale of public tolerance. It was a problem many impoverished Web site administrators should appreciate.
Radio broadcasting was an expensive proposition, yet few station owners were prepared to bear these costs indefinitely. The 576 radio broadcast stations operating in 1923 were run by an eclectic assortment of business people, starry-eyed idealists, public-service organizations, and hard-core wireless addicts. Few regarded radio broadcasting as a profit-making venture unto itself - most broadcast stations were created to serve as high-tech promotional gimmicks that would draw attention to the station owners' primary line of business. Thus in Philadelphia, Gimbel's Brothers department store operated station WIF. Retailer L. Bamberger & Co. founded WOR in New York. WAAF in Chicago was run by the Union Stock Yards & Transit Co. In New Lebanon, Ohio, the Nushawg Poultry Farm owned station WPG. And in Los Angeles, the City Dye Works and Laundry Co. started station KUS.
The broadcast landscape of the early 1920s might have seemed pretty familiar to us if somebody had tacked a suffix of -.com, -.edu, -.gov, or -.org onto the call letters of each radio station. In 1923, for example, 39 percent of radio broadcast stations were owned by companies that manufactured or sold radio hardware and equipment. An assortment of retail stores and commercial businesses owned another 14 percent. Thirteen percent was owned by educational institutions such as schools and universities. Twelve percent was owned by newspapers or publishing houses. Churches and YMCAs owned 2 percent. Municipalities and publicly regulated utilities each owned 1 percent. And the rest were operated by a motley collection of "others," whose ranks included everyone from ranchers and Boy Scouts to eccentric millionaires and backyard amateurs.
Unfortunately, nobody had yet figured out a way to make money from radio broadcasting. And until that happened, the "wireless craze" could be dismissed as just another pop-culture fad. Industry experts argued that wireless wouldn't end up in every American home until broadcast quality was improved on a nationwide basis, but such obvious conclusions didn't help much when it came time to figure out a way to finance all this mass media infrastructure development. Thus a single question appears over and over on the pages of Radio Broadcast magazine throughout the first half of the 1920s: Who will pay for radio broadcasting? There were plenty of ideas floating around. In 1922, Radio Broadcast proposed that since the airwaves were a public treasure, it was only natural that each radio station should seek out a "public spirited citizen" - preferably one with very deep pockets - to act as a patron. "We have gymnasiums, athletic fields, libraries, museums, etc. endowed and for what purpose? Evidently for the amusement and education of the public. But it may be that in the early future the cheapest and most efficient way of dispensing amusement and education may be by radiophone," the magazine suggested.
Two years later, the editors of Radio Broadcast thought they had their sugar daddy. An assortment of Wall Street financiers - gentlemen "who could not possibly be suspected of any idea of profit-taking, and who have been intimately connected with other musical ventures" - announced that they planned to form a nonprofit group called the Radio Music Fund Committee to "solicit funds from the listening public, calling for contributions of a dollar up, from all those who are entertained." The funds received would then be "directly applied to the securing of artists of the highest caliber."
A similar plan was tested at WHB, a station owned by the Sweeny Auto School in Kansas City. After issuing a statement pleading that "it is only fair for those sharing the pleasure to pay a portion of the expense," WHB's station head managed to pry $3,100 from his "invisible audience." Such results were encouraging, but encouragement and $3,100 wouldn't cover all the bills. "Of course that amount won't go far towards keeping a broadcast station running," Radio Broadcast admitted, "But the audience is indeed showing an appreciative spirit."
There were other suggestions. Broadcast programming could be delivered as a public utility to American homes through Wired networks, much like electricity or telephone service. Shortwave transmitters could be pressed into action, since the greater range of shortwave broadcasts would eliminate the need to operate so many local stations. David Sarnoff, vice president and general manager of RCA, volunteered that leading equipment manufacturers would be happy to aid the cause by tacking a broadcast surcharge onto the cost of radio hardware. And in New York, an experiment in municipal financing was launched in 1924 with the founding of radio station WNYC.
Finally, in 1925, Radio Broadcast announced that after having reviewed roughly a thousand entries, a winner had been chosen in the magazine's first-ever, "Who Is to Pay for Broadcasting and How?" essay contest. The $500 first prize was awarded to H. D. Kellogg Jr. of Haverford, Pennsylvania, for his suggestion that the federal government collect a sales tax of $2 per amplifier tube and 50� per radio crystal sold. The amassed tax revenues would then be distributed to broadcast stations nationwide by a new bureaucracy, the Federal Bureau of Broadcasting. The plan seemed comprehensive, but was coolly received by many analysts. Professor J.H. Morecroft, a former president of the Institute of Radio Engineers, wrote, "I do not see how a fund collected from the taxing measure can be equitably distributed. I dislike the idea of Government getting into the game because of its well-known and frequently proved inefficiency and blighting effect in attempting to carry out technical expertise. Let us keep broadcasting as far as possible out of Government hands." Sound familiar?
Herbert Hoover shared this free market bias, and his critique of the Radio Broadcast plan made that perfectly clear. In 1922, the English had launched a centralized system of hardware taxation on behalf of a new radio trust called the British Broadcasting Company, or BBC. Hoover wasn't about to let the same thing happen in the United States. "I do not believe that your prize-winning plan is feasible under conditions as they exist in this country, however well it may work elsewhere," he huffed.
There may have been as many different proposals about how to pay for broadcasting as there were frequencies on the radio dial, but everyone seemed to agree on two things: federal management wasn't an option, and selling air time to advertisers was absolutely out of the question.
"I believe that the quickest way to kill broadcasting would be to use it for direct advertising," Secretary Hoover argued in 1924. "The reader of the newspaper has an option whether he will read an ad or not, but if a speech by the President is to be used as the meat in a sandwich of two patent medicine advertisements, then there will be no radio left."
Hoover uttered these words during his opening address at the Third Annual Radio Conference - a meeting of radio executives and government technocrats held in Washington, DC, to chart the future of the broadcast industry. Two years earlier, during the 1922 conference, Hoover had been heard making similarly negative comments about the evils of "ether advertising."
"It is inconceivable that we should allow so great an opportunity for service to be drowned in advertising chatter," he had said.
After Herbert Hoover sketched out his ideal of commercial-free broadcasting at the first Washington radio conference, Radio Broadcast reported that several bigwigs from American Telephone and Telegraph had "agreed with this point of view." But back in Manhattan, a group of AT&T colleagues were busy working on a project that would soon lead to the near-total commercialization of the broadcast airwaves. It was to be the "killer app" of the radio broadcast industry - an innovation that would, in a single stroke, solve the "who is going to pay" riddle and create a mechanism for financing the production of audience-attracting radio shows. It was a new programming format that would suburbanize the wireless frontier. But nobody realized that at the time. Not Herbert Hoover. Not the editors of Radio Broadcast. Not the amateurs. Not even the guys at AT&T. Nobody knew that big change was afoot.
It was all taking place out in the open - right under everybody's nose. Two weeks before the start of the 1922 radio conference, AT&T issued a press release announcing that the nation's premier telecommunications company planned to inaugurate a brand-new wireless service. It was going to be called "toll broadcasting."
"The American Telephone and Telegraph Company will provide no program of its own, but provide the channels through which anyone with whom it makes a contract can send out their own programs," the press release explained. "Just as the company leases its long-distance wire facilities for the use of newspapers, banks and other concerns, so it will lease its radio telephone facilities and will not provide the matter which is sent out from this station."
It sure sounded innocent enough. AT&T simply planned to build a giant pay phone. Toll broadcasting would work like a radio phone booth in which anyone with something to say or a song to sing could walk in, stand before the microphone, and get the word out to thousands of fellow citizens. One-to-one communication would give way to one-to-many, but the basic pay-phone idea would remain the same. You plunk down your money, and you speak your piece. Pay as you play. The phone company would merely rent you some hardware - in the form of radio station WEAF. And instead of needing pocket change, you'd have to bring along some pretty big bills to use this new phone booth. Rates started at $40 for a 15-minute period in the afternoon, or $50 in the evening.
It took a few months for the idea to catch on, but toll broadcasting was a hit. At 5:15 in the afternoon on August 28, 1922, WEAF sent out its first commercial message. The groundbreaking broadcast came in the form of an infomercial by the Queensboro Corporation, a New York development company that sought to educate the listening audience about American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne - and perhaps unload a few units in the company's new "Hawthorne Court" apartment complex over in Jackson Heights, Queens, at the same time.
"I wish to thank those within the sound of my voice for the broadcasting opportunity afforded to me to urge this vast radio audience to seek the recreation and the daily comfort of a home far removed from the congested part of the city, right at the boundaries of God's great outdoors, and within a few minutes by subway from the business section of Manhattan," began Mr. Blackwell from the Queensboro Corporation. "This sort of residential environment strongly influenced Hawthorne, America's greatest writer of fiction. He analyzed with charming keenness the social spirit of those who had thus happily selected their homes, and he painted the people inhabiting those homes with good-natured relish." (Apparently, Hawthorne Court survives to this day as an urban oasis. According to Harold Thompson, president of the Hawthorne Court Council, life at the complex "just keeps getting better." "This is a wonderful place to live!" he gushed during a phone interview.)
Similar programs by Tidewater Oil and the American Express Company followed a month later. Straight-ahead advertising was still considered a no-no, but sponsorship seemed to be OK. Other companies began signing up as sponsors for professional entertainment. The "Happiness Boys" was a name given to Billy Jones and Ernie Hare - two vaudeville comedians whose weekly show was sponsored by the Happiness Candy Company. (Jones and Hare would also be heard under the guises of the "Best Foods Boys" and the "Taystee Loafers.") Clicquot Ginger Ale brought us music by the "Clicquot Club Eskimos." "The Eveready Hour" was a slick variety show that received production help from the N.W. Ayer advertising agency.
It may have been commercial, but it was also reasonably subtle, and audiences ate it up. And as they did, the money began rolling in. AT&T realized that it could offer toll broadcasters access to an even larger listening audience (not to mention some impressive production economies of scale) by linking a few radio stations together with phone wires. AT&T called this innovation "chain broadcasting," and it was first tried successfully in the summer of 1923, when programming that originated from WEAF in New York was simultaneously broadcast by WJAR in Providence, Rhode Island, and WMAF in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts. It was the first broadcast network.
RCA, Westinghouse, and General Electric figured out that there was big money to be made in network broadcasting, and in September 1926, they teamed up to start a network of their own. They called their new company the National Broadcasting Corporation. NBC then made AT&T an offer for WEAF. AT&T was beginning to get cold feet in the uncharted waters of programming distribution, so the phone company decided to unload the golden goose. NBC's offer to pay $1 million for WEAF was accepted. WEAF was renamed WNBC and became the flagship station of the new network. NBC prospered and in 1927 spawned a competitor - the Columbia Broadcasting System. And by 1930, when radio had become a fixture in almost 46 percent of American homes, the commercial networks dominated the broadcast airwaves and little remained of the amateurs or the wireless community they had so proudly created.
So where does that leave us?
It leaves us at the beginning.
According to Odyssey Ventures Inc. of San Francisco, only 7 percent of American households currently have access to any online media. We still don't know who's going to pay for a nationwide system of high-bandwidth pipes - never mind the question of how this new media will evolve as those household penetration numbers climb ... ever higher ... into double digits. Right now, we are present at the creation of yet another great system whose worth will depend on the use we make of it.
Radio was an interactive medium during its early days. It was cherished by people much like ourselves. But later it changed. The interactivity was lost. Radio junkies had fewer opportunities to create broadcast programming. Passivity became the norm.
Maybe things will be different this time. Online media enables us to be both consumers and suppliers of electronic media content. Today, we have a second chance to "develop the material that is transmitted into that which is really worthwhile," as Hoover put it in 1924. Perhaps radio wasn't the right technology. But the Web and the Net may well be. Our job is to make sure that glorious potential doesn't get stuffed into yet another tired, old media box.
To learn more about the early history of radio broadcasting, check out some of the books that helped make this article possible:
Banning, William Peck,
Commercial Broadcasting Pioneer: The WEAF Experiment 1922-1926,
Harvard University Press, 1946
Barnouw, Eric,
A Tower in Babel: A History of Broad-casting in the United States to 1933,
Oxford University Press, 1966.
Douglas, Susan,
Inventing American Broadcasting 1899-1922,
Johns Hopkins University Press,1987.
Radio Broadcast,
monthly serial, 1922-1925.
Schubert, Paul,
The Electric Word: The Rise of Radio,
The Macmillan Company, 1928.
Smulyan, Susan,
Selling Radio: The Commercialization of American Broadcasting
1920-1934,
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994.
Sterling, Christopher H. and Kittross, John M.,
Stay Tuned: A Concise History of American Broadcasting,
Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1978.
