This began to create a problem for the manufacturers who were selling pre-made units. Under RCA, certain companies could make receivers, while other companies were approved to make transmitters. The broadcasts quickly spread across the UK but failed to usurp newspapers until when the newspapers went on strike. At this point the radio and the BBC became the leading source of information for the public.
In both the U. With the help of journalists, radio relayed news of the war to the public. It was also a rallying source and was used by the government to gain public support for the war.
In the U. The way in which radio was used also changed the world after World War II. While radio had previously been a source of entertainment in the form of serial programs, after the war it began to focus more on playing the music of the time. The "Top" in music became popular during this period and the target audience went from families to pre-teens up to adults in their mid-thirties.
Music and radio continued to rise in popularity until they became synonymous with one another. FM radio stations began to overtake the original AM stations, and new forms of music, such as rock and roll, began to emerge. Traditional radios and radio broadcasting have become a thing of the past. Instead, radio has steadily evolved to keep up with current technology, with satellite and streaming internet stations gaining popularity.
Army during World War I of the super heterodyne that made it possible to replace earphones with a loudspeaker. In , the American Radio Relay league and a British amateur group assisted by Armstrong, an engineer and college professor, proved that contrary to the belief of experts, short waves can travel over long distances. Three years later Marconi, who had previously used only long waves, showed that short-wave radio waves, by bounding off the upper atmosphere, can hopscotch around the world.
This discovery led to short wave radio being used for long distance radio broadcasting. Today telephone companies use microwave relay systems for long-distance, on-shore communication through the air. In , Frank Conrad, a Westinghouse engineer, began broadcasting music in Pittsburgh. These broadcasts stimulated the sales of crystal sets.
A crystal set, which could be made at home, was composed of a tuning coil, a crystal detector, and a pair of earphones. The use of a crystal eliminated the need for a battery or other electric source. In , KDKA began broadcasting prizefights and major league baseball. Later, a government that had once considered making radio a government monopoly followed a policy of promoting competition in the radio industry.
Patent pooling was the solution to the problem of each company owning some essential patents. Sarnoff, who began his career in radio as a Marconi office boy, gained fame as a wireless operator and showed the great value of radio when he picked up distress messages from the sinking Titanic. Ultimately, RCA expanded into nearly every area of communications and electronics. Its extensive patent holdings gave it power over most of its competitors because they had to pay it royalties.
While still working for Marconi Sarnoff had the foresight to realize that the real money in radio lay in selling radio receivers. Because the market was far smaller, radio transmitters generated smaller revenues. Marconi was able to charge people for transmitting messages for them, but how was radio broadcasting to be financed?
In Europe the government financed it. In this country it soon came to be largely financed by advertising. In , few stations sold advertising time. Then the motive of many operating radio stations was to advertise other businesses they owned or to get publicity.
Another quarter were owned by radio-related firms. Educational institutions, radio clubs, civic groups, churches, government, and the military owned 40 percent of the stations. Radio manufacturers viewed broadcasting simply as a way to sell radios. By nine out of ten broadcasting stations were selling advertising time.
In , more than a third of the stations lost money. However, by the end of World War II only five percent were in the red. Paley, a cigar company executive whose CBS career spanned more than a half-century. In , the Mutual Broadcasting System was formed. To avoid the high cost of producing radio shows, local radio stations got most of their shows other than news from the networks, which enjoyed economies of scale in producing radio programs because their costs were spread over the many stations using their programming.
Radio broadcasting was the cheapest form of entertainment, and it provided the public with far better entertainment than most people were accustomed to. One and a half million cars were also equipped with them.
The s were the Golden Age of radio. In the thirties radio broadcasting was an entirely different genre from what it became after the introduction of television. Those who have only known the music, news, and talk radio of recent decades can have no conception of the big budget days of the thirties when radio was king of the electronic hill. Like reading, radio demanded the use of imagination. Through image-inspiring sound effects, which reached a high degree of sophistication in the thirties, radio replaced vision with visualization.
The growth of radio in the s and 30s can be seen in Tables 1, 2, and 3, which give the number of stations, the amount of advertising revenue and sales of radio equipment. The most popular drama and comedy shows and most of their stars migrated from radio to television in the s and s. A few stars, like the comedy star, Fred Allen, did not successfully make the transition.
Other shows died, as radio became a medium, first, of music and news and then of call-in talk shows, music, and news. Point-to-point radio communication became essential for the police and trucking and other companies with similar needs.
New technology made portable radio sets popular. Many decades after the loss of comedy and drama shows to television the creation of the Internet provided radio stations both with a new way to broadcast and gave then a visual component. Because the radio spectrum is quite different from say, a piece of real estate, radio produced a property rights problem.
Originally, it was viewed as being like a navigable waterway, that is, public property. The only ways to deal with an excess of demand over supply are either to raise price until some potential users leave the market or to turn to rationing. The selling of the radio spectrum does not appear to have been considered.
Instead, the spectrum was rationed by the government, which parceled it out to selected parties for free. Navigable waterways present no free speech problem, but radio does.
Was radio to be treated like newspapers and magazines, or were broadcasters to be denied free speech? Were radio stations to be treated, like telephone companies, as common carriers, that is, anyone desiring to make use of them would have to be allowed to use them, or would they be treated like newspapers, which are under no obligation to allow all comers access to their pages? It was also established that radio stations, like newspapers, would be protected by the First Amendment.
Government regulation of radio began in when President Theodore Roosevelt organized the Interdepartmental Board of Wireless Telegraphy.
In the Wireless Ship Act was passed. That radio was to be a regulated industry was decided in , when Congress passed a Radio Act that required people to obtain a license from the government in order to operate a radio transmitter. In , Herbert Hoover, who was secretary of the Commerce Department, said that the radio industry was probably the only industry in the nation that was unanimously in favor of having itself regulated.
The Radio Act of solved the problem of broadcasting stations using the same frequency and the more powerful ones drowning out less powerful ones. This Act also established that radio waves are public property; therefore, radio stations must be licensed by the government. It was decided, however, not to charge stations for the use of this property. One method of imposing speech and music on a continuous wave requires increasing or reducing the amplitude modulating the distance between a radio waves peaks and troughs.
This type of transmission is called amplitude modulation AM. It appears to have first been thought of by John Stone Stone in A significant characteristic of FM as compared with AM is that FM stations using the same frequency do not interfere with each other.
Radios simply pick up whichever FM station is the strongest. This means that low-power FM stations can operate in close proximity. Astute patent dealings were a must in the early radio industry.
As was true of the rest of the electric industry, patent litigation was very common in the radio industry. One reason for the success of Marconi in America was his astute patent dealings. One of the most acrimonious radio patent suits was one between Armstrong and RCA. Armstrong expected to receive royalties on every FM radio set sold and, because FM was selected for the audio portion of TV broadcasting, he also expected royalties on every TV set sold.
Some television manufacturers paid Armstrong. It had more money than Armstrong did, and it could make more money until the case was settled by selling sets utilizing technology Armstrong said was his.
It might be able to do this until his patents ran out. By , the financial burden imposed on him forced him to try to settle with RCA. Not long after he received this offer he committed suicide. Aitken, Hugh G. Princeton, N. More in this Series Kids Work!
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