Roaring Twenties

The Birth of Radio Broadcasting in the 1920s

In the span of a single decade, radio broadcasting went from a tinkering hobby for amateur “wireless” operators to the most powerful communications medium in the United States. By 1930, roughly 12 million American households owned a radio set, and the medium had redrawn the map of American entertainment, news, politics, and consumer culture. The 1920s were the decade in which the modern mass medium was born, and the institutions it created — the networks, the advertisers, the regulatory framework, the listening audience — are still recognizable today.

For the underlying technology and the prehistory of the medium, For the story of the station most often credited as the first commercial broadcaster, For the social impact of radio inside the home,

From Wireless Telegraphy to Broadcasting

The technology that became radio had existed for a quarter-century before the 1920s, but it had been used almost entirely for point-to-point communication. Guglielmo Marconi’s 1895 first wireless transmission and 1899 first transatlantic signal were both telegraphy — pulses of radio energy that spelled out messages in Morse code. For the next two decades, the technology was used by ships at sea to communicate with shore stations, by the military, and by amateur “hams” who passed messages back and forth across the country. The audion tube, invented by Lee de Forest in 1906, made it possible to amplify and transmit voice, but for years no one quite knew what to do with the new capability.

The breakthrough that made broadcasting possible was, in essence, a business decision. In the late 1910s, several companies — most importantly Westinghouse Electric and the General Electric Company — realized that the new vacuum-tube transmitters could be used to send entertainment and information to the general public, on the model of newspapers and magazines. The transmitter could reach an unlimited number of receivers, all of which would have to be purchased by listeners. There was money to be made selling receivers, and additional money to be made selling programming.

The defining moment came on the evening of November 2, 1920, when KDKA in Pittsburgh broadcast the results of the Harding-Cox presidential election to a small but historically significant audience. (The full story of KDKA is on the first commercial radio station page.) Within two years, more than 500 new stations were on the air. The “radio craze” of 1922 transformed the airwaves and forced the federal government to create a new regulatory body, the Federal Radio Commission, in 1927.

The Networks

Radio was the first genuinely national medium, but the early years were dominated by local stations. The shift to nationwide programming required a new kind of organization: the network, a system in which multiple stations agreed to broadcast the same programming simultaneously, allowing advertisers and program producers to reach a mass audience.

The first network model was developed by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) through its New York station WEAF. Beginning in 1922, AT&T sold time on WEAF to advertisers, who would pay to have their messages broadcast to listeners in the New York area. This was the origin of toll broadcasting — the practice of selling chunks of broadcast time to sponsors, who would produce their own programs. The Eveready Hour, sponsored by the National Carbon Company and beginning in 1926, was the first major sponsored program and a model for the future.

The telephone company recognized that the model could scale, but only if multiple stations broadcast the same program at the same time. AT&T built the first long-distance radio network in 1923–24, transmitting programming from New York to stations in other cities over telephone lines. The innovation was critical — without it, the networks could not exist.

In 1926, RCA (the Radio Corporation of America) bought the WEAF station from AT&T and used it as the foundation of the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). NBC was split into two networks almost immediately: the NBC Red Network and the NBC Blue Network. The Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) was founded in 1927 when the Columbia Phonograph Company’s fledgling network was purchased by William S. Paley, a 26-year-old cigar heir. The third major network, the Mutual Broadcasting System, was founded in 1934, after the period covered here.

The networks — NBC and CBS — were the dominant institutions of American radio for the next three decades. They produced or commissioned the programming, sold the advertising, and distributed the programs to affiliated local stations. The programming created by the networks in the late 1920s — Amos ‘n’ Andy, the National Barn Dance, the Grand Ole Opry, the first network news — defined the medium and shaped American culture.

The Companies Behind the Boom

A handful of large corporations drove the development of radio technology and broadcasting:

The relationships among these companies, and the patents they controlled, shaped the industry for decades. The early 1920s saw patent fights and competing transmitter designs, but by the late 1920s a stable industrial structure had emerged, with RCA at the center.

Set Ownership: The Growth of an Audience

The growth of radio audiences was one of the most rapid technological adoptions in American history. Estimates of set ownership vary, but the trajectory is clear:

The early sets were expensive and difficult to operate, requiring multiple batteries and considerable technical skill. By 1927, however, the first AC-powered sets were available, eliminating the troublesome “A-B-C” battery problem. By 1930, the radio-phonograph console had become a centerpiece of the middle-class living room. The set, once a piece of technical equipment, had become a piece of furniture. The full story of the radio’s place in domestic life is on radio in the 1920s American home.

The rapid growth of set ownership made the network advertisers’ dream possible. By 1930, advertisers could count on roughly half of all American households tuning in to a popular network show, and they were willing to pay substantial sums to reach them.

Programming: Entertainment, News, and the National Audience

The early 1920s saw a scramble for programming as stations tried to find ways to keep listeners tuned in. The early formats included phonograph records, live music, news, weather, and time signals. The first major breakthrough was the serial drama — short dramatic programs, often sponsored by soap manufacturers, that aired daily. (The term “soap opera” comes from this format.)

The late 1920s saw the development of several programming formats that would define the medium for decades:

The 1920s also saw the rise of radio news. The first radio news programs were simply readings of newspaper copy, but by the late 1920s some stations were doing their own reporting. The first regularly scheduled network newscast is generally dated to 1930, when CBS’s The CBS World News Tonight began airing; the form fully matured in the 1930s with figures like Edward R. Murrow and the development of the wire services tailored to radio.

Radio and Music: Spreading Jazz and the Vernacular

Radio played a crucial role in spreading the new popular music of the decade. Jazz, in particular, was a regional, largely African American form that became a national phenomenon in significant part through radio. Station KDKA broadcast live music; WHB in Kansas City was an early country music station; WLS in Chicago became a center for the “barn dance” format; and the major networks carried jazz, dance, and popular music programs to every corner of the country.

The same dynamic applied to country music, gospel music, and ethnic music. Stations in the South and Southwest developed regional audiences for country, blues, and Hispanic programming. New York’s station WEAF featured programming in multiple languages. Radio, more than any earlier technology, made the United States a single cultural market — a process that had been started by the phonograph and the popular press, but accelerated by the new medium. ## Politics and the Coming of the Fireside Chat

Radio’s political power was barely tapped in the 1920s but was clearly foreshadowed. The 1924 and 1928 presidential campaigns used radio for the first time, though neither candidate fully exploited the new medium. The breakthrough came in 1932, when Franklin D. Roosevelt used the radio in his unprecedented fireside chats to address the nation during the Great Depression. Roosevelt’s 1933 inaugural address — the first delivered under the new medium’s terms — reached tens of millions of listeners and established the model of the president speaking directly to the American people. The groundwork for that transformation was laid in the 1920s, when the medium first became available and Americans first got used to hearing their leaders through the air.

Regulation: The Federal Radio Commission

The “radio craze” of 1922 produced chaos on the airwaves. Hundreds of stations interfered with each other, broadcast on overlapping frequencies, and jockeyed for clear channels. The Department of Commerce, under Secretary Herbert Hoover, struggled to manage the situation. A series of court decisions in 1926 stripped the Commerce Department of its authority, and in 1927 Congress passed the Radio Act of 1927, creating the Federal Radio Commission (FRC) to regulate the airwaves. The FRC, the predecessor of the modern Federal Communications Commission (FCC, established 1934), had the power to assign frequencies, license stations, and set technical standards. The 1927 Act established the principle that the airwaves belonged to the public, that broadcasters held licenses in the public interest, and that the government had a right to regulate the medium in the public interest.

The 1927 Act was a landmark in American communications law and set the framework for all subsequent broadcasting regulation. It also reflected a widespread anxiety about the new medium’s power — the same kind of anxiety that would, in the 1930s, lead to the imposition of the Hays Code on motion pictures. The new technologies of the 1920s inspired both wonder and fear.

The Medium in 1930

By 1930, radio was the dominant mass medium in the United States. The set was in 12 million homes. NBC and CBS were major institutions. Sponsored programming was the rule. The Federal Radio Commission was the regulator. The medium had reached maturity in a single decade, faster than any previous communications technology.

The radio revolution set the stage for the rest of the twentieth century. The networks built in the 1920s dominated American broadcasting until the rise of television in the 1950s. The sponsored-programming model pioneered in the 1920s remained the basic business model of American broadcasting. The legal and regulatory framework created in 1927 remained largely in place. The radio sets, networks, and listening habits of the 1920s defined American mass culture for generations.

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