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 Italian inventor
Guglielmo Marconi (pictured at right) first developed
the idea of a radio, or wireless telegraph, in the
1890s. His ideas took shape in 1895 when he sent a
wireless Morse Code message to a source more than a
kilometer away. He continued to work on his new
invention, and in 1897 he received the official British
patent for the radio - which was really a wireless
telegraph system at first. Other inventors in Russia
and the United States had been working on similar
devices, but Marconi made the right political and
business connections to gain the first real success
with the device. By 1900 there were four competing
wireless systems.
In the years just before World
War I, scientists at companies such as American
Telephone and Telegraph, General Electric, and
Westinghouse and inventors - including Reginald
Fessenden, Lee De Forest and Cyril Elwell - were
mapping out ways they could develop the potential of
wireless communication so it could broadcast more
sophisticated messages than the dots and dashes of
Morse Code.
By 1914, Fessenden, a Canadian
who was once employed in Thomas Edison's labs, had
worked with General Electric to build alternators that
could sustain a consistent broadcast wave powerful
enough to transmit voices and music over thousands of
miles. Radio was developed for its military
applications in the pre-World War I years, and the U.S.
Navy held the patents.
 In 1919,
Marconi’s resources were sold to General Electric
and with that Radio Corporation of America (RCA, which
spawned NBC Radio) - led by former Marconi employee
David Sarnoff - was formed. The radio boom began, as
people found it indispensable for receiving news and
entertainment programs. RCA's stock price went from
$85 in early 1928 to $500 by the summer of 1929. The
stock market crash of 1929 dropped it down to $20 per
share, but tough economic times of the 1930s
couldn't stop the well-developed NBC network. The
development of a vast array of programming choices in
the 1930s brought the "Golden Age of Radio,"
and by 1939 nearly 80 percent of the United States
population owned a radio.
In the boom of the 1920s, people
rushed to buy radios, and business and social
structures adapted to the new medium. Universities
began to offer radio-based courses; churches began
broadcasting their services; newspapers created tie-ins
with radio broadcasts.
By 1922 there were 576 licensed
radio broadcasters and the publication Radio Broadcast
was launched, breathlessly announcing that in the age
of radio, "government will be a living thing to
its citizens instead of an abstract and unseen
force."
 As with television in later years,
however, entertainment came to rule the radio waves
much more than governmental or educational content, as
commercial sponsors wanted the airtime they paid for to
have large audiences. Most listeners enjoyed hearing
their favorite music, variety programs that included
comic routines and live bands, and serial comedies and
dramas. Broadcasts of major sports events became
popular as the medium matured and remote broadcasts
became possible.
Radio was a key lifeline of
information for the masses in the years of World War
II. Listeners around the world sat transfixed before
their radio sets as vivid reports of battles,
victories, and defeats were broadcast by reporters
including H.V. Kaltenborn and Edward R. Murrow.
Franklin D. Roosevelt (at right), Winston Churchill,
Adolph Hitler and other political leaders used the
medium to influence public opinion.
A Boston Post editorial from
1865:
“Well-informed people
know it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires
and that were it possible to do so, the thing would be
of no practical value.”
Sir William Thomson, later Lord
Kelvin, a Scottish mathematician and physicist, is
quoted as saying in 1897:
“Radio has no
future.”
 A notice titled
"Telegraphy Without Wires" in the Jan. 23,
1897, Scientific American, reporting on a demonstration
of Marconi's radio:
"If the invention was
what he believed it to be, our mariners would have been
given a new sense and a new friend which would make
navigation infinitely easier and safer than it now
was."
A May 7, 1899 review in the New
York Times headlined "Future of Wireless
Telegraphy":
"All the nations of the
earth would be put upon terms of intimacy and men would
be stunned by the tremendous volume of news and
information that would ceaselessly pour in upon
them."
According to a report in
Dunlap's Radio and Television Almanac, Sir John
Wolfe-Barry remarked at a meeting of stockholders of
the Western Telegraph Company in 1907:
"...As far as I can
judge, I do not look upon any system of wireless
telegraphy as a serious competitor with our cables.
Some years ago I said the same thing and nothing has
since occurred to alter my views."
A June 1920 article in Electrical
Experimenter titled "Newsophone to Supplant
Newspapers" reported on an idea for a news service
delivered via recorded telephone messages and also
predicted the "radio distribution of news by
central news agencies in the larger cities to thousands
of radio stations in all parts of the world"
leading to a time when "anyone can simply listen
in on their pocket wireless set."
H.G. Wells wrote in "The Way
the World is Going" in 1925:
“I have anticipated
radio’s complete disappearance…confident
that the unfortunate people, who must now subdue
themselves to listening in, will soon find a better
pastime for their leisure.”
In 1913 Lee de Forest, inventor
of the audion tube, a device that makes radio
broadcasting possible, was brought to trial on charges
of fraudulently using the U.S. mails to sell the public
stock in the Radio Telephone Company. In the court
proceedings, the district attorney charged that:
"De Forest has said in
many newspapers and over his signature that it would be
possible to transmit human voice across the Atlantic
before many years. Based on these absurd and
deliberately misleading statements, the misguided
public...has been persuaded to purchase stock in his
company..."
De Forest was acquitted, but the
judge advised him "to get a common garden-variety
of job and stick to it."
View history of other
information technologies:
<Telegraph>
<Radio>
<Telephone>
<Television>
<Internet>
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