the theater of sound Radio Human social life depends upon the constant use & development of communication. Our existence relies on shared understandings of the world.
Of all the new devices to enter the nation's homes during the 1920s, none had a more revolutionary impact than the radio. Sales of radios soared from $60 million in 1922 to $426 million in 1929. The first commercial radio station began broadcasting in 1919, and during the 1920s, the nation's airwaves were filled with musical variety shows and comedies. Radio drew the nation together by bringing news, entertainment, and advertisements to more than 10 million households by 1929. Radio blunted regional differences and imposed similar tastes and lifestyles. No other media had the power to create heroes and villains so quickly. When Charles Lindbergh became the first person to fly nonstop across the Atlantic from New York to Paris in 1928, the radio brought this incredible feat into American homes, transforming him into a celebrity overnight. Radio also disseminated racial and cultural caricatures and derogatory stereotypes. The nation's most popular radio show, "Amos 'n Andy," which first aired in 1926 on Chicago's WMAQ, spread vicious racial stereotypes into homes whose white occupants knew little about African Americans. Other minorities fared no better. The Italian gangster and the tightfisted Jew became stock characters in radio programming. Marconi seated in his lab EDWIN ARMSTRONG INVENTS FM and nobody cares Only the engineers care that there is a new delivery service that eliminates the static and noise and the bad audio AM. Station owners are making a fortune and they don’t want to make existing receivers obsolete. FM will sleep until the 1970s Inventor Edwin Howard Armstrong is often credited with developing many of the features of radio that we know today. Armstrong patented three important inventions that made radios much easier to operate. Armstrong patented “regeneration, or the use of positive feedback to increase the amplitude of received signals to the point where they could be heard without the use of headphones. Armstrong also invented the super heterodyne circuit which allowed radio manufacturers to do away with the many tuning controls that were required to tune in to a station and at the same time, made radios much more sensitive. Armstrong’s third great contribution was FM which gave listeners static free broadcasts with better sound quality and fidelity than was possible with AM radio. The first AM station. Left, Cat's-Whisker radio & a vacuum-tube oscillator. Above, Cat's-Whisker detector and diode symbol. The modern circuit symbol for a diode originated as a schematic drawing of a cat's-whisker detector. Below: In April of 1909, Charles David Herrold, an electronics instructor in San Jose, California built the world’s first broadcast station. Calling the station “San Jose Calling”, Herrold broadcast both voice and music. He had the world’s first regularly scheduled broadcasts, allowing listeners to tune in at a known time. He coined the terms “narrowcasting”, for transmissions to a single receiver such as ships, and “broadcasting”, for transmissions destined to a wide audience. Below, Tesla with his coils, boosting the faint radio signal to a one-mile radius. Right, Edwin Armstrong and his FM radio on a 20¢ commemorative stamp. Crystal radios, like the one above, were among the first radios to be used and manufactured. These radios used a piece of lead galena crystal and a cat whisker to find the radio signal. Crystal radios allowed many people to join the radio craze in the 1920s because they were easy to make from home. Many boys' magazines encouraged young boys to make their own radios, and included step-by-step instructions for the crystal radio. All necessary supplies could be purchased for as little as six dollars. However, the sound in the earphones was very weak and often interrupted by static. Early radio's, including crystal radios, needed antennas to operate well. While manufacturers tried to improve the crystal radio, one inventive young man, Edwin Armstrong, worked at improving the radio all together. He worked to implement the De Forest Audion tube into the radio. This was also known as a vacuum tube. Eventually, vacuum tubes replaced the crystal. Armstrong's first model of a radio using vacuum tubes was called the Radiola Superheterodyne. After companies succeeded in finding an inexpensive method of producing these tubes, they introduced a vacuum tube radio to the market in 1924. Sounds came through more clearly even over great distances. The additional innovation of the transistor allowed radios to become small and portable. The Cat's-Whisker Detector The Cat's-Whisker detector was a very popular form of radio detector, changing the modulated radio frequency signal into an audio voltage that could be heard in headphones. Gaining its name from the fact that it used a thin wire akin to a cat's whisker, it was not particularly efficient or reliable, it was widely used because it was cheap, easy to make and more effective than other means of the day, soon to be replaced by the superior heterodyne circuitry. But someone had to invent the vacuum tube for it to work well.
A day at the beach with an early prototype of a Walkman. The first commercial FM radio.
DRAMA, PATHOS, MYSTERY "The Shadow" - One of the most popular radio shows in history. The show went on the air in August of 1930. "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!" The opening lines of the "Detective Story" program captivated listeners and are instantly recognizable even today. Originally the narrator of the series of macabre tales, the eerie voice known as The Shadow became so popular to listeners that "Detective Story" was soon renamed "The Shadow," and the narrator became the star of the old-time mystery radio series, which ran until 1954. A figure never seen, only heard, the Shadow was an invincible crime fighter. He possessed many gifts which enabled him to overcome any enemy. Besides his tremendous strength, he could defy gravity, speak any language, unravel any code, and become invisible with his famous ability to "cloud men's minds." Along with his team of operatives, the Shadow battled adversaries with chilling names like The Black Master, Kings of Crime, The Five Chameleons, and, of course, The Red Menace.
Orson Wells as the original main man WAITING FOR THE MASKED AVENGER
RADIO DRAMA IN 1937
The Shadow in "Deathhouse Rescue"
The Shadow in "Death Triangle"
The stuff of radio fantasy: actors acting, shooters shooting. We're LIVE and ON THE AIR Bang bang.
WHO REALLY INVENTED RADIO? With his newly created Tesla coils, the inventor soon discovered that he could transmit and receive powerful radio signals when they were tuned to resonate at the same frequency. When a coil is tuned to a signal of a particular frequency, it literally magnifies the incoming electrical energy through resonant action. By early 1895, Tesla was ready to transmit a signal 50 miles to West Point, New York... But in that same year, disaster struck. A building fire consumed Tesla's lab, destroying his work. The timing could not have been worse. In England, a young Italian experimenter named Guglielmo Marconi had been hard at work building a device for wireless telegraphy. The young Marconi had taken out the first wireless telegraphy patent in England in 1896. His device had only a two-circuit system, which some said could not transmit "across a pond." Later Marconi set up long-distance demonstrations, using a Tesla oscillator to transmit the signals across the English Channel. Tesla filed his own basic radio patent applications in 1897. They were granted in 1900. Marconi's first patent application in America, filed on November 10, 1900, was turned down. Marconi's revised applications over the next three years were repeatedly rejected because of the priority of Tesla and other inventors. The Patent Office made the following comment in 1903: Many of the claims are not patentable over Tesla patent numbers 645,576 and 649,621, of record, the amendment to overcome said references as well as Marconi's pretended ignorance of the nature of a "Tesla oscillator" being little short of absurd... the term "Tesla oscillator" has become a household word on both continents [Europe and North America]. But no patent is truly safe, as Tesla's career demonstrates. In 1900, the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company, Ltd. began thriving in the stock markets—due primarily to Marconi's family connections with English aristocracy. British Marconi stock soared from $3 to $22 per share and the glamorous young Italian nobleman was internationally acclaimed. Both Edison and Andrew Carnegie invested in Marconi and Edison became a consulting engineer of American Marconi. Then, on December 12, 1901, Marconi for the first time transmitted and received signals across the Atlantic Ocean. Otis Pond, an engineer then working for Tesla, said, "Looks as if Marconi got the jump on you." Tesla replied, "Marconi is a good fellow. Let him continue. He is using seventeen of my patents." But Tesla's calm confidence was shattered in 1904, when the U.S. Patent Office suddenly and surprisingly reversed its previous decisions and gave Marconi a patent for the invention of radio. The reasons for this have never been fully explained, but the powerful financial backing for Marconi in the United States suggests one possible explanation. Tesla was embroiled in other problems at the time, but when Marconi won the Nobel Prize in 1911, Tesla was furious. He sued the Marconi Company for infringement in 1915, but was in no financial condition to litigate a case against a major corporation. It wasn't until 1943—a few months after Tesla's death— that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Tesla's radio patent number 645,576. The Court had a selfish reason for doing so. The Marconi Company was suing the United States Government for use of its patents in World War I. The Court simply avoided the action by restoring the priority of Tesla's patent over Marconi.
FM RADIO BESTS AM
THE SAD STATE OF RADIO TODAY Reduced to being a device for waking you up or checking traffic, plagued by "Pop," and a midnight pulpit for aliens, the clock radio is now an afterthought in the bedroom, sequestered near the Gideon Bible, like your crazy aunt from Martha's Vineyard.
THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT INVENTION OF THE 20TH CENTURY
You can forget inventions like air conditioning, television, the computer and the Internet. The single most important invention of the 20th century was the transistor. The transistor considered as the main component in almost all walks of modern electronics, and is termed as one of the greatest inventions of modern times. Yes, that's right. The transistor. The little-talked-about transistor is the building block for the processor. Without the transistor, some say our servers would be three stories high, and laptops would be a prop on Star Trek. Our televisions would still use vacuum tubes, and our cars couldn't guide us to the nearest Indian restaurant.
WHEN RADIO TUNERS' PARTS GOT SMALLER, IT LED TO… …THE MINIATURIZATION OF EVERYTHING
RADIO 2015 - EVERYTHING IS JUST ABOUT AS SMALL AS IT CAN BE FOR HUMAN USE
WHAT WAS IT LIKE IN THE GOLDEN AGE OF RADIO?
Woody Allen's RADIO DAYS A series of vignettes involving radio personalities is intertwined with the life of a working class family in Rockaway Beach, NY circa 1942.
TELEVISION DID NOT—CAN NOT—REPLACE RADIO What radio does that television can not is to require the listeners to use their imagination. With radio you could be anywhere in the world doing anything that you wanted just by imagining it to be so. At KPRI we fired people's imagination by creating characters and environments that were bigger than life. We placed those characters in imaginary situations and invited our listeners to participate in the ongoing story. Arguably more than any other public media, radio demands that we use our imaginative mind faculties to the max. Imagination stimulates the brain cells. That's good, and good for you. Radio rocks.
© 2015 KPRI TIMELINE