The beginning of Radio Broadcasting

The first experimental radio broadcasts were made in Britain in1921.

They led to the formation a few months later of the British Broadcasting Company (later Corporation). This was at the instigation of the General Post Office (GPO), who wanted to see the formation of a single consortium of wireless equipment manufacturers and broadcasters, specifically to avoid the major confusion that had arisen in North America, where there were 500 rival stations.

The new company worked under Johan Reith, an engineer from Aberdeem who was the company´s general manager for its first 16 years. Under Reith´s leadership, the BBC became a major national institution. The broadcasts were entirely live, and Reith insisted on a high level of formality, in spoken English, behaviour and dress, traditions which have unfortunately been thrown to the four winds in recent years.

The London broadcasting station, Known as 2LO, went on the air on 14 November 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company. A news bulletin was read by Arthur Burrows of the Marconi Company. The initial broadcast were fairly short, but soon lengthened to four hours a day of news, talks and concerts.

The BBC was supported financially by license fees paid for by the users. They had to pay ten shillings a year (50 pence) for the privilege of operating a receiver. The same system was used when television was introduced, also by the BBC.

At the same time in North America, the first commercial radio was being broadcast. The New York station, WEAF, broadcast the first radio commercials. This different approach to broadcasting was to become the set pattern in North America - private control of the airwaves and programmes dominated by sponsors.

In 1923, the BBC began publishing its magazine, the Radio Times, so that listeners  would know in advance what programmes were to be broadcast; this too became a long-continuing practice.

By 1926, radio ownership in The United States reached three million; most of these radios required listeners to wear earphones. In 1926, NBC ( the National Broadcasting Company ) was founded by David Sarnoff; this ambitious project had nine stations.

The first experiments with television followed hard on the heels of radio.

It was in 1926 that John Logie Baird gave his first public demonstration of television, but the system he used was bases on the rotating disc invented by van Nipkov in 1886 and had serious limitations.

Television had its first American demonstrations in 1927 in the auditorium of New York´s Bell Telephone Laboratories. Walter Gifford showed a large audience Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover in his office in Washington while Hoover´s voice was transmitted over telephone wires. The development of television was seriously inhibited by the fact that it needed a frequency band of four million cycles compared with only 400 for a radio; this was because of the need to transmit 250.000 elements required to build a clear picture on the screen.

The first regularly scheduled TV programmes started on 11 May 1928. General Electric´s station in New York broadcast the first programmes.

Another contributing development was the invention of the first tape recorder. The blattnerphone designed by the German film producer Louis Blattner used magnetized steel tape. Blattner himself used his invention to supply synchronized sound tracks to the films he was making at Elstree studios. The BBC saw straight away that the tape recorder was going to be invaluable to them, not least for making recorded programmes, and acquired the first commercially produced blattnerphone in 1931.

Both radio and television continued to develop. In the United States 75.000 radio sets were sold in 1921; by the end of the decade sales had increased to over 13 million.

It had become a major communicator. It had also become big business. American advertisers were spending 60 million dollars on radio commercials.