TechList: The Golden Age of Radio

You can go to the tech Stuff podcast page and subscribe to listen to all sorts of episodes about tech from all realms, and hopefully this will provide a little bit of entertainment, a little bit of education, and probably more than a few puns, because that's kind of how I roll. Enjoy this playlist. Welcome to text Stuff, a production from my Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to

tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and I love all things teching. Its time for another entertainment playlist episode. This one is about the Golden Age of radio. So we're talking about the early days of radio when the radio was first coming into being. It's an interesting and dramatic story and

I think it's a pretty entertaining one. Enjoy Today, Christian and I are going to talk about a subject that was suggested by a listener, and first of all, I must apologize to said listener because despite my heroic efforts of researching where this suggestion came from, I couldn't find it.

So I'm guessing this was actually an older one. But said the forward thinking, bad prediction story about Hugo Gernsback got me thinking about how crazy it must have been to have lived through the day you of public radio, all the excitement and so little understanding, fireside chats, fearmongering

about radio death rays. A history episode about the promises in popular notions surrounding radio could be fun and uh so we wanted to talk about the dawn of broadcast radio before we get into that, I should mention that way back in April two thousand eleven, Chris Palette and I sat down and recorded an episode titled Who Invented the Radio, which was mostly about the inventors who discovered radio waves and found ways to generate radio waves, obviously

including the two big names Tesla and Marconi. Anyone who knows anything about the patent wars knows about there was a big kerfuffle between the two of those guys. Uh little peek behind the curtain. That is the first time, and I think the only time I have recorded an entire episode and immediately said, we can't use that, Let's do it again. We recorded it all over because the ghost of Marcon he was haunting you. There was that, and we had in the old studio, we had a

portrait of Nicola Tesla on the wall. We felt judged, but mainly Chris and I both felt that we gave such a disjointed story that we were jumping around so much that made no sense. And so we after talking it through once, we went back re recorded. So that first episode that we recorded, it's lost to time. We don't have it anymore. I don't wish I could, at

least hope will be more organized today. But I'll tell you just from going through all this research that this is such a vast amount of information for this period of time, and I feel like and it's and you can you can get a PhD in radio communication in the history of radio and understanding these things, and it's yeah, we will probably only scratch the surface today, I imagine, Yeah, there there and there's so many crazy dramatic stories of betrayal, of of con men, of big. It's like this pirate

industry of people just messing with each other. Yeah, it's it's fascinating. In fact, there there's probably two or three podcast worth of information that we could cover, but we're gonna try and get this in one if we can. So, first thing I got to mention is that radio and broadcast radio are two different things. You know, radio in the sense of what Tesla and Marconi were looking at, they were looking at ways of transmitting short signals across

distances without using wires, so that was it. They were looking largely at using Morse code. So they might use a spark gap technology where they would create sparks and send messages that way. But you couldn't really do a sustained message that way without creating a lot of static and noise, and that was a real problem. So we need to look at another person for broadcast radio. That would be a Canadian by the name of Reginald Fessenden who said actually invented am radio. That would be uh,

the amplitude modulated radio. And so from your notes here your notes, it says he worked with Edison or for Edison. He actually he actually worked for both Westinghouse and Edison at different points in his career. So yeah, he just like Tesla. Tesla also worked for both, although you know, again working for like it's like me saying that, you know, I worked for the head of our parent company, and technically I do, but I don't have any contact with them. So uh. He had dropped out of school as a

young man. He actually did not complete his school work, but he was keenly interested in electricity and this potential to transmit messages wirelessly, and he was using that spark gap technology. But that was the problem, was that it was creating so much static and noise that it was very difficult to get any intelligible message across. Yeah. So

actually I want to interject here for sure. So um, in like the model of human communication, when scholars are looking at how human beings communicate with each other regardless of media, they actually use uh this Fessenden Marconi uh model of transmissions as like the baseline for it. And it's all about like sending and receiving with feedback and feed forward and then there's a signal to noise ratio.

That's how it's all understood. Whether you and I are sitting here talking in the same room, or it's mass media, or it's uh like like in the early days of radio. That the way they literally thought of it was two ships that were thousands of yards away from one another trying to contact each other using this old radio technology, and they would have so much static they would have to constantly give each other feedback and feed forward to

make sure the message was understood. It makes perfect sense, I mean, especially when you see the brilliance of Fessenden. He thought, well, they I can. I can create these sparks of electricity, create these elector of magnetic fields, and thus creating radio waves, but it isn't giving me the fidelity I need in order to communicate properly. He then thought, what if I used a continuous wave. So I create a sign wave and oscillating wave with the same amplitude,

same frequency, So it's just steady. Now, that's not carrying any information by itself. It's if you could if you could hear it, it would just be a steady tone. But it's actually talking about using frequencies above the limit of human hearing. So let's say you create this wave and then you were too introduce a second wave, one that was created by your voice, so you'd speak into

a microphone, it gets converted into electric waves. You add that on top of the uh, the existing wave you've already created, and you allow it to change the amplitude of that wave as the two waves are overlaid on top of one another. Sure, it's genius, it is genius. It's absolutely genius. Uh. So this was a M radio. This was the idea that what that became a M radio because it does modulate the amplitude of that wave. So the amplitude, by the way, is the the peak

to peak uh difference, Right, It's not. It's not how many oscillations. This is just the the amplitude of the wave itself, how tall the peaks are, how low the troughs are, if you were looking at the wave across a line the way at Assuming that this innovation of his significantly reduced the noise and static it did, it did. It did still have issues and that you could have interference with other waves that were created at that same frequency.

It also meant that you could get interference with other electromagnetic phenomenon like like a lightning strike. So also if you pass below like if you go under a bridge, you would hear, you know, the disruption of the signal. So it wasn't perfect, but it was an incredible step forward. And this was a revolutionary I mean he tested it successfully. He did a short distance test between two towers and it worked fine. And then in nineteen o six he

had his infamous Christmas concert for sailors. See this is yeah, this is where I think that that boat to boat idea comes from. Yeah, because it turns out the disaster of the Titanic would end up really making this uh clear that there needed to be some radio communication for ships at sea. But what he wanted to do was he wanted to send out a message to essentially telegraph

operators aboard ships. That was his plan. So he proceeded the concert with an actual telegraph message that essentially translates into hey, pay attention. And then once he did that, he started knew it was coming though, right They were not, most of them. They just knew to pay attention because they got the message. Yeah. There they were like, well, here's the message. Whatever is going to happen, We need

to really focus. And so what they were expecting to hear were just the noises they would hear for the dots and dashes of Morse code. So then he he gives a short speech, he plays a violin uh, and

plays a Holy Night. There were supposed to be other people who talked into the microphone too, but most of them chickened out because they they got like terrible stage fright because they realized all of a sudden that they were speaking to like hundreds of people, right right, yeah, yeah, And so anyway, it ended up being a big hit. Sailors up and down the Atlantic coast we were able to hear him and reported back to it, so it was known to be a success. And that's how AM

radio got started. Yeah yeah, I like that. Yeah, so that's a nice start to it ends up being or rather thorny industry. Yeah. So, so he he demonstrates this capability and immediately other physicists and engineers start to experiment with it because some of them had been independently working on the same kind of idea. Festendon ended up being the first to make it really work in a public demonstration.

So you had a lot of other people who were who either adopted his ideas or continued to develop their own ideas, and a lot of amateurs were starting to experiment with radio transmissions, including transmitting out to telegraph operators, who often were very much entertained by this because it was different from just listening to clicks on the headphones.

This is the part that's the most fascinating about the evolution of radio to me is that even though the technology is ultimately made for mass communication, people originally started using it as one to one communication across long distances, replacing a telegraph. And then, uh, these amateur operators, these like d I y uh people in their in their garage, is just you know, tinkering around with the technology that they could get a hold of. We're able to turn

it into this mass communication then yeah. And it's funny because when you look at the early ones, obviously they were using very low wattage transmitters, so that meant that they couldn't transmit very far, most of them. I mean, if you were a big name, you might be able to work with someone like General Electric to get a really big transmitter and be able to to send a signal far away. Because the signals reach is largely dependent

upon the power of the transmitter. Right, the further way you get, the weaker the signal is and the less you'll be likely you are able to pick it up with a receiver. So in the early days people were happy to experiment with this, and there was really no regulation because there there hadn't been a demonstrable need to regulate yet, because no one had the power to interfere

that much with anything that was important. Nineteen o seven, Festan would invent a high frequency electric generator to create radio waves in the one hurts frequency, which was really important.

And in nineteen o eight Dr Charles Aaron Culver, who was newly hired as a professor of physics at Beloit College or bell Watt if you prefer um, and it's it's in a town called bell Watt actually, but set up a radio telegraph assembly which became the foundation for the college is radio station, though voice in music transmission

wouldn't be part of it until the nineteen twenties. But this this became like again, it was someone a physics professor, in this case, a physics professor who was already interested in radio and had been working on it independently, setting up a thing that would eventually evolve into an early early radio station. Yeah, and that's kind of Another interesting aspect of this too is that these early amateur radio stations weren't just uh d I y kind of hobbyists

doing it on their own. A lot of it was educational institutions, not just colleges but also high schools that were just you know, trying to use it for educational purposes. Yeah, and that it's interesting later on what happens when amateur

radio sort of gets more regulated. It really reminds me of the early days of personal computers and how how it first started off as a hobbyist thing, and then you know, you had bleeding edge adopters who might not build a computer, but they're curious about how they might use it. And then later you had people who were uh, you know more it became more and more mainstream as time went on. So we've seen other emerging technologies that have followed a similar pathway to radio. Uh not always

with the dramatics. I mean, there were some definite dramatics and early personal computers too. But we got some crazy stories to tell. But first, we have another big name in radio that we have to mention. Yeah, so in nineteen ten, this guy lead to Forest really broadcasted like the first sort of broad meant for mass communication radio broadcast, uh,

specifically of a guy named Enrico Caruso singing. I believe it was opera singing from what I understood, um, and he he ushered in this area era of radio communications. And unfortunately, though even though he was broadcasting probably on Fessenden's news system, for the most part it was static and radio interference, so the audience barely heard anything. But you know, for a decade afterwards, radio fans were both using uh, these amateur radio units to broadcast and receive. Yeah,

it wasn't just them receiving. Yeah, it wasn't like they were a passive audience. They were creating as well. And again, depending upon the power of their radio transmitters, it may be the they were only transmitting to people in their general neighborhood or even small town, but you wouldn't be able to necessarily pick up that signal for much further, it also depends on the quality of the receiver as well.

Like you could build a very simple a radio receiver that doesn't even require a battery and as a crystal, a very long antenna and some headphones, and uh, you can pick up radio signals if you're close enough to a transmitter. Uh. And in fact, that's a fun project to do. You can look up how to do that online.

So also in nineteen ten, the same time Leada Forest was was experimenting with us, you had a guy named Charles David Harold who opened a school that he called the Herald College of Engineering and Wireless and he was experimenting with wireless voice transmissions as early as nineteen o nine and providing a thrill to telegraph operators who suddenly

were able to hear voices over the telegraph lines. Now this is out in California, so he's surprising people out there who normally they weren't expecting it at all, but they loved it because you would have imagine this job is a little probably very tedious. Yeah. So he actually started setting up a regular broadcast time like the first radio programming in a way, and by nineteen ten he had created this, uh, this program that would include reading

out news to telegraph operators. And his wife Sybil got involved and she started playing records that the description I said was the kind of records young people like to listen to. Back in Yeah, so playing records, So playing music for these telegraph operators and holding the first radio contests. And here's how the radio contest work back then. She would instruct people listening to come by their house, sign a guest book with their name and where they were from,

and then they might win a little prize. Was number seven. No, it wasn't calling number seven. Uh. And here's the coolest part. I think this little amateur station eventually over time and twenty one would become kq W, and in ninete it would evolve into k CBS as then the CBS. Yeah. I thought that was really interesting, especially like we'll talk later about, CBS is sort of importance in a big

game of radio development. Yeah. So nineteen ten is also when the US passed the Wireless Ship Act, which required all ships of the US traveling more than two miles off the coast and carrying more than fifty passengers to have a wireless radio equipment on board with a with an operator, and the transmission range had to be at least a hundred miles. And that meant that it created

a lot more radio transmissions broadcast without any regulation. This is where the United States government starts to say, this is going to become a problem because now we we already have a lot of radio traffic going on just through amateurs as well as ship to land land to ship communication. Uh. It's starting to get a little crowded and we're starting to get interfere rants. We need to

figure out how to handle this. So in nineteen twelve, they passed the Radio Act of nineteen twelve, which is good because if they had passed the Radio Act of nineteen twelve and nineteen eleven, everyone would have been confused. Uh. And marked the first time the US government required radio stations to be licensed. So the licensing was really just

to create order in chaos. Uh. And it was really kind of like, you know, we want to make sure that we're keeping certain frequencies free so that we can have these these very important transmissions go uninterrupted because am transmissions, if you transmit two things on the same frequency, you get lots of interference and just different from There was a military component to this as well, because World War One was on the horizon, was happening, and they the

government banned amateur radio broadcasting during the war for you know, the reason that they were trying to transmit signals to one another of important nature. If somebody was talking in their girl raj about um uh, you know their favorite records the young people listen to. Yeah, the ones that the young people listen to, they would overlap and they wouldn't get these important messages, so they shut it all down.

And also just radio detection to the the remote possibility that they might detect radio transmissions from either allies or enemies. It would mean that yeah, yeah, this is this is before the whole Bletchley Park on Dygma thing, which is I've talked about that in the previous episode of tech Stuff. But fascinating story. So Uren Edwin Armstrong, who's going to be important throughout this conversation, and his story is amazing

and tragic. Uh. He patents a radio receiver circuit that increases the selectivity which allows you to tune into specific frequencies and the sensitivity of radio receivers. That means it was able to pick up weaker radio signals than previous receivers. So selectivity obviously very important. You want to be able to say I'm looking at this picular band of frequencies and I don't want anything outside of that. Um, and we would see that get better and better in he

would invent the super heterodyne radio receiver or superhead. So this principle is actually really fascinating, and I gotta admit to you, a Christian, I had to really sit down and read this a few times to kind of get what was going on. Yeah, because I mean this is radio, electromagnetic and radio broadcast. I have a basic understanding of it, but it does go well beyond what I studied in school. And it took a while, but now I think I've

got it. Will explain it to me, because yeah, I'm more of the on the side of the like cultural examination of radio, whereas like the technology of it escapes

me sometimes, So yeah, hit me. All right. Let's say, let's say I want to transmit a radio signal at a high frequency, so it's not going to interfere with anything else, but that processing high frequencies is a little tricky, so you might have a receiver that can process frequencies up to I'm just going to take an arbitrary number killer hurts, but I want to transmit at fifteen hundred

killer hurts. If I were to introduce that frequency to an oscillator tuned to a different frequency, suddenly I would be able to receive that. Uh, not just at the original frequency I transmit at, but the difference between that and the oscillating one. So another easy example, let's say

they have an oscillating frequency at a thousand killer hurts. Okay, that would mean that if you used a receiver tune to five killer hurts, killer hurts or two thousand five killer hurts, you would pick up that signal and could process it. Okay. So and I'm imagining that this is a process that's still used today. Yeah. This is the principle of transmitting and receiving with a radio so that your radio doesn't have to have as wide a spectrum. It's called inter minute frequency. And it took me a

long time to figure out what was going on. Is the oscillator that was throwing me off? And then I realized, oh, the oscillators tuned to a different frequency, and that's what gives you the broader range that you can pick up. It's pretty fascinating. And again Armstrong was absolutely brilliant coming up with this. Uh. And then we move up to the nineteen twenties. Yeah, and the twenties is when this educational stuff that I was talking about earlier. It really

hits a boom. There was like more than two hundred educational organizations across the United States of America that, uh, we're requesting broadcasting licenses so that they could transmit. And whether they were using it as a an opportunity for their students to learn about the technology or to broadcast

educational information didn't really matter. The unfortunate thing is that thirteen years later, by n three or more of these educational institutions had folded and in basically it was because of and this is going to be a huge theme of this episode, because of ad based programming and stronger stations, commercial stations that were able to overlap their signal. Yeah, you essentially had not just the fact that the companies had more technological behind them, but the government was favoring

those over the educational ones. When we get into a little bit more about the politics, you're going to hear that repeated a few times, and it's it's a little upsetting, honestly.

And I also i'd like to say, like, it's interesting because despite whatever my political beliefs are reading one of the articles that we used as as research for this was written in nineteen from the perspective of somebody at Harvard University looking back at the Federal Radio Radio Commission before it turned into the f CC that we have now and kind of just doing a broad review of

the last like ten years of this. And it's very, very similar and reminiscent of arguments that we've seen with media throughout the last hundred years and that we're seeing right now in arguments about net neutrality. Yeah, it's really similar to net neutrality, the idea being that everyone should be free to use the Internet to send and receive

whatever information they want. In radio, we saw the same argument, except in that case radio it was it ended up being that those folks were kind of pushed away and that the the the corporations, the companies that had the money were the ones that had the voice. Yeah, and and so like you know, as we're talking earlier, there's these amateur radio stations, right and they here's the kind

of content you might find on amateur radio stations. Maybe somebody is giving a sermon there, or they're they're they're just reading out of their Bible, or they're talking about sports out of today's newspaper, updating their neighborhood on what happened in sports around the country that day. Maybe they're reading a poem, maybe they're giving a speech about something

political at the time. Perhaps the usage of radio or like we were talking earlier, just playing records and at the time there was no you know, licensing or copyright and effect for for how music was broadcasted, So they just throw any record on and kind of entertain the neighborhood. Right in a way, you can think of it as like the predecessor of blogs. Yeah, you know it really in a in a real way, it was and uh, this was amazing. This was an ability for someone to

have a platform to have their voice heard. Some people made very good use of that. Some people may you may think, made frivolous use of it, just like what we see on the internet. Sure, yeah, exactly. And that's just like blogging, except for for people like us, I suppose, who do get paid to do it. A lot of these these amateur radioists that they weren't getting paid for this.

They had day jobs. In fact, like one of the stories I read was about how there's this guy who ran a gas station, but he also had a radio station running out of his gas station, and so he'd be on air and then he'd say, hold on a minute, I have to go, uh sell some gas, and he'd go. He'd disappeared for five minutes, and they'd come back and just pick up again. And that was just how it is.

They didn't really worry about dead air or anything like that. Yeah. Um. And and at the same time, there's also this other, like broader, more important thing, which I think is why the government started to become more involved in it, which is that radio allowed the listeners to sample other cultures from far away states that and and and learn more about what this kind of idea of America as a

nation meant. You know, even though they may have never visited Nebraska, they would be hearing what these amateur radioists in Nebraska were talking about. They were giving them sort of a peek into what the culture in those towns were. Like it's really cool. Yeah, yeah, absolutely yeah. Moving over to ninety that's when we get the first commercial radio

sta Asian launching. That's Kadi k A. Now, amateur radio stations, like Christian was saying, had already been around, and a guy named Henry P. Davis was inspired by an amateur named Frank Conrad and saw the potential to actually make some money off this whole radio thing, and not just not just broadcast out for free, but to actually make it a commercial enterprise. So the radio station went live

on November two, nineteen twenty. Henry P. Davis himself read out the results of the presidential elections on the air, and he would become heavily involved in broadcast radio, in fact becoming the first chairman of the National Broadcasting Company also known as NBC, so in yeah, exactly, Yeah. Then

the opening of thirty Rock in nineteen six. Kadi k A was owned and operated by Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, and you might not be surprised to hear that Westinghouse used the radio station as a means of convincing people to go out and buy radios, because up to this point, again it was very much an amateur thing. People who were interested in the science would go out and get the equipment or build the equipment from there from whatever

they could, and that's how they participated. But now we're talking about actually making commercial radio sets for people to go out and buy. And this is also the beginning of things starting to get a little dodgy on the corporate side of things, because previously the patents for radios

were all over the place. But what happened was the big companies G E, A, T and T. Weird, they're such a familiar name nowadays, G A, T and T, International Radio and Telegraph and Westinghouse all got together and said, let's pull together our patents, and they created our c A, the Radio Corporation of America, for the express purpose of allowing them to build and sell radio equipment like transmitters and receivers that were designed not for broadcast broadcast but

for for telegraphing, but also to keep these amateur radio wash out of business physically, so that they couldn't just go and buy an out of the box kit anymore. They would have to they would have to really build it themselves. R c A flexed its muscles in ways that I think just about anyone would describe as odious and uh and a lot of the stories we're gonna cover,

yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, um. And what's kind of interesting is just that, you know, there's there's this other article that I read for this that was called the Design of Symbiosis that was all about, you know, the the

longevity of radio and then these corporations interacting. And there's a quote from it that I want to read, which is about this specific thing says it was no accident that the General Electric Corporation G, after acquiring rights to the Marconi wireless patents in the United States, spearheaded the formation of the r c A, which in turn launched the National Broadcasting Corporation NBC, one of g S many subsidiaries.

It still is, I believe right. Well again you got Universal, Yeah, great, it's even larger than that and a leading content company. So it's like one thing led to another, from one corporation to the next. Is they kind of built out their their subsidiaries and spread their spread out kind of like an umbrella and it and it. Don't get me wrong, this wasn't all negative. They were very positive effects at

the time as well. From this, I love that you have this bit about a T and T and there their business strategy that this is one of the So apparently they like repeatedly, we're trying to charge people for commercial broadcasting over their sets, and they wanted to charge tolls in the same way that they were charging people for phone calls. Which I think is amazing when you when you think about it, you know, there's just these

these negotiations between the public and the large corporations. When these new media hit the scene, and we're experiencing it right now, we'll probably always be experiencing it, I imagine. So, and it's interesting to you. You make a delineation in our notes about how how the radio system is treated in America versus in other nations, right, yeah, So the

thing that's unique about the American radio system. This isn't to say that that no other countries did this, but the American radio system specifically evolved as a unique combination between private enterprises like these ones that we were just talking about, in government regulation, whereas in other countries, for the most part, it went for public ownership. So places like Iceland, the United Kingdom obviously with the BBC, Italy, Turkey and the USS are it was all public um.

And so the problem that radio had that was unique in America was that all of these consumers could receive any signal at equal equality, very much like again blogging, right sure in theory, and that any broadcaster, however, whether it's NBC or a guy operating out of his garage would be able to overwhelm multiple frequencies and overwrite what was being played by somebody else's broadcast. Yeah, the very least you could interfere with the signal. Um, we'll talk

about FM and a little bit. The interesting difference, one of the many interesting differences between a M and FM is if you have two AM broadcasts that are coming out at the same signal, they interfere with one another the same frequency, I should say, they interfere with one of FM. If you have two of the same frequency, it's whichever frequency is the most powerful is the one

you will receive. So you could have a little station that is broadcasting in a very small amount of power that if you are close to it, you would be able to pick it up on an FM band that would normally be for a radio station that might be miles away, that could be a giant corporations one. So there was a lot of back and forth with this too, which is today we think of this. You and I were talking about this the other day when we proposed

this idea. We think of it as pirate radio, right, and I think I always think of pop up the volume of the volume. Yeah, and Christians later driving around his neighborhood with his his pirate radio station at the

back of his car. Yeah, it's also similar. I did a story with Chuck Bryant about it was television, not radio, but the same same principle, uh the Max Headroom incident where in Chicago that was also the same principle as FM radio, and that if you were able to send a signal along the same frequency but at a higher power rate, then you could overpower that and people would

receive your signal not someone else's. Yeah, but anyway, and so as these these conflicts are going on, these like weird ven diagrams of stations playing up against one another, the government starts to become interested as we as we've talked about, and especially because of military reasons. So the Navy says, you know what, we should really take control

of this as a means of national defense. And the way that they thought it should be run was basically like the post office, that the you know, the federal government should own and control what is broadcast on radio signals. Obviously that that didn't end up happening, But then you get this huge boom because of the amateur radio movement from nine to nineteen twenty three, the number of radio sets in America increased from sixty thousand to one point

five millions. That's a huge adoption. Massive And uh in nineteen two there were twenty eight stations in operation, but I think it like exploded to hundreds very quickly. Um. And then enter the scene a little guy named Herbert Hoover, who was at the time the Secretary of Commerce, right, and the and the Department of Commerce oversaw radio at this time. Yeah, yeah, And he was really the initiative

of that idea. He was the one who said, you know, uh, he really wanted the Department of Commerce to control it first of all. But he also said, and this is another quote, he said, at first the idea of making money off radio seemed profane. It is inconceivable that we should allow so great a possibility for service, for news, for entertainment, and for vital commercial purposes to be drowned

in advertising chatter. This is Herbert Hoover who subsequently ends up using the government to support the businesses, uh in terms of businesses over amateur radio stations, UH, in terms of their licensing. And his other analogy for radio was that he thought of it as transportation rather than the

the post office analogy that the Navy was using. He thought it was like, we should think of them as like waterways, and that the public should be be able to ride these waterways, but that the government would regulate how they did. So I like this this message here too, of the We're one of the world's first radio ads, aired on August two, uh for a housing development in Queens. Yeah. Yeah, this is the They were basically like um advocating what we would now call gentrification or like get This is

a quote from that ad. Get away from the solid masses of brick, where children grow up starved for a run over a patch of grass. But my child's never seen what a tree looks like. Queen. This is the first thing that we we sold on radio. That's hilarious. Yeah.

But so Hoover goes on in Ino. He calls together the first American Radio Conference, which is he brings together representatives from and I put this in quotes radio industry because it really wasn't an industry, you know, it's just kind of and and this included not only you know, the businesses that had interests in mind, but also the amateur radio operators and no action was taken. Uh, there

were calls for legislation they introduced to building Congress. Congress is like, no, we don't want to have anything to do with this, and there's political reasons behind that that I'll get into later. Um. Then by nine, we've got fourteen hundred radio stations, not just what did I say? Yeah and you So you've got these big commercial broadcasters that are forming networks like NBC and CBS, both of

them they've formed in seven respectively. Uh, and it's very similar today to the same that NBC and CBS that we understand as being television. Right now, now I've got the beginning of one of the weirdest stories I've ever heard. This guy is my favorite. I agree. I think you should do a whole episode about this guy. I could easily do a whole episode about this guy. And and he's going to pepper through parts of the rest of this episode. So nineteen twenty three is what we're talking

about here. We're going back just a little bit too to set the stage. That's when doctor used in quotes John R. Brinkley starts up a radio station called kf KB in Kansas. So let me tell you about doctor Brinkley. First of all, he wasn't a real doctor. He's like the original snake oil salesman. He he at least perfected it to an art form, right. He went to medical school.

They never graduated, but he bought a diploma from a diploma mill for five hundred dollars not an insignificant amount of money, that's uh, and it gave him the right to practice medicine in some states, including Kansas. He purchased diploma, not not an actual like proof that he had the training that would allow him to do this. So anyway,

he starts practicing medicine. He had previously been involved in some scams and cons including things like selling tinted water as if it were an actual medicinal cure and injecting it into people. But I want to see a movie about this guy's life. I want to I want to see a movie. I want to see a movie of this guy. I want to see him cast. I want I want Simon Peg to play him. He's just like deviously injecting things into people and cutting open their necks.

I think I think either Simon Peg or Neil Patrick Harris that would be pliant yeah, he would be good. It's like evil doogie howser. Yeah. So he had he had been hired as a house doctor for a meat packing company and he observed the rigorous mating habits of goats. Uh yeah, So let's slow down for a second, of people, This means that he watched goats have sex for a long time and enthusiastically the goats at least I don't

know about him, but the goats were certainly enthusiastic. So he was talking to a male patient once about the fact that the male patient was having problems in the bedroom.

He was having a failing libido rectile dysfunction. Perhaps the the actual nature of the problem was not what explained in all the sources I looked at, but had something to do with failing libido or um, you know, virility, And so supposedly what Dr Brinkley did was jokingly suggest that perhaps they should transplant plant some goat quote unquote glands, as in gonads into the male patient. And he said, let's do it. Let's fire up like the original body modification.

Give me some give me some of them goat glands. So he does he actually did start performing this, and then he started to suggest, like he began to essentially advertise saying, this is a way to restore virility for men. Uh, let me do this this medical procedure for a not insignificant amount of money. So flash foward to when he gets the radio station and he starts to fill his broadcast time with music and medical lectures, and he would end up advocating for this kind of treatment and other

treatments that were equally bogus advertising too. Yeah, and he was he was essentially throwing business two surgeons into pharmacists and getting kickbacks every single time and making a mint off it. So he's in full operation and will end up, believe it or not, defining in part why radio has regulated the way it is. But we'll get to that. Yeah, I know, he's important to the history of it um. In the meantime, Hoover's continuing to negotiate with stations and

the government on how it should be regulated. And you know, basically, as the Secretary of Commerce, his work is to let the stations work out amongst themselves which frequency is going to be used and when and how they overlap. You know, it wasn't really you know, handing it out. He wouldn't occasionally make decisions. And what happened was in the federal court was like whoa, whoa, you don't have this power.

And specifically the Attorney General of the United States, who you know, was from the same administration that the Secretary of Commerce was, decided that Hoover didn't have this power, he could not grant permits at request, and that all of a sudden, these air waves turned into even more of this like wild wild West of broadcasting than they already were. Uh. And so obviously more regulation is even is necessary. And Coolidge is the president of the time.

He favors the control by the Department of Commerce obviously because it's under his branch, and he opposes any kind of commission being formed. Senate, however, didn't like the idea of one man being in control. And this is where the political angle comes in, because they knew that Herbert Hoover had his eye on the presidency and they didn't want to give him any political prestige for taking care

of the radio problem. Interesting, and also this will probably seem familiar to people following them, that neutrality arguments, where one of the big problems was the FCC had brought a case against Comcast for blocking bit torrent traffic, and then the response was, you don't have authority to tell Comcast what it can and can't do because Internet transmissions

were a title one classification, not titled two. Uh. And if you want to know more about that, you can listen to the title to podcast I did and Common Carrier podcast I did from a while back to to learn more about it. But just suffice it to say that this is something that we've seen before and we'll

likely see again. I just I think it's fascinating that, like the future of this major media uh, was decided by people who wanted to screw over a political candidate potentially running from Yeah, yeah, and sometimes just people who were wanting to screw over inventors. Uh. It's crazy. We'll talk more about those two. In Congress creates the Federal Radio Commission and passes the Radio Act of nineteen twenty seven. Now, before that time, it was all the Department of Commerce,

like Christian was saying. So the Commission's job was to get radio into shape, and they wanted to have a little more power than Department of Commerce, which could grant broadcast licenses but couldn't deny a broadcast license. So if you requested it, if you did all the things you were supposed to do, you would get one. You couldn't be told no, So the Federal Radio Commission was supposed to be able to say no if it was warranted. Um, the question of how they determined how it was warranted

was something of a problem. And uh. The Act also laid out rules for content. Programming could not have obscene, in decent or profane language, and the Commission could and did use content as a factor when deciding whether or not to renew a broadcast license. So if you were broadcasting and not paying a whole attention to those content rules, you wouldn't necessarily have your license revoked, but when you

went back to get your license renewed, you might be denied. Right, And this makes sense in light of other arguments that were going on with media of the you know, the twenty years probably surrounding this, both with the cinema and I would assume newspapers and comic books as well. Yeah, all looking at the government, the government trying to deem what was profane or wasn't, but also trying to leave it in the public's hands to decide. Yeah. There was also a real worry about how far can you rule

on these things before it becomes censorship. So that I mean, that's a real worry, right, because they didn't want to be accused of taking away somebody's right to free speech. Sure, yeah, um. And so the fr C Federal Radio Commission, it was

really just like this compromise, this political compromise. And so the idea was like really like they just assumed they being Congress, that it was going to go away after a year as part of a political deal basically to keep Hoover out of office, and especially because of the commercial radio interests these guys who were lobbying their politicians. Uh, they wanted their regulation to go back to the Secretary

of Commerce. They just didn't want it to be Hoover. Uh. And so they and their supporters in Congress would belittle the FARC's accomplishments even as they had they had subsequently argued that it should exist, and then as it was going along, they would say, oh, this is terrible. You're not doing a good job. And Uh. The FARC was

handicapped by a number of things. A limited financial resources, had an inadequate staff, uh, and as we're talking about here, it really didn't have any power authority, and its existence was in question from the very day that it was it was created. It was like they were constantly on probation. Yeah. It was one of those things where, um, they're also

they're very organization ended up being a problem. So. Uh. One of the things about the FARC was that they were organized so that the entire United States was divided into into zones. Yeah. They called this sectionalism, and each zone was giving given the same number of broadcast licenses essentially as every other zone, which you know, from one perspective, sounds like it would be fair, like everybody gets the same amount, But then you think where's the population distribution.

The Northeast is very heavily populated and the Southwest is very lightly populated, and so you don't have enough broadcast licenses for the Northeast and you have too many for the Southwest. So these were so simple things like just the way things were set up kind of set the f r C up for failure. It did, yeah, especially because when that happened, Southerners in particular felt like they weren't being treated fairly. Uh, And it led to the

Davis Amendment in March. The idea was that there had to be an equal allocation of licenses, band frequencies, periods of time for operation station power for each of these five zones. Uh and that so you know, obviously sexualism was a huge problem for the FARC. And this is even before we get into the business interest angle, right right, This is just in the operation part of the f FRC, not even getting into the business section. But these are

definitely important things to to consider. The idea of being able to say, here's the frequency you are allowed to use, here's the amount of power your transmitter is allowed to have, so that way we can make sure that we don't have these battling frequencies interfering with one another, because that's not going to be good for anybody. It's not good for the transmitter, it's not good for the consumer who's trying to receive these. All of that made sense, but

they were hampered so much. And also, I mean, there were a lot of shady political goings on along with corporate goings on. At the same time. They were essentially trying to fulfill this mission of favoring big business over amateur radios, and they Actually, there's an actual FARC memo that says, quote, there is not room in the broadcast band for every school of thought, whether it's religious, political, social, social, or economic. Each can't have its own separate broadcasting station

or a mouthpiece in the ether. Uh So they, you know, they were coming down pretty hard on these these amateur stations that we're given providing you know, a pulpit essentially to anybody who had the means to to operate a broadcast um in favor of the businesses that were, you know, lobbying to have them created in the first place. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so, you know, very complicated issue. The technology, oddly enough, less

complicated than the politics and culture surrounding it. In this case, like the stories end up getting um Like it's the

human element that really throws the monkey wrench in here. Yeah. So, for instance, like you've got this happens, the FRC says, you know, this isn't a this isn't a pulpit for your belief And then the labor movement, which is very powerful at the time, says, wait a minute, we should have a clear channel that we can broadcast over these five zones so we can talk to people about labor interests, and then educators said, yeah, so should we uh, And

so there's all this pressure from the public, and then subsequently Congress uses that and just keeps pushing on the f r C, saying you're really blowing it here. Yeah. So you've got a great bullet list here of the working principles of the f r C. Let's go through those. Yeah. So this is how they would ostensibly decide things. The first is that the station with the longest record of continuous service had the superior right for broadcasting on a

particular channel, right, but they had a stipulation. There were other conditions as well. So in order to fulfill the fair and equitable distribution that was required by them, an applicant who wanted to broadcast needed firm financial standing and efficient equipment. That's pretty vague, right, So it's up to this f r C, not f c C f r C commissioner at the time to determine what firm financial standing means and what efficient equipment means, especially as this

equipment is evolving at a rapid pace. Um. And then you also had to obey the rules of the obscene of not broadcasting obscene content like we talked about earlier, UH and basically keeping it so that the dissemination of propaganda wasn't controlled by a single group, and that creeds were supposed to find that this is another quote that I loved, find their way into the market of ideas

to be on the air. There was this idea that, um, there was a there would be a natural kind of UH process throughout the radio operators in the public that decide which political agendas should get to be broadcast on the radio or not, rather than just giving everyone the opportunity to Yeah, and that would actually changed to there would there would eventually become a decision where people would say, you know what, we need to make sure that everyone

has equal opportunity to voice there, to to put their political voice out there. But that would be an idea that would come around a little later. Yeah, So you know, saying let's just put this out there and see what happens, and and I trust that whatever outcome there is it will be for the best didn't always work out. It's like it's like saying, the laws of nature will decide who the best person for president of the United States

would be. So what sort of stuff did we get as a result of this, well, subsequently, the f r C didn't want to regulate advertising. Uh, not only because you know, the advertiser's interests were also their interests, but also because the commission chose to further the ends of the commercial broadcasters as part of what they called the

public interest. So the f SEE had this ability to claim that it didn't have powers of censorship and it couldn't be held responsible for questionable advertising such as cigarettes. You know, those like old corny cigarette ads that Judy hear on radio right now. If you listen, if you ever listen to old timey radio that has the commercial still in it, you will hear tons of these. So

they didn't want to censor those. But at the same time, they would rule that public stations that were on the air could or could not be on the air because of their quality of character, which I think is kind of fascinating that you know it was. I would assume at the time that it was maybe arguments of political beliefs, right, um, yeah, very likely religious. This actually makes me think of how

it's unrelated. It's tangential, but how if I'm watching a streaming content on my one of my devices whenever it gets to the content part, like whatever I'm actually trying to see, I might encounter buffering three or four times, depending upon the connection. But commercials always seemed to play

with perfect clarity and no buffering whatsoever. Isn't that interesting, especially especially when you're when you're on YouTube, and YouTube has got that new sort of passive aggressive alert that comes up at the bottom that says, hey, just so you know, this isn't US, it's the limits of your bandwidth provider, right, commercial. So it's interesting to me also that the public, you know, you would think like, oh, the public, were they crying out on behalf of the

little guy, And it turns out they weren't. In large part, they were actually citing with the big networks. Yeah they were. And what's kind of interesting about this is, yeah, they were more interested in the content that NBC, r c A and CBS was we're putting out um and even though some people argued, you know, our c has a monopoly on this industry. Uh, it's interesting, Like there was another argument that was essentially that, look, the mass public

just wants entertainment from these radio channels. They don't want to be educated, they don't want to listen to your political screeds, and so subsequently they're complacent about the whole thing and they don't really care whether or not these

amateur radio stations are getting edged out. UM. And so again, like I turned back to this article by this guy Herring out of the Harvard Review, and he proposed that there are two potential solutions, which I think are really interesting now that we have the the advantage of being so far ahead and time and looking back on this, and he said, the only possible solutions are that we go for full government ownership. His example was the BBC

at the time. UH. And he said, yeah, there's criticisms that come in the form of minorities, not not ethnic minorities, but like minorities of of voice claiming that they aren't given equal opportunity to access to stations. So that's the one negative drawback to that. And he said, or we could a lot of fixed percentage of radio facilities just

for nonprofit programs. UH. And then whatever it is, whether it's uh they allocate a certain number frequencies or maybe they say, you know, the commercial stations can broadcast for these twelve hours a day and then another twelve hours a day, it's our nonprofit stations. Um. But even if they did that, there were so much demand for nonprofit amateur radio that they didn't have enough enough to accommodate everybody. There wasn't enough literally in this case, it wasn't There

weren't enough frequencies to facilitate it. Yeah. Yeah, So this is really between where we see the beginning of the radio industry an actual radio industry that is commercialized, and there are questions that we're going around about, well, how should broadcasting be financed, how should we produce our programs?

How should we distribute? All of this stuff? And amateur broadcasting moved away as much as it was, like kind of I think of it as being like the fandom of today, you know, like I keep thinking that's amateur radios like the bler of the twenties, um, and that

there were so many fandoms expressed there. But ultimately other stations that had commercial enterprises behind them, or even commercial enterprises themselves, like department stores or music stores or doctors or Mr Brinkley sorry Dr brink Yes, uh, he didn't spend three years not graduating medical school to be called Mr Exactly. Yeah, I mean that five was well spent. Uh, they ultimately were able to you know, put push out

these interests of the sort of amateur broadcasters. So like our c A GE and Westinghouse, they form NBC because they want to keep their interests from diverging, even though their competitors they're also you know, united against amateur radio. This leads to the rise of advertising sponsorships, which were well familiarly with in the podcasting world and with ad agents.

This is really like the first time that they had like whole ad agencies that were working together with these companies kind of coming up with how this stuff is going to be broadcasting, How is the best way to convince the audience to to move from queens or to a cigarette. So looking back to our friend that we referred to a second ago, doctor John R. Brinkley. Uh, the FRC denied his broadcast renewal license in nineteen thirty.

So Dr Brinkley comes up to the f r C s as a time for me to get a little stamp on here so I can continue my my good deeds of posting are broadcasting fraudulent medical practices and getting kickbacks, And they said nope, They actually cited the fraudulent claims and the content as the reason, saying it was against their content rules and that's why they were not renewing its license. So actually an instance where they did that and it was for the good, out for the great,

for the greater good in this case, although Brinkley. Brinkley said that what was happening was effectively censorship. Um. And so he protests, and what he does. He buys a radio station in Mexico that broadcasts had a much higher power than almost any station in the US. It was at a hundred thousand watts, eventually went up to a half million watts and so very powerful radio station compared to the other ones that were active at the time.

He directs the antenna northward into the United States. It's amazing. So here's here's the deal. This is this is what's gonna come back and haunt him. The way this worked was that he would, uh, he would actually his studio was in the United States, the the stuff he was broadcasting would go to Mexico to be transmitted by radio, and that's what would eventually come back to get him. But that would be another couple of years. He's unfascinated

by this guy. He's the brass, the moxie. Yeah. Um. Well, as a side note, one of the things that was mentioned at the top from that listener message was FDRs fireside chats, and those began in nineteen thirty three. So this is really when I mean fireside chats don't happen anymore.

But I'm fairly certain that the President of the United States still records a weekly message that goes out on radio and it becomes an institution, but presidency recognizes the importance of this media, of the communicating to the mass public. Also in nineteen thirty three, that's when Edwin Howard Edwin Howard Armstrong, remember we talked about him earlier, created frequency modulation radio or FM radio. So am Remember we mentioned changes the peak to peak voltage changes the amplitude of

that wavelength. Frequency modulation doesn't change the amplitude. It changes the number of oscillations per second, the actual frequency of the wave, but then a fairly narrow band because obviously you have to tune to a band of frequencies in order to pick things up. Then if it went outside of that, you wouldn't get it anymore, which is why

you can overlap stations instead of causing interference. Yeah, as long as you know so you know if you're if you're going in an area where the power levels are almost the same for the frequencies, that's when you start getting that weird thing where you'll hear one station and then the other station. Maybe you'll hear both the same time. But it's pretty rare. Uh So it's also not as prone to static. You don't have the same problems that

you did with AM with electromagnetic interference. But before it could get widespread adoption, Armstrong was essentially backstabbed by his former friend David Starnoff, who was head of guess what r c A, and r c A obviously had a big vested interest in AM radio FM was rising as a competing technology. Sarnoff went nuclear. He he had wanted Armstrong to go and create technology to make AM radio broadcast more clear, more free at static, and instead Armstrong

comes up with this alternative to AM radio. But our c A is heavily invested in AM, so rather than say, let's adopt this new technology and build on it, he went nuclear, and he started lobbying the FCC to deny an experimental license for UH testing FM radio. Essentially, every time Armstrong tried to make a move to push FM radio forward, our ci A blocked it or tried to block it, or complicated litigation ensued. It got very expensive.

And here's where things get really tragic. UH in the and by the time you get to the nineteen forties, Armstrong was effectively bankrupted by the litigation. He was still trying to pursue this. He goes to his wife to ask her for some of the money he had given her in their earlier part of their relationship that she had put aside for their retirement. She denies him this. He he has been beaten down totally, and he gets

enraged and does a horrible act. He grabs a fire poker, hits his wife in the arm UH injuring her arm. She leaves obviously. She leaves him that evening. He sits down, writes an apologetic letter, and jumps out the window of his thirteenth floor building and kills himself. Tragic, tragic story. So there are some amazing and powerful stories here. Brinkley Armstrong Tesla Marconi. Is I mean there's a movie? There are many movies to be made. From this, moving on

the nur Communications Act, huge huge piece of legislation. This is the formation of the fcc UM. The one section of that Act is actually referred to as the Brinkley Act. This is within the overall nine Communications Act. And of course the Brinkley Act is in fact named after our good buddy, doctor John R. Brinkley. So this was the US government's attempt to finally shut down Brinkley and his

attempts to continue broadcasting. And they said that if you are transmitting information from the United States to another country to be broadcast, that is a type of international commerce and thus can be regulated. And they laid down rules and they said, you cannot do this, it is against the law. Now we have put that into law. It put a stop to his transmitting and he ended up

trying to do other things. He also, by the way, really got the government's attention, not just by transmitting messages about quackery and terrible medicinal cures for things. He sided with the Nazis before the before the United States entered the war, exactly as is before the United States was in in World War Two. But he started with the Nazis. Did not go over well. Uh. He eventually would die of a heart attack in nine. Yeah, and insane with

Dr Brinkley. But Brinkley, I mean his his actions are what in fact there was not. There was a case back in the nineteen nineties that related to shutting down a uh AN organization that was using a similar means of transmitting from the United States to a radio antenna in Mexico because they had the facility that they could use and it was largely unregulated. Even as late as nineties, we've had cases that fall under this part of the Act. For some reason, I'm thinking about d d O S attacks.

It's like the their version of yeah, it's all about stepping around the regulations, right yeah. Well, um, Congress, like you said, had abolished that FARC, which they were hoping to do to begin with, but instead of just turning it back over to the Department of Commerce, they established the FCC. The mandate of the SEC is Interstate and Foreign Commerce in Communication, which is where the Brinkley thing comes in. And this is these are the three claims

that they maintainer. The reason for the FCC make sure that radio is available to all for reasonable charges and with adequate facilities. So that you're not necessarily listening to. No longer would you be listening to an amateur out of their garage, out of their gas station, would walk away for five minutes to go pump some gas and then come back. You want reliable radio service, America, and we're going to give it to you. And so this is also when we start seeing the allocation of large

frequency bands for AM radio and FM radio. There's still is amateur radio. You can get a license to operate an amateur radio, but there are very specific band of frequencies you are allowed to use and you can't use anything outside of that. Yeah, it's kind of it's kind of what Herrying was arguing back in the nineteen thirties that that there, but it's far more limited than that.

I think what he was envisioning with that there there would be a spectrum for nonprofit radio um and, and he also argued that the f c C at the time had to decide whether they were going to support commercial broadcasters at the expense of nonprofit ones, and ultimately, as we know, they decided to do that. Um and even though they were hearings going on and reports were being pulled together and the f CC was looking at

all these things. You know, ultimately, what we know of as the Golden Age of radio saw the growth of these these uh multi uh corporate networks across the country. Right and by this time we're talking about World War two, radio now was adopted by a huge percentage of the population. Nine and ten families owned a radio and listened to an average of three to four hours of programming at a right, this is like what we picture of that

like family gathered right time. Yeah, my place is going and they're all gathered around the radio, little orphan Annie and the lone Ranger and green Hornet and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, this is this is where we're going to kind of draw and end to this because while we're right here at the dawn of the Golden Age, I think that you know, what's the cool story that we've been able to tell is the rocky journey it took to get there. I hope you guys enjoyed that

episode about the Golden Age of radio. If you have any suggestions for future episodes, reach out to me on tech stuff or Twitter. The handle for both of those is tex Stuff h s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Eight