Before the Broadcast Era

Abstract

How did radio get started in the United States, and how did it evolve from, first, wireless telegraphy, then wireless telephony and, finally, broadcast radio? Until the mid‐1980s, there was minimal serious historiography of radio in general, and early radio in particular. The best known and most widely used source was the first volume in Erik Barnouw’s trilogy on the history of broadcasting, A Tower in Babel (1966) (discussed in Chapter 20 by Gary Edgerton, this volume). Daniel Czitrom also provided a brief account of this era in Media and the American Mind (1982). The only other accounts of radio’s “prehistory,” when the device was known as wireless telegraphy and was used to transmit Morse code messages, were non‐academic and often gushing accounts of the invention in books with titles like Old Wires, New Waves (Harlow 1936). Gleason Archer’s History of Radio to 1926, published in 1938, while containing some important history, offered an overly generous account of the role that the Navy, and especially David Sarnoff, president of RCA, played in radio’s early development and was, by turns, untrustworthy or inaccurate. And Rupert Maclaurin provided an early technical history in Invention and Innovation in the Radio Industry (1949). But beginning in 1976, with the publication of Hugh Aitken’s Syntony and Spark (1976), a technical history of the development of wireless, and followed by his prize‐ winning The Continuous Wave (1985), a new era of wireless and radio historiography began. My own Inventing American Broadcasting came out in 1987 – and is discussed in Chapter 21 by Shawn VanCour, this volume – followed by work, primarily on the broadcast era, by Robert McChesney (1993), Susan Smulyan (1994), Michele Hilmes (1997), and others. By the 1990s, two new fields, radio studies and sound studies, had emerged from this work. The majority of work on radio focused on the post‐1920s broadcast era. Why was radio’s early history ignored? The “radio boom” of the 1920s seemed so sudden, the diffusion of the device so dramatic, and the entry of voice and music into people’s homes without any connecting wires so miraculous (the word most frequently used at the time), that it eclipsed what came before. By contrast, the exchange of the Morse code between wireless operators could seem like an irrelevant prehistory with not nearly the cultural, political, and economic impact of radio. Yet by the 1970s, historians of technology were challenging the notion of technological revolutions, and also taking on the “Eureka” school of invention and its inventor‐as‐hero narratives that often accompanied such deterministic accounts of technical change. Scholars put Before the Broadcast Era: 1900–1910s