Radio Timeline

In 1878 English inventor David Edward Hughes, working in London, invented the loose-contact carbon microphone. Hughes's microphone was vital to telephony, and later to broadcasting and sound recording.

In 1887 Heinrich Hertz, professor physics at the University of Karlsruhe, proved the existence of electromagnetic waves, the theoretical basis for wireless communication.

In 1892 German physicist Heinrich Hertz of the University of Karlsruhe published his collected papers on electromagnetic waves, Untersuchungen ueber die Ausbreitung der elektrischen Kraft, in Leipzig at the press of Johann Ambrosius Barth. For the edition Hertz added a 31-page introduction.  Hertz's book was translated into English, with a preface by William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, as Electric Waves: Being Researches on the Propagation of Electric Action with Fine Velocity Through Space, and published by Macmillan in London in 1893.

The death of Hertz in 1894 evoked reviews of his discoveries which interested Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi.  

"He was permitted to briefly study the subject under Augusto Righi, a University of Bologna physicist and neighbour of Marconi who had done research on Hertz's work. Righi had a subscription to The Electrician where Oliver Lodge published detailed accounts of the apparatus used in his (Lodge's) public demonstrations of wireless telegraphy in 1894.

"Marconi began to conduct experiments, building much of his own equipment in the attic of his home at the Villa Griffone in Pontecchio, Italy, with the help of his butler Mignani. His goal was to use radio waves to create a practical system of "wireless telegraphy"—i.e. the transmission of telegraph messages without connecting wires as used by the electric telegraph. This was not a new idea—numerous investigators had been exploring wireless telegraph technologies for over 50 years, but none had proven commercially successful. Marconi did not discover any new and revolutionary principle in his wireless-telegraph system, but rather he assembled and improved a number of components, unified and adapted them to his system" (Wikipedia article on Guglielmo Marconi, accessed 02-08-2012).

Working at his father's estate in Ponteccio, Italy Guglielmo Marconi invented wireless telegraphy (radio). 

Canadian-American physicist Reginald A. Fessenden was the first to transmit human speech over radio waves using a spark-gap transmitter from his transmitter at Brant Rock, Massachusetts.  He said:

“One, two, three, four, is it snowing where you are Mr. Thiessen? If it is, would you telegraph back to me?”

Mr. Thiessen, one mile way, heard the transmission.

Fessenden’s voice was the first ever to be transmitted by radio waves and heard by another person.

Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi believed that he heard the letter “S” transmitted by Morse Code from Poldhu in south Cornwall, England, to Signal Hill, St. John's Newfoundland.

For many years this feat was considered the first transatlantic radio transmission, but later researchers concluded that the reception may not have been possible, and that Marconi may have heard static caused by lightning instead of transmitted information.

English physicist and electrical engineer John Ambrose Fleming, who had worked with Thomas Edison’s company in London, invented and applied for the patent for the two-electrode vacuum-tube rectifier on November 16, 1904.  He filed the complete specification on August 15, 1905 and received British patent no. 24,850 on September 21, 1905 for "Improvements in Instruments for Detecting and Measuring Alternating Electric Currents." Fleming had been aware since 1884 of the “Edison effect,” more commonly known as thermionic emission, of “unilateral flow of particles from negative to positive electrode, and he repeated some of the experiments, with both direct and alternating currents, beginning in 1889. . . . [In 1904] he returned to his experiments on the Edison effect, with a view to producing a rectifier that would replace the inadequate detectors then used in radiotelegraphy. He named the resulting device a ‘thermionic valve,’ for which he obtained a patent in 1904. This was the first electron tube, the diode, ancestor of the triode and the other multielectrode tubes which have played such an important role in both telecommunications and scientific instrumentation” (Dictionary of Scientific Biography). 

Fleming's first written document on the valve was the British patent. However, his first distributed publication on the topic was "On the Conversion of Electric Oscillations into Continuous Currents by Means of a Vacuum Valve," Proceedings of the Royal Society 74 (1905) 476-487, which appeared in the issue of the Proceedings dated March 16, 1905. Fleming’s patent, and this scientific paper introducing the basic principle of the two-electrode vacuum tube or diode, marked the beginning of electronics.

Aside from its multitude of users in radio, radar and other devices, before the development of the transistor the vacuum tube became the first switch used in the earliest electronic computers. Using vacuum tubes as switches, the first general purpose electronic computer, the ENIAC, operated 10,000 times the speed of a human computer. By comparison, the Harvard Mark 1, which used electromechnical relays as switches, computed at 100 times the speed of a human computer.

Carter & Muir, Printing and the Mind of Man (1967) no. 396 (Proc. Roy. Soc. paper)

Lee de Forest introduced a third electrode called the grid into the vacuum tube. The resulting triode could be used both as an amplifier and a switch.

Canadian American inventor Reginald A. Fessenden made the first audio radio (as distinct from Morse code) broadcast of entertainment and music to a general audience, broadcasting from Brant Rock on the coast of Massachusetts.

The program included Fessenden playing the song O Holy Night on the violin and reading a passage, Luke Chapter 2, from the Bible. The main audience for this transmission was an unknown number of shipboard radio operators along the Atlantic Coast. This is considered the beginning of amplitude modulation broadcasting, or AM radio.

In his junior year of college studying electrical engineering at Columbia University American Edwin Armstrong invented and patented the regenerative circuit from his parents' home in Yonkers, New York.

"Lee De Forest filed a patent in 1916 that became the cause of a contentious lawsuit with the prolific inventor Armstrong, whose patent for the regenerative circuit had been issued in 1914. The lawsuit lasted twelve years, winding its way through the appeals process and ending up at the Supreme Court. The Court ruled in favor of De Forest, although the experts agree that the incorrect judgment had been issued.

"At the time the regenerative receiver was introduced, vacuum tubes were expensive and consumed lots of power, with the added expense and encumbrance of heavy batteries or AC transformer and rectifier. So this design, getting most gain out of one tube, filled the needs of the growing radio community and immediately thrived. Although the superheterodyne receiver is the most common receiver in use today, the regenerative radio made the most out of very few parts" (Wikipedia article on regenerative circuit, accessed 11-10-2009).

On August 31, 1920 the first radio news program was broadcast by station 8MK in Detroit, Michigan.

KDKA, a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Westinghouse station, transmitted the first commercial radio broadcast.

In 1922 American Army Signal Corps officer and inventor Major General George Owen Squier of Washington, D. C. created "Wired Radio," a service that piped music to businesses and subscribers over wires. Squier, who, in the early 1920s, was granted several US patents related to transmission of information signals, including a system for the transmission and distribution of signals over electrical lines, recognized the potential of this technology for delivering music to listeners without the use of radio, which at the time required fussy and expensive equipment. Squier sold the rights to his information transmission patents to the North American Company utility conglomerate, which created a company named Wired Radio Inc. with the intent to use the technique to deliver music subscriptions to private customers of the utility company's power service.

Squier remained involved in the Wired Radio project. Intrigued by the use of the neologism "Kodak" as a trademark, he took the "mus" syllable from "music" and added the "ak" from "Kodak" to create the name "Muzak" for the service. By the time a workable Muzak system was fully developed, commercial radio had become well established, so the company re-focused its efforts on delivering music to hotels and restaurants. The first actual delivery of Muzak to commercial customers took place in New York City in 1936, two years after Squier's death.

The British Broadcasting Company, the first national broadcasting organization, was formed for radio broadcasting by a group of British telecommunications companies. Its first broadcast from Marconi House in London occurred on November 14, 1922.

Some of the earliest "talk radio" programs were sermons by Aimee Semple McPherson, the evangelist and "media sensation," broadcasting on her Four Square Gospel station, KFSG, in Los Angeles. 

Another pioneer of radio evangelism, S. Parkes Cadman, preceded McPherson by a few months.

David Sarnoff of Radio Corporation of America (RCA) created the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) for radio broadcasting.

William S. Paley took over the failing United Independent Broadcasters network with its 16 affiliate stations and reorganized it as the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) for radio broadcasting.

Edwin Howard Armstrong developed wide-band frequency modulation, FM radio, which delivered clearer sound, free of static. 

Armstrong received a patent on wideband FM on December 26, 1933.

"Armstrong conducted the first large scale field tests of his FM radio technology on the 85th floor of RCA's (Radio Corporation of America) Empire State Building from May 1934 until October 1935. However RCA had its eye on television broadcasting, and chose not to buy the patents for the FM technology.  A June 17, 1936, presentation at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) headquarters made headlines nationwide. He played a jazz record over conventional AM radio, then switched to an FM broadcast. 'If the audience of 50 engineers had shut their eyes they would have believed the jazz band was in the same room. There were no extraneous sounds,' noted one reporter. He added that several engineers described the invention 'as one of the most important radio developments since the first earphone crystal sets were introduced' " (Wikipedia article on Edward Howard Armstrong, accessed 07-12-2009).

Armstrong's first paper on FM radio was "A Method of Reducing Disturbances in Radio Signaling by a System of Frequency Modulation," presented to the New York section of the Institute of Radio Engineers on November 6, 1935, and first published in Proceedings of the IRE, 24, no. 5, (1936) 689–740.

Congress passed the Communications Act of 1934,  abolishing the Federal Radio Commission and transferring jurisdiction over radio licensing to a new Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The FCC also received the telecommunications jurisdiction previously handled by the Interstate Commerce Commission.

Engineers at AEG developed the Magnetophon K1. The K1 was the first practical reel-to-reel magnetic tape recorder, using magnetic tape invented by Fritz Pfleumer.  It was first demonstrated at the Internationale Funkausstellung Berlin (International radio exhibition Berlin, aka 'Berlin Radio Show') in 1935.

As head of the Radio Research Station at Ditton Park near Slough, England, Robert Watson-Watt published a report entitled The Detection of Aircraft by Radio Methods.

"On February 26, 1935 Watson-Watt and [his assistant Arnold] Wilkins demonstrated a basic radar system to an observer from the Air Ministry Committee the Detection of Aircraft. The previous day Wilkins had set up receiving equipment in a field near Upper Stowe, Northamptonshire, and this was used to detect the presence of a Handley Page Heyford bomber at ranges up to 8 miles by means of the radio waves which it reflected from the nearby Daventry shortwave radio transmitter of the BBC, which operated at a wavelength of 49 m (6 MHz). This convincing demonstration, known as the Daventry Experiment, led immediately to development of radar in the UK."

Orson Wells and the Mercury Theatre in New York broadcast over CBS radio H. G. Wells' 1898 novel, The War of the Worlds.

The broadcast was heard by 6,000,000 people, some of whom believed that the story of the invading Martians was real. To the extent that a large number of people were deceived, this may be one of the earliest examples of mass hysteria induced by electronic media.

The first pocket-sized commercial transistor radio, Regency TR-1, designed by Texas Instruments, was built and marketed by IDEA Corporation.

On September 25, 1956 the first transatlantic telephone cable, TAT-1, became operational, carrying 36 telephone channels. It was laid between Gallanach Bay, near Oban, Scotland and Clarenville, Newfoundland between 1955 and 1956. 

Prior to this development, since 1927, very expensive radio-based transatlantic telephone service was available. However, radio-based transatlantic telephone service carried only around 2000 calls per year.

Canadian educator, philosopher, and media theorist of the University of Toronto Marshall McLuhan published Undertstanding Media: The Extensions of Man.

"In it McLuhan proposed that media themselves, not the content they carry, should be the focus of study — popularly quoted as the medium is the message'. McLuhan's insight was that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not by the content delivered over the medium, but by the characteristics of the medium itself. McLuhan pointed to the light bulb as a clear demonstration of this concept. A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan states that 'a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence.' More controversially, he postulated that content had little effect on society — in other words, it did not matter if television broadcasts children's shows or violent programming, to illustrate one example — the effect of television on society would be identical. He noted that all media have characteristics that engage the viewer in different ways; for instance, a passage in a book could be reread at will, but a movie had to be screened again in its entirety to study any individual part of it.

"The book is the source of the well-known phrase 'The medium is the message'. It was a leading indicator of the upheaval of local cultures by increasingly globalized values. The book greatly influenced academics, writers, and social theorists" (Wikipedia article on Understanding Media, accessed 11-14-2009)

In 1970 American engineer and computer scientist Norman Abramson at the University of Hawaii built ALOHAnet, the first wireless packet-switched data network, using packet radio.

Unlike the ARPANET where each node could talk to a node on the other end, ALOHA used a shared medium for transmission and revealed the need for contention management schemes. ALOHA’s situation was similar to issues that were later faced by Ethernet (non-switched) and Wi-Fi networks.

The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) was founded as the successor to National Educational Television (NET).

Andrew Economos founded Radio Computing Services. RCS's first product was Selector, a music scheduling system.

"The original Selector was developed on a PDP-11/03 under RT-11 and was programmed in Fortran and FMS-11. The goal of Selector is to help music directors of radio stations to handle day-to-day operations such as daily schedule generation, maintenance of music library and format hours" (Wikipedia article on Radio Computing Services).

Brian Raila of GTE Laboratories recognized that a viewer or listener did not need to download the entirety of a program to view or listen to a portion of it, as long as the receiving device ("client computer") could, over time, receive and present data more rapidly than the user could digest the data. At the InterTainment '89 conference held in New York City Raila used the term "buffered media" to describe this concept. It became the basis for "webcasting."

In July 1990 lawyer Martine Rothblatt founded Satellite CD Radio, Inc., and petitioned the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to create a Satellite Digital Audio Radio Service in an underutilized portion of the 2300 MHz frequency band.

"Her vision was to adapt GPS patch antennas to a national, digital, radio service, for which she claimed in her Petition for Rulemaking that there was a large, unmet public need. Rothblatt first demonstrated the service via terrestrial emulators of a satellite to FCC officials in 1992 outside the offices of WPFW in Washington, DC. In that year her daughter was diagnosed with life-threatening pulmonary arterial hypertension, and she resigned as Chairman & CEO to focus on finding a cure for the medical condition. She selected David Margolese to succeed her, and he subsequently venture capitalized US$20 million over the next five years lobbying the Federal Communications Commission to allow satellite radio to be deployed" (Wikipedia article on Sirius Satellite Radio, accessed 03-23-2012).

On February 14, 2002 David Margolese launched Sirius Satellite Radio on a pay for service subscription basis in four states, extending the service nationwide in July of that year.

In 1994 the first demonstration of wireless Internet access occured at Bell Labs.

The first Internet radio cyberstation broadcast over the Internet at NetWorld + Interop in Las Vegas.

A Rolling Stones concert with 50, 000 fans at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, Texas, became the "first cyberspace multicast concert" over Internet radio. Mick Jagger opened the concert by saying, "I wanna say a special welcome to everyone that's, uh, climbed into the Internet tonight and, uh, has got into the Mbone. And I hope it doesn't all collapse" (quoted from the Wikipedia article on Internet radio, accessed 03-18-2012).

WXYC (89.3 FM Chapel Hill, NC) became the first traditional radio station to initiate broadcasting on the Internet. WXYC used an FM radio connected to a system at SunSite, later known as Ibiblio, running Cornell's CU-SeeMe software. WXYC had begun test broadcasts and bandwidth testing as early as August, 1994.

WREK (91.1 FM, Atlanta, GA) started streaming on the same day using their own custom software called CyberRadio1. However, unlike WXYC, this was WREK's beta launch and the stream was not advertised until a later date.

A broadcast by Seattle based space rock group Sky Cries Mary was the first live Internet only broadcast of a live band on November 10th, 1994.  The broadcast was done by Paul Allen's Seattle based digital media start-up Starwave.

Webcast company AudioNet (Broadcast.com) began the first continuous live webcasts with content from WFAA-TV serving Dallas-Ft. Worth in January, 1998 and KCTU-LP serving Wichita, Kansas, on January 10, 1998.

Will Glaser, Jon Kraft, and Tim Westergren founded Pandora Radio, an automated music recommendation service, and "custodian" of the Music Genome Project— a mathematical algorithm to organize music—  in Oakland, California.

XM Radio, Washington, D.C., having launched its two broadcast satellites "Rock" and "Roll" in the spring, initiated the first U.S. digital satellite radio service in Dallas/Ft. Worth and San Diego. Within two months service extended across the U.S.

"The initial lineup includes 71 music channels and 29 other channels consisting of sports, talk, children's programming, entertainment and news." (quoted from Wikipedia article on XM Satellite Radio.)

The original launch date of September 12 was pushed back after the 9/11 attacks.

The author/editor of this database, Jeremy Norman, issued From Gutenberg to the Internet: A Sourcebook on the History of Information Technology.

This printed book was the first anthology of original publications, reflecting the origins of the various technologies that converged to form the Internet. Each reading is introduced by the editor.

Sirius Satellite Radio and XM Radio merged to form Sirius XM Radio.