Inventions & Innovation: Radio

Radio was the first global electronic medium. It dominated public communications on local, national, and global levels in the 20th century, and it continues to be an important feature of the public media of the 21st century. The term radio has two meanings: It describes the content that is made to be listened to when a radio apparatus is tuned to a favorite radio station as well as describes the apparatus itself. The latter meaning is so linguistically embedded that it persists across the several digital platforms on which radio programs can now be received. The word has long been detached from its technological derivation.

The sudden emergence of broadcasting in the 1920s upended existing business arrangements and led to the competition between the broadcast networks that are still with us today. Learn about the technology of radio and television, the challenges broadcasters faced, the origin of radio commercials, and the cultural effects of these new communications technologies.

For 50 years radio dominated the airwaves and the American consciousness as the first “mass medium.” In Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio, Ken Burns examines the lives of three extraordinary men who shared the primary responsibility for this invention and its early success, and whose genius, friendship, rivalry and enmity interacted in tragic ways. This is the story of Lee de Forest, a clergyman’s flamboyant son, who invented the audion tube; Edwin Howard Armstrong, a brilliant, withdrawn inventor who pioneered FM technology; and David Sarnoff, a hard-driving Russian immigrant who created the most powerful communications company on earth.

During the first half of the 20th century, newspapers, radio, and newsreels became America’s eyes and ears, creating a collective consciousness. Although mass communication assisted in bringing the country through the Great Depression, it also fostered abuses such as yellow journalism and the Red Scare. This ABC News program anchored by Peter Jennings takes a critical look at how the media rose to such prominence, covering the period spanning U.S. involvement in World War I and the onset of the Cold War. (38 minutes)

This program tells the complete story of radio, from its roots in Marconi’s wireless telegraphy and the invention of the vacuum tube by Lee De Forest, to its heyday in the 1930s and subsequent upstaging by television in a battle for audience-share. Academic experts discuss the impact of early innovators like Frank Conrad of station KDKA, Pittsburgh, who broadcasted from his garage; the power of personalities to influence mass audiences, citing FDR, Edward R. Murrow, and Orson Welles as examples; radio’s role as a vehicle for delivering mass audiences to advertisers; and the superior ability of the radio to entertain and actively engage listeners in the "theater of the mind." This program provides an intriguing look at America’s once-dominant mass medium. (28 minutes)

In this article, we assert and demonstrate a particular and enduring adaptability of radio in tandem with observable temporal shifts in development communication theory and practice in Africa. Specifically, we use the historical research method to explore and explain the ideological discourses, polity contours and social forces that have overlain the role of radio as both an index and an instrument of development in Ghana. The evidence reveals that radio has transitioned through three key milestones in how the technology has been appropriated and applied to national development efforts: from transplantation, through transmission, to transaction. Each of these phases coincides, incidentally, with paradigm shifts in development communication theorizing: from modernization through diffusion to participation. They also coincide, broadly, with three distinctive epochs of ideological shifts in the historical accounting on radio for development in Ghana: from British imperial hegemony, through post-independence command-and-control, to contemporary liberal pluralism.

The article offers a comparative and transnational history of the organised radio listening group in Canada and Australia, from the 1930s to the 1960s. It compares this history to the earlier development of listening group practice in the UK and US, and examines the export from the 1950s of the Canadian and Australian models of listening group organisation to the developing world. As in the UK and US, listening groups in Canada and Australia were supposed to help combat broadcast propaganda, to encourage a more tolerant and worldly perspective in listeners and to foster skills in articulating and defending personal opinions on public affairs. In addition, however, the Canadian and Australian versions encouraged listener citizens to practice the skills of making collective decisions and undertaking practical projects of community improvement. The metropolitan radio histories of the UK and US have often dominated the field, but in this case the view from Canada and Australia generates a different chronology and different interpretive understanding of the history of the radio listening group.