From Cave Paintings to the Internet A Chronological and Thematic Database on the History of Information and Media Radio Timeline

David Edward Hughes invents the loose-contact carbon microphone.

Hughes's microphone was vital to telephony and later to broadcasting and sound recording.

Heinrich Hertz proves the existence of electromagnetic waves, the theoretical basis for wireless communication.

Heinrich Hertz publishes his collected papers on electromagnetic waves.

In this form Guglielmo Marconi learned about Hertz’s work and began work on the development of radio.

Guglielmo Marconi invents wireless telegraphy (radio). (See Reading 5.4.)

Canadian-American physicist Reginald A. Fessenden is the first to transmit human speech over radio waves using a spark-gap transmitter. He says:

“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.

Guglielmo Marconi believes that he hears the letter “S” transmitted by Morse Code from Poldhu 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.

John Ambrose Fleming invents the two-element vacuum tube, or diode—an essential step in the development of radio, and later for electronic computing.

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

Reginald A. Fessenden makes the first audio radio 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 Edwin Armstrong invents and patents the regenerative circuit.

"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 judgement 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).

The first radio news program is broadcast by station 8MK in Detroit, Michigan.

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

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

Some of the earliest "talk radio" programs are 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) creates the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) for radio broadcasting.

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

Edwin Howard Armstrong develops wide-band frequency modulation, FM radio, which delivers 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 passes the Communications Act. It abolished the Federal Radio Commission and transferred jurisdiction over radio licensing to a new Federal Communications Commission, including in it also the telecommunications jurisdiction previously handled by the Interstate Commerce Commission.

Orson Wells and the Mercury Theatre 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, is built and marketed by IDEA Corporation.

Canadian educator, philosopher, and media theorist Marshall McLuhan publishes 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)

Norman Abramson at the University of Hawaii builds 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.

Andrew Economos founds 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 recognizes that a viewer or listener does 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."

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

A Rolling Stones concert becomes the "first cyberspace multicast concert" over Internet radio. Mick Jagger opens 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).

WXYC (89.3 FM Chapel Hill, NC) becomes the first traditional radio station to initiate broadcasting on the Internet. WXYC uses 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) starts streaming on the same day using their own custom software called CyberRadio1. However, unlike WXYC, this is WREK's beta launch and the stream will not be advertised until a later date.

Webcast company AudioNet (Broadcast.com) begins the first continuous live webcasts with content from WFAA-TV in January, 1998 and KCTU-LP on January 10, 1998.

XM Radio, having launched its two broadcast satellites "Rock" and "Roll" in the spring, initiates the first U.S. digital satellite radio service in Dallas/Ft. Worth and San Diego. Within two months service will extend 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 is pushed back after the 9/11 attacks.

David Margolese launches Sirius Satellite Radio on a pay for service subscription basis.

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

This printed book was the first anthology to reflect the origins of the various technologies that converged to form the Internet.

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