When was radio introduced in america

Marconi was also more astute in his patent dealings than were his American competitors. For example, to protect himself from a possible patent suit, he purchased from Thomas A. Edison his patent on a system of wireless telegraphy that Edison had never used. Marconi never used it either because it was inferior to one he developed.

Fessenden, a very prolific inventor, first experimented with voice transmission while working for the United States Weather Bureau. In he left what is now the University of Pittsburgh, where he was head of the electrical engineering department, to develop a method for the U. Weather Bureau to transmit weather reports. That year, through the use of a transmitter that produced discontinuous waves, he succeeded in transmitting speech.

Although discontinuous waves would satisfactorily transmit the dots and dashes of Morse code, high quality voice and music cannot be transmitted in this way. So, in , Fessenden switched to using a continuous wave, becoming the first person to transmit voice and music by this method. On Christmas Eve, , Fessenden made history by broadcasting music and speech from Massachusetts that was heard as far away as the West Indies.

After picking up this broadcast, the United Fruit Company purchased equipment from Fessenden to communicate with its ships. Navies and shipping companies were among those most interested in purchasing early radio equipment. During World War I armies also made significant use of radio. Important among its army uses was communicating with airplanes. Because he did not provide a regular schedule of programming for the public, Fessenden is not usually credited with having operated the first broadcasting station.

Nonetheless, he is widely recognized as the father of broadcasting because those who had gone before him had only used radio to deliver messages from one person to another. However, despite being preoccupied with laboratory work and being unsuited by temperament and experience to be a businessman, he chose to directly manage his company.

It failed, and an embittered Fessenden left the radio industry. Lee deForest, whose doctoral dissertation was about Hertzian waves, received his Ph. His first job was with Western Electric.

He was acquitted. The Audion tube later known as a triode tube was far from being a worthless device, as it was a key component of radios so long as vacuum tubes continued to be used. They discovered that the introduction of impurities into semiconductors provided a solid-state material that would not only rectify a current, but also amplify it. Transistors using this material rapidly replaced vacuum tubes. Later it became possible to etch transistors on small pieces of silicon in integrated circuits.

In , deForest broadcast, probably rather poorly, the singing of opera singer Enrico Caruso. He installed a transmitter at the Columbia Gramophone building in New York and began daily broadcasts of phonograph music sponsored by Columbia.

Because in the late nineteenth century the new electrical industry had made some investors multimillionaires almost over night, Americans like deForest and his partners found easy pickings for awhile, as many people were eager to snap up the stock offered by overly optimistic inventors in this new branch of the electrical industry. The quick failure of firms whose end, rather than their means, was selling stock made life more difficult for ethical firms. In the United States in there were licensed amateur radio operators who would ultimately be relegated to the seemingly barren wasteland of the radio spectrum, short wave.

By there were 13, amateur radio operators. At that time building a radio receiver was a fad. The typical builder was a boy or young man. Many older people thought that all radio would ever be was a fad, and certainly so long as the public had to build its own radios, put up with poor reception, and listen to dots and dashes and a few experimental broadcasts of music and speech over earphones, relatively few people were going to be interested in having a radio.

Laying the groundwork for making radio a mass medium was Edwin H. Army during World War I of the super heterodyne that made it possible to replace earphones with a loudspeaker. In , the American Radio Relay league and a British amateur group assisted by Armstrong, an engineer and college professor, proved that contrary to the belief of experts, short waves can travel over long distances.

Three years later Marconi, who had previously used only long waves, showed that short-wave radio waves, by bounding off the upper atmosphere, can hopscotch around the world. This discovery led to short wave radio being used for long distance radio broadcasting. Today telephone companies use microwave relay systems for long-distance, on-shore communication through the air.

In , Frank Conrad, a Westinghouse engineer, began broadcasting music in Pittsburgh. These broadcasts stimulated the sales of crystal sets. A crystal set, which could be made at home, was composed of a tuning coil, a crystal detector, and a pair of earphones.

The use of a crystal eliminated the need for a battery or other electric source. In , KDKA began broadcasting prizefights and major league baseball. Later, a government that had once considered making radio a government monopoly followed a policy of promoting competition in the radio industry.

Patent pooling was the solution to the problem of each company owning some essential patents. Sarnoff, who began his career in radio as a Marconi office boy, gained fame as a wireless operator and showed the great value of radio when he picked up distress messages from the sinking Titanic. Ultimately, RCA expanded into nearly every area of communications and electronics.

Its extensive patent holdings gave it power over most of its competitors because they had to pay it royalties. While still working for Marconi Sarnoff had the foresight to realize that the real money in radio lay in selling radio receivers. Because the market was far smaller, radio transmitters generated smaller revenues. Marconi was able to charge people for transmitting messages for them, but how was radio broadcasting to be financed?

In Europe the government financed it. In this country it soon came to be largely financed by advertising. In , few stations sold advertising time. Then the motive of many operating radio stations was to advertise other businesses they owned or to get publicity. Another quarter were owned by radio-related firms. Under RCA, certain companies could make receivers, while other companies were approved to make transmitters. The broadcasts quickly spread across the UK but failed to usurp newspapers until when the newspapers went on strike.

At this point the radio and the BBC became the leading source of information for the public. In both the U. With the help of journalists, radio relayed news of the war to the public. It was also a rallying source and was used by the government to gain public support for the war.

In the U. The way in which radio was used also changed the world after World War II. While radio had previously been a source of entertainment in the form of serial programs, after the war it began to focus more on playing the music of the time. The "Top" in music became popular during this period and the target audience went from families to pre-teens up to adults in their mid-thirties.

Music and radio continued to rise in popularity until they became synonymous with one another. The federal government hesitated to regulate the airwaves.

Radio stations, listeners, and emerging broadcasting corporations all asked the government for some sort of intervention to end the free-for-all that radio had become.

The government responded slowly, gradually passing laws to govern the radio. This Act became the basis for the Communications Act passed after the rise of television. As the government spent more time investigating radio stations, apportioning time to different groups and programs, and monitoring the growth of the radio industry, they became more and more comfortable with the responsibilities of regulation.

These federal bodies eventually ceased to doubt their right to regulate. Radios in the s Crystal radios, like the one at left, were among the first radios to be used and manufactured. These radios used a piece of lead galena crystal and a cat whisker to find the radio signal.

Crystal radios allowed many people to join the radio craze in the s because they were easy to make from home. All necessary supplies could be purchased for as little as six dollars. However, the sound in the earphones was very weak and often interrupted by static.

Early radio's, including crystal radios, needed antennas to operate well. The most frequently used antenna was the inverted L. For more information on this and other antenna, click HERE. While manufacturers tried to improve the crystal radio, one inventive young man, Edwin Armstrong, worked at improving the radio all together.

His signal was received as far away as Norfolk, Virginia. The stage for commercial voice and music broadcasts was set. A steady stream of inventions pushed radio forward. In , American inventor Lee De Forest introduced his patented Audion signal detector--which allowed radio frequency signals to be amplified dramatically.

Another American inventor, Edwin Armstrong, developed the superheterodyne circuit in , and in discovered how FM broadcasts could be produced. Sarnoff withheld FM from the public for more than a decade.

Still, the public demand for radio grew exponentially. Entertainment broadcasting began in about , and included De Forest's own program, which he aired from the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City.

An entertainment broadcasting venture based in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, became the first commercial radio station, KDKA, in The station WWJ, in Detroit, Michigan, also one of the firsts, began commercial broadcasting in the same year. The period between the late s and the early s is considered the Golden Age of Radio, in which comedies, dramas, variety shows, game shows, and popular music shows drew millions of listeners across America.

But in the s, with the introduction of television, the Golden Age faded.