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Speaker 1: Hey, history fans, if you want a double dose of history,

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Speaker 1: here's a rerun for today, brought to you by Tracy V. Wilson.

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Speaker 1: We hope it makes previous episodes for this date easier

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Speaker 1: to find in the feed. Welcome to this Day in

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Speaker 1: History Class from how Stuff Works dot com and from

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Speaker 1: the desk of Stuff you missed in History Class. It's

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Speaker 1: the show where we explore the past one day at

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Speaker 1: a time with a quick look at what happened today

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Speaker 1: in history. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson,

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Speaker 1: and it's November four. The BBC began daily radio broadcasts

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Speaker 1: on this day in two making it the world's oldest

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Speaker 1: national broadcasting organization. Radio at this point was still relatively new.

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Speaker 1: It was developed through the work of multiple inventors and

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Speaker 1: engineers and businessmen at the end of the nineteenth century,

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Speaker 1: and once people worked out how to communicate wirelessly using

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Speaker 1: radio waves, it became super easy to build the receiver

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Speaker 1: needed to do that. A lot of people got really

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Speaker 1: interested in amateur radio. But all of this amateur use

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Speaker 1: of radio quickly started to crowd out the increasingly important

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Speaker 1: radio transmissions that were being used in an official capacity.

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Speaker 1: For example, during World War One, civilian radio signals could

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Speaker 1: overwhelm military communications, so governments started regulating amateur use of

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Speaker 1: radio and passing laws about who could use radio and how,

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Speaker 1: and regulating exactly what frequencies could be used for what purpose.

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Speaker 1: By the nineteen twenties, the British public was lobbying for

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Speaker 1: some kind of national broadcasting service. It was inspired in

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Speaker 1: part by broadcasting services that had sprung up in the

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Speaker 1: United States and had already started to be developed. The

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Speaker 1: amateur broadcasters in the UK had already been shut down

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Speaker 1: and regulated alternatives had been slow to develop because of

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Speaker 1: the fears that the signals would interfere with more critical

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Speaker 1: radio community sations. In May, though, the Postmaster General announced

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Speaker 1: that a national broadcaster would be authorized, and then, after

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Speaker 1: a series of meetings and committee discussions, the British Broadcasting

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Speaker 1: Company was formed on October nineteenth. It would be the

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Speaker 1: following January, though before it was formerly licensed, and at

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Speaker 1: that point it was already sending broadcasts. Six leading wireless

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Speaker 1: manufacturers were involved in creating the original British Broadcasting Company.

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Speaker 1: One of them was the Marconi Company, and the first

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Speaker 1: broadcasts on this new radio service came from Marconi's studio

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Speaker 1: called two l oh. This was a daily service, but

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Speaker 1: it wasn't all day. The first broadcast was a news

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Speaker 1: report that was provided by news agencies, and then the weather.

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Speaker 1: It was foggy and a lot of England that day,

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Speaker 1: and London was seeing some smog. At first, a typical

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Speaker 1: broadcast day was just a few hours of music, news

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Speaker 1: and weather, which eventually expanded to also include things like audio,

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Speaker 1: drama and receiving. The broadcast required a person to have

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Speaker 1: a broadcast receiving license. More than a million of these

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Speaker 1: licenses were issued before that very first day of broadcasting

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Speaker 1: even happened. The British Broadcasting Company was, as his name suggests,

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Speaker 1: a company, but it reorganized in seven to be more

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Speaker 1: like the public corporation that it is today. We don't

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Speaker 1: know very much about how listeners really responded to the

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Speaker 1: first few years of daily broadcasting from the BBC because

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Speaker 1: audience research didn't start until nineteen thirty six. BBC television

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Speaker 1: service also began in nineteen thirty six. On August twenty six,

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Speaker 1: the BBC actually adopted television a lot quicker than it

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Speaker 1: had adopted radio, and now, of course it's known as

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Speaker 1: just the BBC, although in a lot of minds, including mine,

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Speaker 1: still stands for British Broadcasting Company or maybe British Broadcasting Corporation,

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Speaker 1: at least in Pople's heads. Thanks very much to Eve's

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Speaker 1: Jeff Cote for her research work on Today's podcast, and

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Speaker 1: thanks to Casey P. Graham and Chandler May's for their

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Speaker 1: audio work on this show. You can subscribe to This

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Speaker 1: Day in History Class and Apple podcasts, Google podcasts and

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Speaker 1: We're Real to get podcasts, and you can tune in

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Speaker 1: tomorrow for an incredibly destructive March