Speaker 1: Hey there, it's Jonathan Strickland, and I'm here to introduce
Speaker 1: a playlist of ten episodes of my podcast tech Stuff
Speaker 1: that are all about entertainment and entertainment related fields, from
Speaker 1: video games to television series, two films to internet videos
Speaker 1: from yesteryear. So I hope you guys enjoy these episodes.
Speaker 1: You can go to the tech Stuff podcast page and
Speaker 1: subscribe to listen to all sorts of episodes about tech
Speaker 1: from all realms, and hopefully this will provide a little
Speaker 1: bit of entertainment, a little bit of education, and probably
Speaker 1: more than a few puns, because that's kind of how
Speaker 1: I roll. Enjoy this playlist. Welcome to text Stuff, a
Speaker 1: production from my Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to
Speaker 1: tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive
Speaker 1: producer with I Heart Radio and I love all things teching.
Speaker 1: Its time for another entertainment playlist episode. This one is
Speaker 1: about the Golden Age of radio. So we're talking about
Speaker 1: the early days of radio when the radio was first
Speaker 1: coming into being. It's an interesting and dramatic story and
Speaker 1: I think it's a pretty entertaining one. Enjoy Today, Christian
Speaker 1: and I are going to talk about a subject that
Speaker 1: was suggested by a listener, and first of all, I
Speaker 1: must apologize to said listener because despite my heroic efforts
Speaker 1: of researching where this suggestion came from, I couldn't find it.
Speaker 1: So I'm guessing this was actually an older one. But
Speaker 1: said the forward thinking, bad prediction story about Hugo Gernsback
Speaker 1: got me thinking about how crazy it must have been
Speaker 1: to have lived through the day you of public radio,
Speaker 1: all the excitement and so little understanding, fireside chats, fearmongering
Speaker 1: about radio death rays. A history episode about the promises
Speaker 1: in popular notions surrounding radio could be fun and uh
Speaker 1: so we wanted to talk about the dawn of broadcast
Speaker 1: radio before we get into that, I should mention that
Speaker 1: way back in April two thousand eleven, Chris Palette and
Speaker 1: I sat down and recorded an episode titled Who Invented
Speaker 1: the Radio, which was mostly about the inventors who discovered
Speaker 1: radio waves and found ways to generate radio waves, obviously
Speaker 1: including the two big names Tesla and Marconi. Anyone who
Speaker 1: knows anything about the patent wars knows about there was
Speaker 1: a big kerfuffle between the two of those guys. Uh
Speaker 1: little peek behind the curtain. That is the first time,
Speaker 1: and I think the only time I have recorded an
Speaker 1: entire episode and immediately said, we can't use that, Let's
Speaker 1: do it again. We recorded it all over because the
Speaker 1: ghost of Marcon he was haunting you. There was that,
Speaker 1: and we had in the old studio, we had a
Speaker 1: portrait of Nicola Tesla on the wall. We felt judged,
Speaker 1: but mainly Chris and I both felt that we gave
Speaker 1: such a disjointed story that we were jumping around so
Speaker 1: much that made no sense. And so we after talking
Speaker 1: it through once, we went back re recorded. So that
Speaker 1: first episode that we recorded, it's lost to time. We
Speaker 1: don't have it anymore. I don't wish I could, at
Speaker 1: least hope will be more organized today. But I'll tell
Speaker 1: you just from going through all this research that this
Speaker 1: is such a vast amount of information for this period
Speaker 1: of time, and I feel like and it's and you
Speaker 1: can you can get a PhD in radio communication in
Speaker 1: the history of radio and understanding these things, and it's yeah,
Speaker 1: we will probably only scratch the surface today, I imagine, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there there and there's so many crazy dramatic stories of betrayal,
Speaker 1: of of con men, of big. It's like this pirate
Speaker 1: industry of people just messing with each other. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's fascinating. In fact, there there's probably two or three
Speaker 1: podcast worth of information that we could cover, but we're
Speaker 1: gonna try and get this in one if we can. So,
Speaker 1: first thing I got to mention is that radio and
Speaker 1: broadcast radio are two different things. You know, radio in
Speaker 1: the sense of what Tesla and Marconi were looking at,
Speaker 1: they were looking at ways of transmitting short signals across
Speaker 1: distances without using wires, so that was it. They were
Speaker 1: looking largely at using Morse code. So they might use
Speaker 1: a spark gap technology where they would create sparks and
Speaker 1: send messages that way. But you couldn't really do a
Speaker 1: sustained message that way without creating a lot of static
Speaker 1: and noise, and that was a real problem. So we
Speaker 1: need to look at another person for broadcast radio. That
Speaker 1: would be a Canadian by the name of Reginald Fessenden
Speaker 1: who said actually invented am radio. That would be uh,
Speaker 1: the amplitude modulated radio. And so from your notes here
Speaker 1: your notes, it says he worked with Edison or for Edison.
Speaker 1: He actually he actually worked for both Westinghouse and Edison
Speaker 1: at different points in his career. So yeah, he just
Speaker 1: like Tesla. Tesla also worked for both, although you know,
Speaker 1: again working for like it's like me saying that, you know,
Speaker 1: I worked for the head of our parent company, and
Speaker 1: technically I do, but I don't have any contact with them.
Speaker 1: So uh. He had dropped out of school as a
Speaker 1: young man. He actually did not complete his school work,
Speaker 1: but he was keenly interested in electricity and this potential
Speaker 1: to transmit messages wirelessly, and he was using that spark
Speaker 1: gap technology. But that was the problem, was that it
Speaker 1: was creating so much static and noise that it was
Speaker 1: very difficult to get any intelligible message across. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: actually I want to interject here for sure. So um,
Speaker 1: in like the model of human communication, when scholars are
Speaker 1: looking at how human beings communicate with each other regardless
Speaker 1: of media, they actually use uh this Fessenden Marconi uh
Speaker 1: model of transmissions as like the baseline for it. And
Speaker 1: it's all about like sending and receiving with feedback and
Speaker 1: feed forward and then there's a signal to noise ratio.
Speaker 1: That's how it's all understood. Whether you and I are
Speaker 1: sitting here talking in the same room, or it's mass media,
Speaker 1: or it's uh like like in the early days of radio.
Speaker 1: That the way they literally thought of it was two
Speaker 1: ships that were thousands of yards away from one another
Speaker 1: trying to contact each other using this old radio technology,
Speaker 1: and they would have so much static they would have
Speaker 1: to constantly give each other feedback and feed forward to
Speaker 1: make sure the message was understood. It makes perfect sense,
Speaker 1: I mean, especially when you see the brilliance of Fessenden.
Speaker 1: He thought, well, they I can. I can create these
Speaker 1: sparks of electricity, create these elector of magnetic fields, and
Speaker 1: thus creating radio waves, but it isn't giving me the
Speaker 1: fidelity I need in order to communicate properly. He then thought,
Speaker 1: what if I used a continuous wave. So I create
Speaker 1: a sign wave and oscillating wave with the same amplitude,
Speaker 1: same frequency, So it's just steady. Now, that's not carrying
Speaker 1: any information by itself. It's if you could if you
Speaker 1: could hear it, it would just be a steady tone.
Speaker 1: But it's actually talking about using frequencies above the limit
Speaker 1: of human hearing. So let's say you create this wave
Speaker 1: and then you were too introduce a second wave, one
Speaker 1: that was created by your voice, so you'd speak into
Speaker 1: a microphone, it gets converted into electric waves. You add
Speaker 1: that on top of the uh, the existing wave you've
Speaker 1: already created, and you allow it to change the amplitude
Speaker 1: of that wave as the two waves are overlaid on
Speaker 1: top of one another. Sure, it's genius, it is genius.
Speaker 1: It's absolutely genius. Uh. So this was a M radio.
Speaker 1: This was the idea that what that became a M
Speaker 1: radio because it does modulate the amplitude of that wave.
Speaker 1: So the amplitude, by the way, is the the peak
Speaker 1: to peak uh difference, Right, It's not. It's not how
Speaker 1: many oscillations. This is just the the amplitude of the
Speaker 1: wave itself, how tall the peaks are, how low the
Speaker 1: troughs are, if you were looking at the wave across
Speaker 1: a line the way at Assuming that this innovation of
Speaker 1: his significantly reduced the noise and static it did, it did.
Speaker 1: It did still have issues and that you could have
Speaker 1: interference with other waves that were created at that same frequency.
Speaker 1: It also meant that you could get interference with other
Speaker 1: electromagnetic phenomenon like like a lightning strike. So also if
Speaker 1: you pass below like if you go under a bridge,
Speaker 1: you would hear, you know, the disruption of the signal.
Speaker 1: So it wasn't perfect, but it was an incredible step forward.
Speaker 1: And this was a revolutionary I mean he tested it successfully.
Speaker 1: He did a short distance test between two towers and
Speaker 1: it worked fine. And then in nineteen o six he
Speaker 1: had his infamous Christmas concert for sailors. See this is yeah,
Speaker 1: this is where I think that that boat to boat
Speaker 1: idea comes from. Yeah, because it turns out the disaster
Speaker 1: of the Titanic would end up really making this uh
Speaker 1: clear that there needed to be some radio communication for
Speaker 1: ships at sea. But what he wanted to do was
Speaker 1: he wanted to send out a message to essentially telegraph
Speaker 1: operators aboard ships. That was his plan. So he proceeded
Speaker 1: the concert with an actual telegraph message that essentially translates
Speaker 1: into hey, pay attention. And then once he did that,
Speaker 1: he started knew it was coming though, right They were not,
Speaker 1: most of them. They just knew to pay attention because
Speaker 1: they got the message. Yeah. There they were like, well,
Speaker 1: here's the message. Whatever is going to happen, We need
Speaker 1: to really focus. And so what they were expecting to
Speaker 1: hear were just the noises they would hear for the
Speaker 1: dots and dashes of Morse code. So then he he
Speaker 1: gives a short speech, he plays a violin uh, and
Speaker 1: plays a Holy Night. There were supposed to be other
Speaker 1: people who talked into the microphone too, but most of
Speaker 1: them chickened out because they they got like terrible stage
Speaker 1: fright because they realized all of a sudden that they
Speaker 1: were speaking to like hundreds of people, right right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And so anyway, it ended up being a big hit.
Speaker 1: Sailors up and down the Atlantic coast we were able
Speaker 1: to hear him and reported back to it, so it
Speaker 1: was known to be a success. And that's how AM
Speaker 1: radio got started. Yeah yeah, I like that. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: that's a nice start to it ends up being or
Speaker 1: rather thorny industry. Yeah. So, so he he demonstrates this
Speaker 1: capability and immediately other physicists and engineers start to experiment
Speaker 1: with it because some of them had been independently working
Speaker 1: on the same kind of idea. Festendon ended up being
Speaker 1: the first to make it really work in a public demonstration.
Speaker 1: So you had a lot of other people who were
Speaker 1: who either adopted his ideas or continued to develop their
Speaker 1: own ideas, and a lot of amateurs were starting to
Speaker 1: experiment with radio transmissions, including transmitting out to telegraph operators,
Speaker 1: who often were very much entertained by this because it
Speaker 1: was different from just listening to clicks on the headphones.
Speaker 1: This is the part that's the most fascinating about the
Speaker 1: evolution of radio to me is that even though the
Speaker 1: technology is ultimately made for mass communication, people originally started
Speaker 1: using it as one to one communication across long distances,
Speaker 1: replacing a telegraph. And then, uh, these amateur operators, these
Speaker 1: like d I y uh people in their in their garage,
Speaker 1: is just you know, tinkering around with the technology that
Speaker 1: they could get a hold of. We're able to turn
Speaker 1: it into this mass communication then yeah. And it's funny
Speaker 1: because when you look at the early ones, obviously they
Speaker 1: were using very low wattage transmitters, so that meant that
Speaker 1: they couldn't transmit very far, most of them. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you were a big name, you might be able
Speaker 1: to work with someone like General Electric to get a
Speaker 1: really big transmitter and be able to to send a
Speaker 1: signal far away. Because the signals reach is largely dependent
Speaker 1: upon the power of the transmitter. Right, the further way
Speaker 1: you get, the weaker the signal is and the less
Speaker 1: you'll be likely you are able to pick it up
Speaker 1: with a receiver. So in the early days people were
Speaker 1: happy to experiment with this, and there was really no
Speaker 1: regulation because there there hadn't been a demonstrable need to
Speaker 1: regulate yet, because no one had the power to interfere
Speaker 1: that much with anything that was important. Nineteen o seven,
Speaker 1: Festan would invent a high frequency electric generator to create
Speaker 1: radio waves in the one hurts frequency, which was really important.
Speaker 1: And in nineteen o eight Dr Charles Aaron Culver, who
Speaker 1: was newly hired as a professor of physics at Beloit
Speaker 1: College or bell Watt if you prefer um, and it's
Speaker 1: it's in a town called bell Watt actually, but set
Speaker 1: up a radio telegraph assembly which became the foundation for
Speaker 1: the college is radio station, though voice in music transmission
Speaker 1: wouldn't be part of it until the nineteen twenties. But
Speaker 1: this this became like again, it was someone a physics professor,
Speaker 1: in this case, a physics professor who was already interested
Speaker 1: in radio and had been working on it independently, setting
Speaker 1: up a thing that would eventually evolve into an early
Speaker 1: early radio station. Yeah, and that's kind of Another interesting
Speaker 1: aspect of this too is that these early amateur radio
Speaker 1: stations weren't just uh d I y kind of hobbyists
Speaker 1: doing it on their own. A lot of it was
Speaker 1: educational institutions, not just colleges but also high schools that
Speaker 1: were just you know, trying to use it for educational purposes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that it's interesting later on what happens when amateur
Speaker 1: radio sort of gets more regulated. It really reminds me
Speaker 1: of the early days of personal computers and how how
Speaker 1: it first started off as a hobbyist thing, and then
Speaker 1: you know, you had bleeding edge adopters who might not
Speaker 1: build a computer, but they're curious about how they might
Speaker 1: use it. And then later you had people who were uh,
Speaker 1: you know more it became more and more mainstream as
Speaker 1: time went on. So we've seen other emerging technologies that
Speaker 1: have followed a similar pathway to radio. Uh not always
Speaker 1: with the dramatics. I mean, there were some definite dramatics
Speaker 1: and early personal computers too. But we got some crazy
Speaker 1: stories to tell. But first, we have another big name
Speaker 1: in radio that we have to mention. Yeah, so in
Speaker 1: nineteen ten, this guy lead to Forest really broadcasted like
Speaker 1: the first sort of broad meant for mass communication radio broadcast, uh,
Speaker 1: specifically of a guy named Enrico Caruso singing. I believe
Speaker 1: it was opera singing from what I understood, um, and
Speaker 1: he he ushered in this area era of radio communications.
Speaker 1: And unfortunately, though even though he was broadcasting probably on
Speaker 1: Fessenden's news system, for the most part it was static
Speaker 1: and radio interference, so the audience barely heard anything. But
Speaker 1: you know, for a decade afterwards, radio fans were both
Speaker 1: using uh, these amateur radio units to broadcast and receive. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it wasn't just them receiving. Yeah, it wasn't like they
Speaker 1: were a passive audience. They were creating as well. And again,
Speaker 1: depending upon the power of their radio transmitters, it may
Speaker 1: be the they were only transmitting to people in their
Speaker 1: general neighborhood or even small town, but you wouldn't be
Speaker 1: able to necessarily pick up that signal for much further,
Speaker 1: it also depends on the quality of the receiver as well.
Speaker 1: Like you could build a very simple a radio receiver
Speaker 1: that doesn't even require a battery and as a crystal,
Speaker 1: a very long antenna and some headphones, and uh, you
Speaker 1: can pick up radio signals if you're close enough to
Speaker 1: a transmitter. Uh. And in fact, that's a fun project
Speaker 1: to do. You can look up how to do that online.
Speaker 1: So also in nineteen ten, the same time Leada Forest
Speaker 1: was was experimenting with us, you had a guy named
Speaker 1: Charles David Harold who opened a school that he called
Speaker 1: the Herald College of Engineering and Wireless and he was
Speaker 1: experimenting with wireless voice transmissions as early as nineteen o
Speaker 1: nine and providing a thrill to telegraph operators who suddenly
Speaker 1: were able to hear voices over the telegraph lines. Now
Speaker 1: this is out in California, so he's surprising people out
Speaker 1: there who normally they weren't expecting it at all, but
Speaker 1: they loved it because you would have imagine this job
Speaker 1: is a little probably very tedious. Yeah. So he actually
Speaker 1: started setting up a regular broadcast time like the first
Speaker 1: radio programming in a way, and by nineteen ten he
Speaker 1: had created this, uh, this program that would include reading
Speaker 1: out news to telegraph operators. And his wife Sybil got
Speaker 1: involved and she started playing records that the description I
Speaker 1: said was the kind of records young people like to
Speaker 1: listen to. Back in Yeah, so playing records, So playing
Speaker 1: music for these telegraph operators and holding the first radio contests.
Speaker 1: And here's how the radio contest work back then. She
Speaker 1: would instruct people listening to come by their house, sign
Speaker 1: a guest book with their name and where they were from,
Speaker 1: and then they might win a little prize. Was number seven. No,
Speaker 1: it wasn't calling number seven. Uh. And here's the coolest part.
Speaker 1: I think this little amateur station eventually over time and
Speaker 1: twenty one would become kq W, and in ninete it
Speaker 1: would evolve into k CBS as then the CBS. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I thought that was really interesting, especially like we'll talk
Speaker 1: later about, CBS is sort of importance in a big
Speaker 1: game of radio development. Yeah. So nineteen ten is also
Speaker 1: when the US passed the Wireless Ship Act, which required
Speaker 1: all ships of the US traveling more than two miles
Speaker 1: off the coast and carrying more than fifty passengers to
Speaker 1: have a wireless radio equipment on board with a with
Speaker 1: an operator, and the transmission range had to be at
Speaker 1: least a hundred miles. And that meant that it created
Speaker 1: a lot more radio transmissions broadcast without any regulation. This
Speaker 1: is where the United States government starts to say, this
Speaker 1: is going to become a problem because now we we
Speaker 1: already have a lot of radio traffic going on just
Speaker 1: through amateurs as well as ship to land land to
Speaker 1: ship communication. Uh. It's starting to get a little crowded
Speaker 1: and we're starting to get interfere rants. We need to
Speaker 1: figure out how to handle this. So in nineteen twelve,
Speaker 1: they passed the Radio Act of nineteen twelve, which is
Speaker 1: good because if they had passed the Radio Act of
Speaker 1: nineteen twelve and nineteen eleven, everyone would have been confused. Uh.
Speaker 1: And marked the first time the US government required radio
Speaker 1: stations to be licensed. So the licensing was really just
Speaker 1: to create order in chaos. Uh. And it was really
Speaker 1: kind of like, you know, we want to make sure
Speaker 1: that we're keeping certain frequencies free so that we can
Speaker 1: have these these very important transmissions go uninterrupted because am transmissions,
Speaker 1: if you transmit two things on the same frequency, you
Speaker 1: get lots of interference and just different from There was
Speaker 1: a military component to this as well, because World War
Speaker 1: One was on the horizon, was happening, and they the
Speaker 1: government banned amateur radio broadcasting during the war for you know,
Speaker 1: the reason that they were trying to transmit signals to
Speaker 1: one another of important nature. If somebody was talking in
Speaker 1: their girl raj about um uh, you know their favorite
Speaker 1: records the young people listen to. Yeah, the ones that
Speaker 1: the young people listen to, they would overlap and they
Speaker 1: wouldn't get these important messages, so they shut it all down.
Speaker 1: And also just radio detection to the the remote possibility
Speaker 1: that they might detect radio transmissions from either allies or enemies.
Speaker 1: It would mean that yeah, yeah, this is this is
Speaker 1: before the whole Bletchley Park on Dygma thing, which is
Speaker 1: I've talked about that in the previous episode of tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: But fascinating story. So Uren Edwin Armstrong, who's going to
Speaker 1: be important throughout this conversation, and his story is amazing
Speaker 1: and tragic. Uh. He patents a radio receiver circuit that
Speaker 1: increases the selectivity which allows you to tune into specific
Speaker 1: frequencies and the sensitivity of radio receivers. That means it
Speaker 1: was able to pick up weaker radio signals than previous receivers.
Speaker 1: So selectivity obviously very important. You want to be able
Speaker 1: to say I'm looking at this picular band of frequencies
Speaker 1: and I don't want anything outside of that. Um, and
Speaker 1: we would see that get better and better in he
Speaker 1: would invent the super heterodyne radio receiver or superhead. So
Speaker 1: this principle is actually really fascinating, and I gotta admit
Speaker 1: to you, a Christian, I had to really sit down
Speaker 1: and read this a few times to kind of get
Speaker 1: what was going on. Yeah, because I mean this is radio,
Speaker 1: electromagnetic and radio broadcast. I have a basic understanding of it,
Speaker 1: but it does go well beyond what I studied in school.
Speaker 1: And it took a while, but now I think I've
Speaker 1: got it. Will explain it to me, because yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: more of the on the side of the like cultural
Speaker 1: examination of radio, whereas like the technology of it escapes
Speaker 1: me sometimes, So yeah, hit me. All right. Let's say,
Speaker 1: let's say I want to transmit a radio signal at
Speaker 1: a high frequency, so it's not going to interfere with
Speaker 1: anything else, but that processing high frequencies is a little tricky,
Speaker 1: so you might have a receiver that can process frequencies
Speaker 1: up to I'm just going to take an arbitrary number
Speaker 1: killer hurts, but I want to transmit at fifteen hundred
Speaker 1: killer hurts. If I were to introduce that frequency to
Speaker 1: an oscillator tuned to a different frequency, suddenly I would
Speaker 1: be able to receive that. Uh, not just at the
Speaker 1: original frequency I transmit at, but the difference between that
Speaker 1: and the oscillating one. So another easy example, let's say
Speaker 1: they have an oscillating frequency at a thousand killer hurts. Okay,
Speaker 1: that would mean that if you used a receiver tune
Speaker 1: to five killer hurts, killer hurts or two thousand five
Speaker 1: killer hurts, you would pick up that signal and could
Speaker 1: process it. Okay. So and I'm imagining that this is
Speaker 1: a process that's still used today. Yeah. This is the
Speaker 1: principle of transmitting and receiving with a radio so that
Speaker 1: your radio doesn't have to have as wide a spectrum.
Speaker 1: It's called inter minute frequency. And it took me a
Speaker 1: long time to figure out what was going on. Is
Speaker 1: the oscillator that was throwing me off? And then I realized, oh,
Speaker 1: the oscillators tuned to a different frequency, and that's what
Speaker 1: gives you the broader range that you can pick up.
Speaker 1: It's pretty fascinating. And again Armstrong was absolutely brilliant coming
Speaker 1: up with this. Uh. And then we move up to
Speaker 1: the nineteen twenties. Yeah, and the twenties is when this
Speaker 1: educational stuff that I was talking about earlier. It really
Speaker 1: hits a boom. There was like more than two hundred
Speaker 1: educational organizations across the United States of America that, uh,
Speaker 1: we're requesting broadcasting licenses so that they could transmit. And
Speaker 1: whether they were using it as a an opportunity for
Speaker 1: their students to learn about the technology or to broadcast
Speaker 1: educational information didn't really matter. The unfortunate thing is that
Speaker 1: thirteen years later, by n three or more of these
Speaker 1: educational institutions had folded and in basically it was because
Speaker 1: of and this is going to be a huge theme
Speaker 1: of this episode, because of ad based programming and stronger stations,
Speaker 1: commercial stations that were able to overlap their signal. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you essentially had not just the fact that the companies
Speaker 1: had more technological behind them, but the government was favoring
Speaker 1: those over the educational ones. When we get into a
Speaker 1: little bit more about the politics, you're going to hear
Speaker 1: that repeated a few times, and it's it's a little upsetting, honestly.
Speaker 1: And I also i'd like to say, like, it's interesting
Speaker 1: because despite whatever my political beliefs are reading one of
Speaker 1: the articles that we used as as research for this
Speaker 1: was written in nineteen from the perspective of somebody at
Speaker 1: Harvard University looking back at the Federal Radio Radio Commission
Speaker 1: before it turned into the f CC that we have
Speaker 1: now and kind of just doing a broad review of
Speaker 1: the last like ten years of this. And it's very,
Speaker 1: very similar and reminiscent of arguments that we've seen with
Speaker 1: media throughout the last hundred years and that we're seeing
Speaker 1: right now in arguments about net neutrality. Yeah, it's really
Speaker 1: similar to net neutrality, the idea being that everyone should
Speaker 1: be free to use the Internet to send and receive
Speaker 1: whatever information they want. In radio, we saw the same argument,
Speaker 1: except in that case radio it was it ended up
Speaker 1: being that those folks were kind of pushed away and
Speaker 1: that the the the corporations, the companies that had the
Speaker 1: money were the ones that had the voice. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: and so like you know, as we're talking earlier, there's
Speaker 1: these amateur radio stations, right and they here's the kind
Speaker 1: of content you might find on amateur radio stations. Maybe
Speaker 1: somebody is giving a sermon there, or they're they're they're
Speaker 1: just reading out of their Bible, or they're talking about
Speaker 1: sports out of today's newspaper, updating their neighborhood on what
Speaker 1: happened in sports around the country that day. Maybe they're
Speaker 1: reading a poem, maybe they're giving a speech about something
Speaker 1: political at the time. Perhaps the usage of radio or
Speaker 1: like we were talking earlier, just playing records and at
Speaker 1: the time there was no you know, licensing or copyright
Speaker 1: and effect for for how music was broadcasted, So they
Speaker 1: just throw any record on and kind of entertain the neighborhood.
Speaker 1: Right in a way, you can think of it as
Speaker 1: like the predecessor of blogs. Yeah, you know it really
Speaker 1: in a in a real way, it was and uh,
Speaker 1: this was amazing. This was an ability for someone to
Speaker 1: have a platform to have their voice heard. Some people
Speaker 1: made very good use of that. Some people may you
Speaker 1: may think, made frivolous use of it, just like what
Speaker 1: we see on the internet. Sure, yeah, exactly. And that's
Speaker 1: just like blogging, except for for people like us, I suppose,
Speaker 1: who do get paid to do it. A lot of
Speaker 1: these these amateur radioists that they weren't getting paid for this.
Speaker 1: They had day jobs. In fact, like one of the
Speaker 1: stories I read was about how there's this guy who
Speaker 1: ran a gas station, but he also had a radio
Speaker 1: station running out of his gas station, and so he'd
Speaker 1: be on air and then he'd say, hold on a minute,
Speaker 1: I have to go, uh sell some gas, and he'd go.
Speaker 1: He'd disappeared for five minutes, and they'd come back and
Speaker 1: just pick up again. And that was just how it is.
Speaker 1: They didn't really worry about dead air or anything like that. Yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: And and at the same time, there's also this other,
Speaker 1: like broader, more important thing, which I think is why
Speaker 1: the government started to become more involved in it, which
Speaker 1: is that radio allowed the listeners to sample other cultures
Speaker 1: from far away states that and and and learn more
Speaker 1: about what this kind of idea of America as a
Speaker 1: nation meant. You know, even though they may have never
Speaker 1: visited Nebraska, they would be hearing what these amateur radioists
Speaker 1: in Nebraska were talking about. They were giving them sort
Speaker 1: of a peek into what the culture in those towns were.
Speaker 1: Like it's really cool. Yeah, yeah, absolutely yeah. Moving over
Speaker 1: to ninety that's when we get the first commercial radio
Speaker 1: sta Asian launching. That's Kadi k A. Now, amateur radio stations,
Speaker 1: like Christian was saying, had already been around, and a
Speaker 1: guy named Henry P. Davis was inspired by an amateur
Speaker 1: named Frank Conrad and saw the potential to actually make
Speaker 1: some money off this whole radio thing, and not just
Speaker 1: not just broadcast out for free, but to actually make
Speaker 1: it a commercial enterprise. So the radio station went live
Speaker 1: on November two, nineteen twenty. Henry P. Davis himself read
Speaker 1: out the results of the presidential elections on the air,
Speaker 1: and he would become heavily involved in broadcast radio, in
Speaker 1: fact becoming the first chairman of the National Broadcasting Company
Speaker 1: also known as NBC, so in yeah, exactly, Yeah. Then
Speaker 1: the opening of thirty Rock in nineteen six. Kadi k
Speaker 1: A was owned and operated by Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company,
Speaker 1: and you might not be surprised to hear that Westinghouse
Speaker 1: used the radio station as a means of convincing people
Speaker 1: to go out and buy radios, because up to this point,
Speaker 1: again it was very much an amateur thing. People who
Speaker 1: were interested in the science would go out and get
Speaker 1: the equipment or build the equipment from there from whatever
Speaker 1: they could, and that's how they participated. But now we're
Speaker 1: talking about actually making commercial radio sets for people to
Speaker 1: go out and buy. And this is also the beginning
Speaker 1: of things starting to get a little dodgy on the
Speaker 1: corporate side of things, because previously the patents for radios
Speaker 1: were all over the place. But what happened was the
Speaker 1: big companies G E, A, T and T. Weird, they're
Speaker 1: such a familiar name nowadays, G A, T and T,
Speaker 1: International Radio and Telegraph and Westinghouse all got together and said,
Speaker 1: let's pull together our patents, and they created our c A,
Speaker 1: the Radio Corporation of America, for the express purpose of
Speaker 1: allowing them to build and sell radio equipment like transmitters
Speaker 1: and receivers that were designed not for broadcast broadcast but
Speaker 1: for for telegraphing, but also to keep these amateur radio
Speaker 1: wash out of business physically, so that they couldn't just
Speaker 1: go and buy an out of the box kit anymore.
Speaker 1: They would have to they would have to really build
Speaker 1: it themselves. R c A flexed its muscles in ways
Speaker 1: that I think just about anyone would describe as odious
Speaker 1: and uh and a lot of the stories we're gonna cover,
Speaker 1: yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, um. And what's kind of interesting
Speaker 1: is just that, you know, there's there's this other article
Speaker 1: that I read for this that was called the Design
Speaker 1: of Symbiosis that was all about, you know, the the
Speaker 1: longevity of radio and then these corporations interacting. And there's
Speaker 1: a quote from it that I want to read, which
Speaker 1: is about this specific thing says it was no accident
Speaker 1: that the General Electric Corporation G, after acquiring rights to
Speaker 1: the Marconi wireless patents in the United States, spearheaded the
Speaker 1: formation of the r c A, which in turn launched
Speaker 1: the National Broadcasting Corporation NBC, one of g S many subsidiaries.
Speaker 1: It still is, I believe right. Well again you got Universal, Yeah, great,
Speaker 1: it's even larger than that and a leading content company.
Speaker 1: So it's like one thing led to another, from one
Speaker 1: corporation to the next. Is they kind of built out
Speaker 1: their their subsidiaries and spread their spread out kind of
Speaker 1: like an umbrella and it and it. Don't get me wrong,
Speaker 1: this wasn't all negative. They were very positive effects at
Speaker 1: the time as well. From this, I love that you
Speaker 1: have this bit about a T and T and there
Speaker 1: their business strategy that this is one of the So
Speaker 1: apparently they like repeatedly, we're trying to charge people for
Speaker 1: commercial broadcasting over their sets, and they wanted to charge
Speaker 1: tolls in the same way that they were charging people
Speaker 1: for phone calls. Which I think is amazing when you
Speaker 1: when you think about it, you know, there's just these
Speaker 1: these negotiations between the public and the large corporations. When
Speaker 1: these new media hit the scene, and we're experiencing it
Speaker 1: right now, we'll probably always be experiencing it, I imagine. So,
Speaker 1: and it's interesting to you. You make a delineation in
Speaker 1: our notes about how how the radio system is treated
Speaker 1: in America versus in other nations, right, yeah, So the
Speaker 1: thing that's unique about the American radio system. This isn't
Speaker 1: to say that that no other countries did this, but
Speaker 1: the American radio system specifically evolved as a unique combination
Speaker 1: between private enterprises like these ones that we were just
Speaker 1: talking about, in government regulation, whereas in other countries, for
Speaker 1: the most part, it went for public ownership. So places
Speaker 1: like Iceland, the United Kingdom obviously with the BBC, Italy,
Speaker 1: Turkey and the USS are it was all public um.
Speaker 1: And so the problem that radio had that was unique
Speaker 1: in America was that all of these consumers could receive
Speaker 1: any signal at equal equality, very much like again blogging,
Speaker 1: right sure in theory, and that any broadcaster, however, whether
Speaker 1: it's NBC or a guy operating out of his garage
Speaker 1: would be able to overwhelm multiple frequencies and overwrite what
Speaker 1: was being played by somebody else's broadcast. Yeah, the very
Speaker 1: least you could interfere with the signal. Um, we'll talk
Speaker 1: about FM and a little bit. The interesting difference, one
Speaker 1: of the many interesting differences between a M and FM
Speaker 1: is if you have two AM broadcasts that are coming
Speaker 1: out at the same signal, they interfere with one another
Speaker 1: the same frequency, I should say, they interfere with one
Speaker 1: of FM. If you have two of the same frequency,
Speaker 1: it's whichever frequency is the most powerful is the one
Speaker 1: you will receive. So you could have a little station
Speaker 1: that is broadcasting in a very small amount of power
Speaker 1: that if you are close to it, you would be
Speaker 1: able to pick it up on an FM band that
Speaker 1: would normally be for a radio station that might be
Speaker 1: miles away, that could be a giant corporations one. So
Speaker 1: there was a lot of back and forth with this too,
Speaker 1: which is today we think of this. You and I
Speaker 1: were talking about this the other day when we proposed
Speaker 1: this idea. We think of it as pirate radio, right,
Speaker 1: and I think I always think of pop up the
Speaker 1: volume of the volume. Yeah, and Christians later driving around
Speaker 1: his neighborhood with his his pirate radio station at the
Speaker 1: back of his car. Yeah, it's also similar. I did
Speaker 1: a story with Chuck Bryant about it was television, not radio,
Speaker 1: but the same same principle, uh the Max Headroom incident
Speaker 1: where in Chicago that was also the same principle as
Speaker 1: FM radio, and that if you were able to send
Speaker 1: a signal along the same frequency but at a higher
Speaker 1: power rate, then you could overpower that and people would
Speaker 1: receive your signal not someone else's. Yeah, but anyway, and
Speaker 1: so as these these conflicts are going on, these like
Speaker 1: weird ven diagrams of stations playing up against one another,
Speaker 1: the government starts to become interested as we as we've
Speaker 1: talked about, and especially because of military reasons. So the
Speaker 1: Navy says, you know what, we should really take control
Speaker 1: of this as a means of national defense. And the
Speaker 1: way that they thought it should be run was basically
Speaker 1: like the post office, that the you know, the federal
Speaker 1: government should own and control what is broadcast on radio signals.
Speaker 1: Obviously that that didn't end up happening, But then you
Speaker 1: get this huge boom because of the amateur radio movement
Speaker 1: from nine to nineteen twenty three, the number of radio
Speaker 1: sets in America increased from sixty thousand to one point
Speaker 1: five millions. That's a huge adoption. Massive And uh in
Speaker 1: nineteen two there were twenty eight stations in operation, but
Speaker 1: I think it like exploded to hundreds very quickly. Um.
Speaker 1: And then enter the scene a little guy named Herbert Hoover,
Speaker 1: who was at the time the Secretary of Commerce, right,
Speaker 1: and the and the Department of Commerce oversaw radio at
Speaker 1: this time. Yeah, yeah, And he was really the initiative
Speaker 1: of that idea. He was the one who said, you know, uh,
Speaker 1: he really wanted the Department of Commerce to control it
Speaker 1: first of all. But he also said, and this is
Speaker 1: another quote, he said, at first the idea of making
Speaker 1: money off radio seemed profane. It is inconceivable that we
Speaker 1: should allow so great a possibility for service, for news,
Speaker 1: for entertainment, and for vital commercial purposes to be drowned
Speaker 1: in advertising chatter. This is Herbert Hoover who subsequently ends
Speaker 1: up using the government to support the businesses, uh in
Speaker 1: terms of businesses over amateur radio stations, UH, in terms
Speaker 1: of their licensing. And his other analogy for radio was
Speaker 1: that he thought of it as transportation rather than the
Speaker 1: the post office analogy that the Navy was using. He
Speaker 1: thought it was like, we should think of them as
Speaker 1: like waterways, and that the public should be be able
Speaker 1: to ride these waterways, but that the government would regulate
Speaker 1: how they did. So I like this this message here too,
Speaker 1: of the We're one of the world's first radio ads,
Speaker 1: aired on August two, uh for a housing development in Queens. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is the They were basically like um advocating what
Speaker 1: we would now call gentrification or like get This is
Speaker 1: a quote from that ad. Get away from the solid
Speaker 1: masses of brick, where children grow up starved for a
Speaker 1: run over a patch of grass. But my child's never
Speaker 1: seen what a tree looks like. Queen. This is the
Speaker 1: first thing that we we sold on radio. That's hilarious. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But so Hoover goes on in Ino. He calls together
Speaker 1: the first American Radio Conference, which is he brings together
Speaker 1: representatives from and I put this in quotes radio industry
Speaker 1: because it really wasn't an industry, you know, it's just
Speaker 1: kind of and and this included not only you know,
Speaker 1: the businesses that had interests in mind, but also the
Speaker 1: amateur radio operators and no action was taken. Uh, there
Speaker 1: were calls for legislation they introduced to building Congress. Congress
Speaker 1: is like, no, we don't want to have anything to
Speaker 1: do with this, and there's political reasons behind that that
Speaker 1: I'll get into later. Um. Then by nine, we've got
Speaker 1: fourteen hundred radio stations, not just what did I say?
Speaker 1: Yeah and you So you've got these big commercial broadcasters
Speaker 1: that are forming networks like NBC and CBS, both of
Speaker 1: them they've formed in seven respectively. Uh, and it's very
Speaker 1: similar today to the same that NBC and CBS that
Speaker 1: we understand as being television. Right now, now I've got
Speaker 1: the beginning of one of the weirdest stories I've ever heard.
Speaker 1: This guy is my favorite. I agree. I think you
Speaker 1: should do a whole episode about this guy. I could
Speaker 1: easily do a whole episode about this guy. And and
Speaker 1: he's going to pepper through parts of the rest of
Speaker 1: this episode. So nineteen twenty three is what we're talking
Speaker 1: about here. We're going back just a little bit too
Speaker 1: to set the stage. That's when doctor used in quotes
Speaker 1: John R. Brinkley starts up a radio station called kf
Speaker 1: KB in Kansas. So let me tell you about doctor Brinkley.
Speaker 1: First of all, he wasn't a real doctor. He's like
Speaker 1: the original snake oil salesman. He he at least perfected
Speaker 1: it to an art form, right. He went to medical school.
Speaker 1: They never graduated, but he bought a diploma from a
Speaker 1: diploma mill for five hundred dollars not an insignificant amount
Speaker 1: of money, that's uh, and it gave him the right
Speaker 1: to practice medicine in some states, including Kansas. He purchased diploma,
Speaker 1: not not an actual like proof that he had the
Speaker 1: training that would allow him to do this. So anyway,
Speaker 1: he starts practicing medicine. He had previously been involved in
Speaker 1: some scams and cons including things like selling tinted water
Speaker 1: as if it were an actual medicinal cure and injecting
Speaker 1: it into people. But I want to see a movie
Speaker 1: about this guy's life. I want to I want to
Speaker 1: see a movie. I want to see a movie of
Speaker 1: this guy. I want to see him cast. I want
Speaker 1: I want Simon Peg to play him. He's just like
Speaker 1: deviously injecting things into people and cutting open their necks.
Speaker 1: I think I think either Simon Peg or Neil Patrick
Speaker 1: Harris that would be pliant yeah, he would be good.
Speaker 1: It's like evil doogie howser. Yeah. So he had he
Speaker 1: had been hired as a house doctor for a meat
Speaker 1: packing company and he observed the rigorous mating habits of goats.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, So let's slow down for a second, of people,
Speaker 1: This means that he watched goats have sex for a
Speaker 1: long time and enthusiastically the goats at least I don't
Speaker 1: know about him, but the goats were certainly enthusiastic. So
Speaker 1: he was talking to a male patient once about the
Speaker 1: fact that the male patient was having problems in the bedroom.
Speaker 1: He was having a failing libido rectile dysfunction. Perhaps the
Speaker 1: the actual nature of the problem was not what explained
Speaker 1: in all the sources I looked at, but had something
Speaker 1: to do with failing libido or um, you know, virility,
Speaker 1: And so supposedly what Dr Brinkley did was jokingly suggest
Speaker 1: that perhaps they should transplant plant some goat quote unquote glands,
Speaker 1: as in gonads into the male patient. And he said,
Speaker 1: let's do it. Let's fire up like the original body modification.
Speaker 1: Give me some give me some of them goat glands.
Speaker 1: So he does he actually did start performing this, and
Speaker 1: then he started to suggest, like he began to essentially
Speaker 1: advertise saying, this is a way to restore virility for men. Uh,
Speaker 1: let me do this this medical procedure for a not
Speaker 1: insignificant amount of money. So flash foward to when he
Speaker 1: gets the radio station and he starts to fill his
Speaker 1: broadcast time with music and medical lectures, and he would
Speaker 1: end up advocating for this kind of treatment and other
Speaker 1: treatments that were equally bogus advertising too. Yeah, and he
Speaker 1: was he was essentially throwing business two surgeons into pharmacists
Speaker 1: and getting kickbacks every single time and making a mint
Speaker 1: off it. So he's in full operation and will end up,
Speaker 1: believe it or not, defining in part why radio has
Speaker 1: regulated the way it is. But we'll get to that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know, he's important to the history of it um.
Speaker 1: In the meantime, Hoover's continuing to negotiate with stations and
Speaker 1: the government on how it should be regulated. And you know, basically,
Speaker 1: as the Secretary of Commerce, his work is to let
Speaker 1: the stations work out amongst themselves which frequency is going
Speaker 1: to be used and when and how they overlap. You know,
Speaker 1: it wasn't really you know, handing it out. He wouldn't
Speaker 1: occasionally make decisions. And what happened was in the federal
Speaker 1: court was like whoa, whoa, you don't have this power.
Speaker 1: And specifically the Attorney General of the United States, who
Speaker 1: you know, was from the same administration that the Secretary
Speaker 1: of Commerce was, decided that Hoover didn't have this power,
Speaker 1: he could not grant permits at request, and that all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, these air waves turned into even more
Speaker 1: of this like wild wild West of broadcasting than they
Speaker 1: already were. Uh. And so obviously more regulation is even
Speaker 1: is necessary. And Coolidge is the president of the time.
Speaker 1: He favors the control by the Department of Commerce obviously
Speaker 1: because it's under his branch, and he opposes any kind
Speaker 1: of commission being formed. Senate, however, didn't like the idea
Speaker 1: of one man being in control. And this is where
Speaker 1: the political angle comes in, because they knew that Herbert
Speaker 1: Hoover had his eye on the presidency and they didn't
Speaker 1: want to give him any political prestige for taking care
Speaker 1: of the radio problem. Interesting, and also this will probably
Speaker 1: seem familiar to people following them, that neutrality arguments, where
Speaker 1: one of the big problems was the FCC had brought
Speaker 1: a case against Comcast for blocking bit torrent traffic, and
Speaker 1: then the response was, you don't have authority to tell
Speaker 1: Comcast what it can and can't do because Internet transmissions
Speaker 1: were a title one classification, not titled two. Uh. And
Speaker 1: if you want to know more about that, you can
Speaker 1: listen to the title to podcast I did and Common
Speaker 1: Carrier podcast I did from a while back to to
Speaker 1: learn more about it. But just suffice it to say
Speaker 1: that this is something that we've seen before and we'll
Speaker 1: likely see again. I just I think it's fascinating that,
Speaker 1: like the future of this major media uh, was decided
Speaker 1: by people who wanted to screw over a political candidate
Speaker 1: potentially running from Yeah, yeah, and sometimes just people who
Speaker 1: were wanting to screw over inventors. Uh. It's crazy. We'll
Speaker 1: talk more about those two. In Congress creates the Federal
Speaker 1: Radio Commission and passes the Radio Act of nineteen twenty seven. Now,
Speaker 1: before that time, it was all the Department of Commerce,
Speaker 1: like Christian was saying. So the Commission's job was to
Speaker 1: get radio into shape, and they wanted to have a
Speaker 1: little more power than Department of Commerce, which could grant
Speaker 1: broadcast licenses but couldn't deny a broadcast license. So if
Speaker 1: you requested it, if you did all the things you
Speaker 1: were supposed to do, you would get one. You couldn't
Speaker 1: be told no, So the Federal Radio Commission was supposed
Speaker 1: to be able to say no if it was warranted. Um,
Speaker 1: the question of how they determined how it was warranted
Speaker 1: was something of a problem. And uh. The Act also
Speaker 1: laid out rules for content. Programming could not have obscene,
Speaker 1: in decent or profane language, and the Commission could and
Speaker 1: did use content as a factor when deciding whether or
Speaker 1: not to renew a broadcast license. So if you were
Speaker 1: broadcasting and not paying a whole attention to those content rules,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't necessarily have your license revoked, but when you
Speaker 1: went back to get your license renewed, you might be denied. Right,
Speaker 1: And this makes sense in light of other arguments that
Speaker 1: were going on with media of the you know, the
Speaker 1: twenty years probably surrounding this, both with the cinema and
Speaker 1: I would assume newspapers and comic books as well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all looking at the government, the government trying to deem
Speaker 1: what was profane or wasn't, but also trying to leave
Speaker 1: it in the public's hands to decide. Yeah. There was
Speaker 1: also a real worry about how far can you rule
Speaker 1: on these things before it becomes censorship. So that I mean,
Speaker 1: that's a real worry, right, because they didn't want to
Speaker 1: be accused of taking away somebody's right to free speech. Sure, yeah, um.
Speaker 1: And so the fr C Federal Radio Commission, it was
Speaker 1: really just like this compromise, this political compromise. And so
Speaker 1: the idea was like really like they just assumed they
Speaker 1: being Congress, that it was going to go away after
Speaker 1: a year as part of a political deal basically to
Speaker 1: keep Hoover out of office, and especially because of the
Speaker 1: commercial radio interests these guys who were lobbying their politicians. Uh,
Speaker 1: they wanted their regulation to go back to the Secretary
Speaker 1: of Commerce. They just didn't want it to be Hoover. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so they and their supporters in Congress would belittle
Speaker 1: the FARC's accomplishments even as they had they had subsequently
Speaker 1: argued that it should exist, and then as it was
Speaker 1: going along, they would say, oh, this is terrible. You're
Speaker 1: not doing a good job. And Uh. The FARC was
Speaker 1: handicapped by a number of things. A limited financial resources,
Speaker 1: had an inadequate staff, uh, and as we're talking about here,
Speaker 1: it really didn't have any power authority, and its existence
Speaker 1: was in question from the very day that it was
Speaker 1: it was created. It was like they were constantly on probation. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It was one of those things where, um, they're also
Speaker 1: they're very organization ended up being a problem. So. Uh.
Speaker 1: One of the things about the FARC was that they
Speaker 1: were organized so that the entire United States was divided
Speaker 1: into into zones. Yeah. They called this sectionalism, and each
Speaker 1: zone was giving given the same number of broadcast licenses
Speaker 1: essentially as every other zone, which you know, from one perspective,
Speaker 1: sounds like it would be fair, like everybody gets the
Speaker 1: same amount, But then you think where's the population distribution.
Speaker 1: The Northeast is very heavily populated and the Southwest is
Speaker 1: very lightly populated, and so you don't have enough broadcast
Speaker 1: licenses for the Northeast and you have too many for
Speaker 1: the Southwest. So these were so simple things like just
Speaker 1: the way things were set up kind of set the
Speaker 1: f r C up for failure. It did, yeah, especially
Speaker 1: because when that happened, Southerners in particular felt like they
Speaker 1: weren't being treated fairly. Uh, And it led to the
Speaker 1: Davis Amendment in March. The idea was that there had
Speaker 1: to be an equal allocation of licenses, band frequencies, periods
Speaker 1: of time for operation station power for each of these
Speaker 1: five zones. Uh and that so you know, obviously sexualism
Speaker 1: was a huge problem for the FARC. And this is
Speaker 1: even before we get into the business interest angle, right right,
Speaker 1: This is just in the operation part of the f FRC,
Speaker 1: not even getting into the business section. But these are
Speaker 1: definitely important things to to consider. The idea of being
Speaker 1: able to say, here's the frequency you are allowed to use,
Speaker 1: here's the amount of power your transmitter is allowed to have,
Speaker 1: so that way we can make sure that we don't
Speaker 1: have these battling frequencies interfering with one another, because that's
Speaker 1: not going to be good for anybody. It's not good
Speaker 1: for the transmitter, it's not good for the consumer who's
Speaker 1: trying to receive these. All of that made sense, but
Speaker 1: they were hampered so much. And also, I mean, there
Speaker 1: were a lot of shady political goings on along with
Speaker 1: corporate goings on. At the same time. They were essentially
Speaker 1: trying to fulfill this mission of favoring big business over
Speaker 1: amateur radios, and they Actually, there's an actual FARC memo
Speaker 1: that says, quote, there is not room in the broadcast
Speaker 1: band for every school of thought, whether it's religious, political, social, social,
Speaker 1: or economic. Each can't have its own separate broadcasting station
Speaker 1: or a mouthpiece in the ether. Uh So they, you know,
Speaker 1: they were coming down pretty hard on these these amateur
Speaker 1: stations that we're given providing you know, a pulpit essentially
Speaker 1: to anybody who had the means to to operate a
Speaker 1: broadcast um in favor of the businesses that were, you know,
Speaker 1: lobbying to have them created in the first place. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so,
Speaker 1: you know, very complicated issue. The technology, oddly enough, less
Speaker 1: complicated than the politics and culture surrounding it. In this case,
Speaker 1: like the stories end up getting um Like it's the
Speaker 1: human element that really throws the monkey wrench in here. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: for instance, like you've got this happens, the FRC says,
Speaker 1: you know, this isn't a this isn't a pulpit for
Speaker 1: your belief And then the labor movement, which is very
Speaker 1: powerful at the time, says, wait a minute, we should
Speaker 1: have a clear channel that we can broadcast over these
Speaker 1: five zones so we can talk to people about labor interests,
Speaker 1: and then educators said, yeah, so should we uh, And
Speaker 1: so there's all this pressure from the public, and then
Speaker 1: subsequently Congress uses that and just keeps pushing on the
Speaker 1: f r C, saying you're really blowing it here. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So you've got a great bullet list here of the
Speaker 1: working principles of the f r C. Let's go through those. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So this is how they would ostensibly decide things. The
Speaker 1: first is that the station with the longest record of
Speaker 1: continuous service had the superior right for broadcasting on a
Speaker 1: particular channel, right, but they had a stipulation. There were
Speaker 1: other conditions as well. So in order to fulfill the
Speaker 1: fair and equitable distribution that was required by them, an
Speaker 1: applicant who wanted to broadcast needed firm financial standing and
Speaker 1: efficient equipment. That's pretty vague, right, So it's up to
Speaker 1: this f r C, not f c C f r
Speaker 1: C commissioner at the time to determine what firm financial
Speaker 1: standing means and what efficient equipment means, especially as this
Speaker 1: equipment is evolving at a rapid pace. Um. And then
Speaker 1: you also had to obey the rules of the obscene
Speaker 1: of not broadcasting obscene content like we talked about earlier,
Speaker 1: UH and basically keeping it so that the dissemination of
Speaker 1: propaganda wasn't controlled by a single group, and that creeds
Speaker 1: were supposed to find that this is another quote that
Speaker 1: I loved, find their way into the market of ideas
Speaker 1: to be on the air. There was this idea that, um,
Speaker 1: there was a there would be a natural kind of
Speaker 1: UH process throughout the radio operators in the public that
Speaker 1: decide which political agendas should get to be broadcast on
Speaker 1: the radio or not, rather than just giving everyone the
Speaker 1: opportunity to Yeah, and that would actually changed to there
Speaker 1: would there would eventually become a decision where people would say,
Speaker 1: you know what, we need to make sure that everyone
Speaker 1: has equal opportunity to voice there, to to put their
Speaker 1: political voice out there. But that would be an idea
Speaker 1: that would come around a little later. Yeah, So you know,
Speaker 1: saying let's just put this out there and see what happens,
Speaker 1: and and I trust that whatever outcome there is it
Speaker 1: will be for the best didn't always work out. It's
Speaker 1: like it's like saying, the laws of nature will decide
Speaker 1: who the best person for president of the United States
Speaker 1: would be. So what sort of stuff did we get
Speaker 1: as a result of this, well, subsequently, the f r
Speaker 1: C didn't want to regulate advertising. Uh, not only because
Speaker 1: you know, the advertiser's interests were also their interests, but
Speaker 1: also because the commission chose to further the ends of
Speaker 1: the commercial broadcasters as part of what they called the
Speaker 1: public interest. So the f SEE had this ability to
Speaker 1: claim that it didn't have powers of censorship and it
Speaker 1: couldn't be held responsible for questionable advertising such as cigarettes.
Speaker 1: You know, those like old corny cigarette ads that Judy
Speaker 1: hear on radio right now. If you listen, if you
Speaker 1: ever listen to old timey radio that has the commercial
Speaker 1: still in it, you will hear tons of these. So
Speaker 1: they didn't want to censor those. But at the same time,
Speaker 1: they would rule that public stations that were on the
Speaker 1: air could or could not be on the air because
Speaker 1: of their quality of character, which I think is kind
Speaker 1: of fascinating that you know it was. I would assume
Speaker 1: at the time that it was maybe arguments of political beliefs, right, um, yeah,
Speaker 1: very likely religious. This actually makes me think of how
Speaker 1: it's unrelated. It's tangential, but how if I'm watching a
Speaker 1: streaming content on my one of my devices whenever it
Speaker 1: gets to the content part, like whatever I'm actually trying
Speaker 1: to see, I might encounter buffering three or four times,
Speaker 1: depending upon the connection. But commercials always seemed to play
Speaker 1: with perfect clarity and no buffering whatsoever. Isn't that interesting,
Speaker 1: especially especially when you're when you're on YouTube, and YouTube
Speaker 1: has got that new sort of passive aggressive alert that
Speaker 1: comes up at the bottom that says, hey, just so
Speaker 1: you know, this isn't US, it's the limits of your
Speaker 1: bandwidth provider, right, commercial. So it's interesting to me also
Speaker 1: that the public, you know, you would think like, oh,
Speaker 1: the public, were they crying out on behalf of the
Speaker 1: little guy, And it turns out they weren't. In large part,
Speaker 1: they were actually citing with the big networks. Yeah they were.
Speaker 1: And what's kind of interesting about this is, yeah, they
Speaker 1: were more interested in the content that NBC, r c
Speaker 1: A and CBS was we're putting out um and even
Speaker 1: though some people argued, you know, our c has a
Speaker 1: monopoly on this industry. Uh, it's interesting, Like there was
Speaker 1: another argument that was essentially that, look, the mass public
Speaker 1: just wants entertainment from these radio channels. They don't want
Speaker 1: to be educated, they don't want to listen to your
Speaker 1: political screeds, and so subsequently they're complacent about the whole
Speaker 1: thing and they don't really care whether or not these
Speaker 1: amateur radio stations are getting edged out. UM. And so again,
Speaker 1: like I turned back to this article by this guy
Speaker 1: Herring out of the Harvard Review, and he proposed that
Speaker 1: there are two potential solutions, which I think are really
Speaker 1: interesting now that we have the the advantage of being
Speaker 1: so far ahead and time and looking back on this,
Speaker 1: and he said, the only possible solutions are that we
Speaker 1: go for full government ownership. His example was the BBC
Speaker 1: at the time. UH. And he said, yeah, there's criticisms
Speaker 1: that come in the form of minorities, not not ethnic minorities,
Speaker 1: but like minorities of of voice claiming that they aren't
Speaker 1: given equal opportunity to access to stations. So that's the
Speaker 1: one negative drawback to that. And he said, or we
Speaker 1: could a lot of fixed percentage of radio facilities just
Speaker 1: for nonprofit programs. UH. And then whatever it is, whether
Speaker 1: it's uh they allocate a certain number frequencies or maybe
Speaker 1: they say, you know, the commercial stations can broadcast for
Speaker 1: these twelve hours a day and then another twelve hours
Speaker 1: a day, it's our nonprofit stations. Um. But even if
Speaker 1: they did that, there were so much demand for nonprofit
Speaker 1: amateur radio that they didn't have enough enough to accommodate everybody.
Speaker 1: There wasn't enough literally in this case, it wasn't There
Speaker 1: weren't enough frequencies to facilitate it. Yeah. Yeah, So this
Speaker 1: is really between where we see the beginning of the
Speaker 1: radio industry an actual radio industry that is commercialized, and
Speaker 1: there are questions that we're going around about, well, how
Speaker 1: should broadcasting be financed, how should we produce our programs?
Speaker 1: How should we distribute? All of this stuff? And amateur
Speaker 1: broadcasting moved away as much as it was, like kind
Speaker 1: of I think of it as being like the fandom
Speaker 1: of today, you know, like I keep thinking that's amateur
Speaker 1: radios like the bler of the twenties, um, and that
Speaker 1: there were so many fandoms expressed there. But ultimately other
Speaker 1: stations that had commercial enterprises behind them, or even commercial
Speaker 1: enterprises themselves, like department stores or music stores or doctors
Speaker 1: or Mr Brinkley sorry Dr brink Yes, uh, he didn't
Speaker 1: spend three years not graduating medical school to be called
Speaker 1: Mr Exactly. Yeah, I mean that five was well spent. Uh,
Speaker 1: they ultimately were able to you know, put push out
Speaker 1: these interests of the sort of amateur broadcasters. So like
Speaker 1: our c A GE and Westinghouse, they form NBC because
Speaker 1: they want to keep their interests from diverging, even though
Speaker 1: their competitors they're also you know, united against amateur radio.
Speaker 1: This leads to the rise of advertising sponsorships, which were
Speaker 1: well familiarly with in the podcasting world and with ad agents.
Speaker 1: This is really like the first time that they had
Speaker 1: like whole ad agencies that were working together with these
Speaker 1: companies kind of coming up with how this stuff is
Speaker 1: going to be broadcasting, How is the best way to
Speaker 1: convince the audience to to move from queens or to
Speaker 1: a cigarette. So looking back to our friend that we
Speaker 1: referred to a second ago, doctor John R. Brinkley. Uh,
Speaker 1: the FRC denied his broadcast renewal license in nineteen thirty.
Speaker 1: So Dr Brinkley comes up to the f r C
Speaker 1: s as a time for me to get a little
Speaker 1: stamp on here so I can continue my my good
Speaker 1: deeds of posting are broadcasting fraudulent medical practices and getting kickbacks,
Speaker 1: And they said nope, They actually cited the fraudulent claims
Speaker 1: and the content as the reason, saying it was against
Speaker 1: their content rules and that's why they were not renewing
Speaker 1: its license. So actually an instance where they did that
Speaker 1: and it was for the good, out for the great,
Speaker 1: for the greater good in this case, although Brinkley. Brinkley
Speaker 1: said that what was happening was effectively censorship. Um. And
Speaker 1: so he protests, and what he does. He buys a
Speaker 1: radio station in Mexico that broadcasts had a much higher
Speaker 1: power than almost any station in the US. It was
Speaker 1: at a hundred thousand watts, eventually went up to a
Speaker 1: half million watts and so very powerful radio station compared
Speaker 1: to the other ones that were active at the time.
Speaker 1: He directs the antenna northward into the United States. It's amazing.
Speaker 1: So here's here's the deal. This is this is what's
Speaker 1: gonna come back and haunt him. The way this worked
Speaker 1: was that he would, uh, he would actually his studio
Speaker 1: was in the United States, the the stuff he was
Speaker 1: broadcasting would go to Mexico to be transmitted by radio,
Speaker 1: and that's what would eventually come back to get him.
Speaker 1: But that would be another couple of years. He's unfascinated
Speaker 1: by this guy. He's the brass, the moxie. Yeah. Um. Well,
Speaker 1: as a side note, one of the things that was
Speaker 1: mentioned at the top from that listener message was FDRs
Speaker 1: fireside chats, and those began in nineteen thirty three. So
Speaker 1: this is really when I mean fireside chats don't happen anymore.
Speaker 1: But I'm fairly certain that the President of the United
Speaker 1: States still records a weekly message that goes out on
Speaker 1: radio and it becomes an institution, but presidency recognizes the
Speaker 1: importance of this media, of the communicating to the mass public.
Speaker 1: Also in nineteen thirty three, that's when Edwin Howard Edwin
Speaker 1: Howard Armstrong, remember we talked about him earlier, created frequency
Speaker 1: modulation radio or FM radio. So am Remember we mentioned
Speaker 1: changes the peak to peak voltage changes the amplitude of
Speaker 1: that wavelength. Frequency modulation doesn't change the amplitude. It changes
Speaker 1: the number of oscillations per second, the actual frequency of
Speaker 1: the wave, but then a fairly narrow band because obviously
Speaker 1: you have to tune to a band of frequencies in
Speaker 1: order to pick things up. Then if it went outside
Speaker 1: of that, you wouldn't get it anymore, which is why
Speaker 1: you can overlap stations instead of causing interference. Yeah, as
Speaker 1: long as you know so you know if you're if
Speaker 1: you're going in an area where the power levels are
Speaker 1: almost the same for the frequencies, that's when you start
Speaker 1: getting that weird thing where you'll hear one station and
Speaker 1: then the other station. Maybe you'll hear both the same time.
Speaker 1: But it's pretty rare. Uh So it's also not as
Speaker 1: prone to static. You don't have the same problems that
Speaker 1: you did with AM with electromagnetic interference. But before it
Speaker 1: could get widespread adoption, Armstrong was essentially backstabbed by his
Speaker 1: former friend David Starnoff, who was head of guess what
Speaker 1: r c A, and r c A obviously had a
Speaker 1: big vested interest in AM radio FM was rising as
Speaker 1: a competing technology. Sarnoff went nuclear. He he had wanted
Speaker 1: Armstrong to go and create technology to make AM radio
Speaker 1: broadcast more clear, more free at static, and instead Armstrong
Speaker 1: comes up with this alternative to AM radio. But our
Speaker 1: c A is heavily invested in AM, so rather than say,
Speaker 1: let's adopt this new technology and build on it, he
Speaker 1: went nuclear, and he started lobbying the FCC to deny
Speaker 1: an experimental license for UH testing FM radio. Essentially, every
Speaker 1: time Armstrong tried to make a move to push FM
Speaker 1: radio forward, our ci A blocked it or tried to
Speaker 1: block it, or complicated litigation ensued. It got very expensive.
Speaker 1: And here's where things get really tragic. UH in the
Speaker 1: and by the time you get to the nineteen forties,
Speaker 1: Armstrong was effectively bankrupted by the litigation. He was still
Speaker 1: trying to pursue this. He goes to his wife to
Speaker 1: ask her for some of the money he had given
Speaker 1: her in their earlier part of their relationship that she
Speaker 1: had put aside for their retirement. She denies him this.
Speaker 1: He he has been beaten down totally, and he gets
Speaker 1: enraged and does a horrible act. He grabs a fire poker,
Speaker 1: hits his wife in the arm UH injuring her arm.
Speaker 1: She leaves obviously. She leaves him that evening. He sits down,
Speaker 1: writes an apologetic letter, and jumps out the window of
Speaker 1: his thirteenth floor building and kills himself. Tragic, tragic story.
Speaker 1: So there are some amazing and powerful stories here. Brinkley
Speaker 1: Armstrong Tesla Marconi. Is I mean there's a movie? There
Speaker 1: are many movies to be made. From this, moving on
Speaker 1: the nur Communications Act, huge huge piece of legislation. This
Speaker 1: is the formation of the fcc UM. The one section
Speaker 1: of that Act is actually referred to as the Brinkley Act.
Speaker 1: This is within the overall nine Communications Act. And of
Speaker 1: course the Brinkley Act is in fact named after our
Speaker 1: good buddy, doctor John R. Brinkley. So this was the
Speaker 1: US government's attempt to finally shut down Brinkley and his
Speaker 1: attempts to continue broadcasting. And they said that if you
Speaker 1: are transmitting information from the United States to another country
Speaker 1: to be broadcast, that is a type of international commerce
Speaker 1: and thus can be regulated. And they laid down rules
Speaker 1: and they said, you cannot do this, it is against
Speaker 1: the law. Now we have put that into law. It
Speaker 1: put a stop to his transmitting and he ended up
Speaker 1: trying to do other things. He also, by the way,
Speaker 1: really got the government's attention, not just by transmitting messages
Speaker 1: about quackery and terrible medicinal cures for things. He sided
Speaker 1: with the Nazis before the before the United States entered
Speaker 1: the war, exactly as is before the United States was
Speaker 1: in in World War Two. But he started with the Nazis.
Speaker 1: Did not go over well. Uh. He eventually would die
Speaker 1: of a heart attack in nine. Yeah, and insane with
Speaker 1: Dr Brinkley. But Brinkley, I mean his his actions are
Speaker 1: what in fact there was not. There was a case
Speaker 1: back in the nineteen nineties that related to shutting down
Speaker 1: a uh AN organization that was using a similar means
Speaker 1: of transmitting from the United States to a radio antenna
Speaker 1: in Mexico because they had the facility that they could
Speaker 1: use and it was largely unregulated. Even as late as nineties,
Speaker 1: we've had cases that fall under this part of the Act.
Speaker 1: For some reason, I'm thinking about d d O S attacks.
Speaker 1: It's like the their version of yeah, it's all about
Speaker 1: stepping around the regulations, right yeah. Well, um, Congress, like
Speaker 1: you said, had abolished that FARC, which they were hoping
Speaker 1: to do to begin with, but instead of just turning
Speaker 1: it back over to the Department of Commerce, they established
Speaker 1: the FCC. The mandate of the SEC is Interstate and
Speaker 1: Foreign Commerce in Communication, which is where the Brinkley thing
Speaker 1: comes in. And this is these are the three claims
Speaker 1: that they maintainer. The reason for the FCC make sure
Speaker 1: that radio is available to all for reasonable charges and
Speaker 1: with adequate facilities. So that you're not necessarily listening to.
Speaker 1: No longer would you be listening to an amateur out
Speaker 1: of their garage, out of their gas station, would walk
Speaker 1: away for five minutes to go pump some gas and
Speaker 1: then come back. You want reliable radio service, America, and
Speaker 1: we're going to give it to you. And so this
Speaker 1: is also when we start seeing the allocation of large
Speaker 1: frequency bands for AM radio and FM radio. There's still
Speaker 1: is amateur radio. You can get a license to operate
Speaker 1: an amateur radio, but there are very specific band of
Speaker 1: frequencies you are allowed to use and you can't use
Speaker 1: anything outside of that. Yeah, it's kind of it's kind
Speaker 1: of what Herrying was arguing back in the nineteen thirties
Speaker 1: that that there, but it's far more limited than that.
Speaker 1: I think what he was envisioning with that there there
Speaker 1: would be a spectrum for nonprofit radio um and, and
Speaker 1: he also argued that the f c C at the
Speaker 1: time had to decide whether they were going to support
Speaker 1: commercial broadcasters at the expense of nonprofit ones, and ultimately,
Speaker 1: as we know, they decided to do that. Um and
Speaker 1: even though they were hearings going on and reports were
Speaker 1: being pulled together and the f CC was looking at
Speaker 1: all these things. You know, ultimately, what we know of
Speaker 1: as the Golden Age of radio saw the growth of
Speaker 1: these these uh multi uh corporate networks across the country.
Speaker 1: Right and by this time we're talking about World War two,
Speaker 1: radio now was adopted by a huge percentage of the population.
Speaker 1: Nine and ten families owned a radio and listened to
Speaker 1: an average of three to four hours of programming at
Speaker 1: a right, this is like what we picture of that
Speaker 1: like family gathered right time. Yeah, my place is going
Speaker 1: and they're all gathered around the radio, little orphan Annie
Speaker 1: and the lone Ranger and green Hornet and all that
Speaker 1: kind of stuff. Yeah, this is this is where we're
Speaker 1: going to kind of draw and end to this because
Speaker 1: while we're right here at the dawn of the Golden Age,
Speaker 1: I think that you know, what's the cool story that
Speaker 1: we've been able to tell is the rocky journey it
Speaker 1: took to get there. I hope you guys enjoyed that
Speaker 1: episode about the Golden Age of radio. If you have
Speaker 1: any suggestions for future episodes, reach out to me on
Speaker 1: tech stuff or Twitter. The handle for both of those
Speaker 1: is tex Stuff h s W and I'll talk to
Speaker 1: you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I heart
Speaker 1: Radio production. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit
Speaker 1: the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
Speaker 1: listen to your favorite shows. Eight