Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology. It was tex Stuff from
Speaker 1: dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland and I am joined by a special guest,
Speaker 1: my buddy Christian, who is here. Hey Jonathan, Hey Christian,
Speaker 1: how you doing. I am good? Windy outside it is.
Speaker 1: It's a little windy, a little rainy outside in Atlanta today.
Speaker 1: It's terrible because this morning it was it was, it
Speaker 1: was raining, but the temperature was about twenty degrees warmer. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it dropped significantly. I'm regretting my choice of jackets well,
Speaker 1: especially because it was in the seventies yesterday. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And now this is this is Atlanta people complaining about
Speaker 1: whether right. Yeah. Sorry for all of you who are
Speaker 1: in Montreal or New York or you know, any place
Speaker 1: where the temperature drops below, say zero, on a regular basis.
Speaker 1: Here we're like, it's a little chilly, that's raining. Uh. Today,
Speaker 1: Christian and I are going to talk about a subject
Speaker 1: that was suggested by a listener, And first of all,
Speaker 1: I must apologize to said listener because despite my heroic
Speaker 1: efforts of researching where this suggestion came from, I couldn't
Speaker 1: find it. So I'm guessing this was actually an older one,
Speaker 1: but said the forward thinking, bad prediction story about Hugo
Speaker 1: Gernsback got me thinking about how crazy it must have
Speaker 1: been to have lived through the debut 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 Pallette 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, or recorded it all over because the
Speaker 1: ghost of Marconi was haunting you there was that, and
Speaker 1: we had in the old studio we had a portrait
Speaker 1: of Nicola Tesla on the wall. We felt judged, but
Speaker 1: mainly Chris and I both felt that we gave such
Speaker 1: a disjointed story that we were jumping around so much
Speaker 1: that it made no sense. And so we we after
Speaker 1: talking it through once we went back re recorded, so
Speaker 1: that first episode that we recorded it's lost to time.
Speaker 1: We don't have it anymore, at least I hope will
Speaker 1: be more organized today. But I'll tell you just from
Speaker 1: going through all this research that this is such a
Speaker 1: vast amount of information for this period of time, and
Speaker 1: I feel like it's in you can you can get
Speaker 1: a PhD in radio communication in the history of radio
Speaker 1: and understanding these things, and it's yeah, we will probably
Speaker 1: only scratch the surface today. Ig Yeah, there there and
Speaker 1: there's so many crazy dramatic stories of the trail of
Speaker 1: of con men, of big media. It's like this pirate
Speaker 1: industry of people just messing with each other. It's it's fascinating.
Speaker 1: In fact, there there's probably two or three podcast worth
Speaker 1: of information that we could cover, but we're gonna try
Speaker 1: and get this in one if we can. So first
Speaker 1: thing I got to mention is that radio and broadcast
Speaker 1: radio are two different things. You know, radio in the
Speaker 1: sense of what Tesla and Marconi were looking at, they
Speaker 1: were looking at ways of transmitting short signals across distances
Speaker 1: without using wires, so that was it. They were looking
Speaker 1: largely at using Morse code. So they might use a
Speaker 1: spark gap technology where they would create sparks and send
Speaker 1: messages that way. But you couldn't really do a sustained
Speaker 1: message that way without creating a lot of static and noise,
Speaker 1: and that was a real problem. So we need to
Speaker 1: look at another person for broadcast radio. That would be
Speaker 1: a Canadian by the name of Reginald Fessenden, who essentially
Speaker 1: invented a M radio that would be uh, the amplitude
Speaker 1: modulated radio. And so from your notes here your notes,
Speaker 1: it says he worked with Edison for Edison. Actually he
Speaker 1: actually worked for both Westinghouse and Edison at different points
Speaker 1: in his career. So yeah, he just like Tesla, Tesla
Speaker 1: also worked for both, although you know, again working for
Speaker 1: like it's like me saying that, you know, I worked
Speaker 1: for the head of our parent company. Technically I do,
Speaker 1: but I don't have any contact with them. So uh,
Speaker 1: he had dropped out of school as a young man.
Speaker 1: He actually did not complete his school work, but he
Speaker 1: was mainly interested in electricity and this potential to transmit
Speaker 1: messages wirelessly, and he was using that spark gap technology.
Speaker 1: But that was the problem, was that it was creating
Speaker 1: so much static and noise that it was very difficult
Speaker 1: to get any intelligible message across. Yeah. So actually I
Speaker 1: want to interject here for a second. So, um, in
Speaker 1: like the model of human communication, when scholars are looking
Speaker 1: at how human beings communicate with each other regardless of media,
Speaker 1: they actually use uh this Fessenden Marconi uh model of
Speaker 1: transmissions as like the baseline for it. And it's all
Speaker 1: about like sending and receiving with feedback and feed forward
Speaker 1: and then there's a signal to noise ratio. That's how
Speaker 1: it's all understood, whether you and I are sitting here
Speaker 1: talking in the same room, or it's mass media or
Speaker 1: 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 electromagnetic fields and thus creating
Speaker 1: radio waves, but it isn't giving me the fidelity I
Speaker 1: need in order to communicate properly. He then thought, what
Speaker 1: if I used a continuous wave. So I create a
Speaker 1: sign wave and oscillating wave with the same amplitude, same frequency,
Speaker 1: So it's just steady. Now that's not carrying any information
Speaker 1: by itself. It's if you could if you could hear it,
Speaker 1: it would just be a steady tone. But it's actually
Speaker 1: talking about using frequencies above the limit of human hearing.
Speaker 1: So let's say you create this wave, and then you
Speaker 1: were too introduce a second wave, one that was created
Speaker 1: by your voice. So you speak into a microphone, it
Speaker 1: gets converted into electric waves. You add that on top
Speaker 1: of the uh the existing wave you've already created, and
Speaker 1: you allow it to change the amplitude of that wave.
Speaker 1: As the two waves are overlaid on top of one another. Sure,
Speaker 1: it's genius. It is genius. It's absolutely genius. Uh. So
Speaker 1: this was a M radio. This was the idea that
Speaker 1: what that became a M radio because it does modulate
Speaker 1: the amplitude of that wave. So the amplitude, by the way,
Speaker 1: is the the peak to peak uh difference, Right, it's not.
Speaker 1: It's not how many oscillations. This is just the the
Speaker 1: amplitude of the wave itself, how tall the peaks are,
Speaker 1: how low the troughs are, if you were looking at
Speaker 1: the wave across a line the way. It's assuming that
Speaker 1: this innovation of his significantly reduced the noise and static.
Speaker 1: It did, it did. It did still have issues and
Speaker 1: that you could have interference with other waves that were
Speaker 1: created at that same frequency. It also meant that you
Speaker 1: could get interference with other electromagnetic phenomenons, like like a
Speaker 1: lightning strike. So also if you pass below, like if
Speaker 1: you go under a bridge, you would hear, you know,
Speaker 1: the disruption of the signal. So it wasn't perfect, but
Speaker 1: it was an incredible step forward. And this was a
Speaker 1: revolutionary I mean he tested it successfully. He did a
Speaker 1: short distance test between two towers and it worked fine.
Speaker 1: And then in nineteen o six he had his infamous
Speaker 1: Christmas concert for sailors. See this is yeah, this is
Speaker 1: where I think that that boat to boat idea comes from,
Speaker 1: right yeah, Because it turns out the disaster of the
Speaker 1: Titanic would end up really making this uh clear that
Speaker 1: needed to be some radio communication for ships at sea.
Speaker 1: But what he wanted to do was he wanted to
Speaker 1: send out a message to essentially telegraph operators aboard ships.
Speaker 1: That was his plan. So he proceeded the concert with
Speaker 1: an actual telegraph message that essentially translates into hey, pay attention.
Speaker 1: And then once he did that, he started it was
Speaker 1: coming right. They were not, most of them. They just
Speaker 1: knew to pay attention because I got yeah there. They
Speaker 1: were like, well, here's the message. Whatever is going to happen,
Speaker 1: We need to really focus. And so what they were
Speaker 1: expecting to hear were just the noises they would hear
Speaker 1: for the dots and dashes of Morse code. So then
Speaker 1: he he gives a short speech, he plays a violin
Speaker 1: uh and plays a Holy Night. There were supposed to
Speaker 1: be other people who talked into the microphone too, but
Speaker 1: most of them chickened out because they they got like
Speaker 1: terrible stage fright because they realized all of a sudden
Speaker 1: that they were speaking to like hundreds of people, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so anyway, it ended up being a big hit.
Speaker 1: Sailors up and down the Atlantic coast we're we're 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. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so so he he demonstrates this capability, and immediately other
Speaker 1: physicists and engineers start to experiment with it because some
Speaker 1: of them had been independently working on the same kind
Speaker 1: of idea. Fessendon ended up being the first to make
Speaker 1: it really work in a public demonstration. So you had
Speaker 1: a lot of other people who were who either adopted
Speaker 1: his ideas or continued to develop their own ideas, and
Speaker 1: a lot of amateurs were starting to experiment with radio transmissions,
Speaker 1: including transmitting out to telegraph operators, who often were very
Speaker 1: much entertained by this because it was different from just
Speaker 1: listening to clicks on the headphones. This is the part
Speaker 1: that's the most fascinating about the evolution of radio to
Speaker 1: me is that even though the technology is ultimately made
Speaker 1: for mass communication. People originally started using it as one
Speaker 1: to one communication across long distances, replacing a telegraph. And
Speaker 1: then uh, these amateur operators, these like d I y
Speaker 1: uh people in their in their garage, is just you know,
Speaker 1: tinkering around with the technology that they could get a
Speaker 1: hold of. We're able to turn it into this mass
Speaker 1: communication then yeah, And it's funny because when you look
Speaker 1: at the early ones, obviously they were using very low
Speaker 1: wattage transmitters, so that meant that they couldn't transmit very far,
Speaker 1: most of them. I mean, if you were a big name,
Speaker 1: you might be able to work with someone like General
Speaker 1: Electric to get a really big transmitter and be able
Speaker 1: to send a signal far away, because the signals reach
Speaker 1: is largely dependent upon the power of the transmitter. Right.
Speaker 1: The further way you get, the weaker the signal is,
Speaker 1: and the less you'll be likely you are able to
Speaker 1: pick it up with a receiver. So in the early days,
Speaker 1: people were happy to experiment with this, and there was
Speaker 1: really no regulation because there there hadn't been a demonstrable
Speaker 1: need to regulate yet, because no one had the power
Speaker 1: to interfere that much with anything that was important. Seven
Speaker 1: Festan would invent a high frequency electric generator to create
Speaker 1: radio waves in the Hurts frequency, which was really important,
Speaker 1: and in night. Dr Charles Aaron Culver, who was newly
Speaker 1: hired as a professor of physics at Beloit College or
Speaker 1: bell Watt if you prefer um. It's it's in a
Speaker 1: town called bell Watt actually um, but set up a
Speaker 1: radio telegraph assembly which became the foundation for the college
Speaker 1: is radio station, though voice in music transmission wouldn't be
Speaker 1: part of it until the ninth twenties. But this this
Speaker 1: became like again, it was someone a physics professor, in
Speaker 1: this case, a physics professor who was already interested in
Speaker 1: radio and had been working on it independently, setting up
Speaker 1: a thing that would eventually evolve into an early early
Speaker 1: radio station. Yeah, and that's kind of another interesting aspect
Speaker 1: of this too, is that these early amateur radio stations
Speaker 1: weren't just uh d I y kind of hobbyists doing
Speaker 1: it on their own. A lot of it was educational institutions,
Speaker 1: not just colleges but also high schools that were just
Speaker 1: you know, trying to use it for educational purposes. And
Speaker 1: that it's interesting later on what happens when amateur radio
Speaker 1: sort of gets more regulated. It really reminds me of
Speaker 1: the early days of personal computers and how how it
Speaker 1: first started off as a hobbyist thing, and then you know,
Speaker 1: you had bleeding edge adopters who might not build a computer,
Speaker 1: but they're curious about how they might use it. And
Speaker 1: then later who had people who were uh you know
Speaker 1: more it became more and more mainstream as time went on.
Speaker 1: So we've seen other emerging technologies that have followed a
Speaker 1: similar pathway to radio. Uh. Not always with the dramatics.
Speaker 1: I mean, there were some definite dramatics and early personal
Speaker 1: computers too. But we got some crazy stories to tell.
Speaker 1: But first we have another big name in radio that
Speaker 1: we have to mention. Yeah, so in nineteen ten, this
Speaker 1: guy lead to Forest uh really broadcasted like the first
Speaker 1: 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: that 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 new 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 maybe
Speaker 1: that they were only transmitting to people in their general
Speaker 1: neighborhood or even small town, but you wouldn't be able
Speaker 1: to necessarily pick up that signal for much further. It
Speaker 1: 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 he would imagine, this job is
Speaker 1: a little probably very tedious. Yeah. So he actually started
Speaker 1: setting up a regular broadcast time, like the first radio
Speaker 1: programming in a way, And by nineteen ten he had
Speaker 1: created this, uh, this program that would include reading out
Speaker 1: news to telegraph operators. And his wife Sybil, got involved
Speaker 1: and she started playing records that the description I said
Speaker 1: was the kind of records young people like to listen
Speaker 1: to back in nineteen 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 already contest work. Back then, she would
Speaker 1: instruct people listening to come by their house sign a
Speaker 1: guest book with their name and where they were from,
Speaker 1: and then they might win a little prize. Number seven. No,
Speaker 1: wasn't calling number seven. Uh. And here's the coolest part.
Speaker 1: I think this little amateur station. Eventually, over time in
Speaker 1: ninety one would become kq W, and in nineteen 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 the 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 our radio transmissions broadcast without any regulation.
Speaker 1: This is where the United States government starts to say,
Speaker 1: this is going to become a problem because now we
Speaker 1: we already have a lot of radio traffic going on
Speaker 1: just through amateurs as well as ship to land land
Speaker 1: to ship communication. Uh, it's starting to get a little
Speaker 1: crowded and we're starting to get interference. 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 like nineteen eleven, everyone would have been confused. Uh.
Speaker 1: And it marked the first time the US government required
Speaker 1: radio stations to be licensed. So the licensing was really
Speaker 1: just to create order in chaos. Uh. And it was
Speaker 1: really kind of like, you know, we want to make
Speaker 1: sure that we're keeping certain frequencies free so that we
Speaker 1: can have these these very important transmissions go uninterrupted because
Speaker 1: am transmissions, if you transmit two things on the same frequency,
Speaker 1: you get lots of interference, which is different from there
Speaker 1: was a military on it too. This as well because
Speaker 1: World War One was on the horizon, was happening, and
Speaker 1: they the government banned amateur radio broadcasting during the war
Speaker 1: for you know, the reason that they were trying to
Speaker 1: transmit signals to one another of important nature. If somebody
Speaker 1: was talking in their garage about uh, you know, their
Speaker 1: favorite records or something or young people. Yeah, the ones
Speaker 1: that the young people listened to, they would overlap and
Speaker 1: they wouldn't get these important messages. So they shut it
Speaker 1: all down. And also just radio detection to the the
Speaker 1: remote possibility that they might detect radio transmissions from either
Speaker 1: allies or enemies. It would mean that before they had Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is this is before the whole Bletchley park On
Speaker 1: Dygma thing, which is I've talked about that in the
Speaker 1: previous episode of tex stuff. But fascinating story. So nineteen
Speaker 1: fourteen Edwin Armstrong, who's going to be important throughout this conversation,
Speaker 1: and his story is a ma using and tragic. Uh.
Speaker 1: He patents a radio receiver circuit that increases the selectivity
Speaker 1: which allows you to tune into specific frequencies and the
Speaker 1: sensitivity of radio receivers. That means it was able to
Speaker 1: pick up weaker radio signals than previous receivers. So selectivity
Speaker 1: obviously very important. You want to be able to say
Speaker 1: I'm looking at this particular band of frequencies and I
Speaker 1: don't want anything outside of that um and we would
Speaker 1: see that get better and better. In en he would
Speaker 1: invent the super heterodyne radio receiver or superhead. So this
Speaker 1: principle is actually really fascinating, and I gotta admit to you,
Speaker 1: a Christian, I had to really sit down and read
Speaker 1: this a few times to kind of get what was
Speaker 1: going on. Yeah, because I mean this is radio electromagnetic
Speaker 1: 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 to explain it to me, because yeah, I'm more
Speaker 1: of the on the side of the leg cultural examination
Speaker 1: of radio, whereas like the technology of it escapes me sometimes,
Speaker 1: So yeah, hit me. All right. Let's say, let's say
Speaker 1: I want to transmit a radio signal at a high frequency,
Speaker 1: so it's not going to interfere with anything else, but
Speaker 1: that processing high frequencies is a little tricky, So you
Speaker 1: might have a receiver that can process frequencies up to
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna take an arbitrary number hurts. But I
Speaker 1: want to transmit at five hundred killer hurts. If I
Speaker 1: were to introduce that frequency to an oscillator tuned to
Speaker 1: a different frequency, suddenly I would be able to receive that. Uh,
Speaker 1: not just at the original frequency I transmit at, but
Speaker 1: the difference between that and the oscillating one. So another
Speaker 1: easy example, let's say they have an oscillating frequency at
Speaker 1: a thousand killer hurts. Okay, that would mean that if
Speaker 1: you use a receiver tuned to five killer hurts, killer hurts,
Speaker 1: or two thousand five Killer Hurts. You would pick up
Speaker 1: that signal and could process it. Okay, So and I'm
Speaker 1: imagining that this is a process that's still used today. Yeah.
Speaker 1: This is the principle of transmitting and and receiving with
Speaker 1: a radios so that your radio doesn't have to have
Speaker 1: as wide a spectrum. It's called interminute frequency. And it
Speaker 1: took me a long time to figure out what was
Speaker 1: going on. Is the oscillator that was throwing me off?
Speaker 1: And then I realized, oh, the oscillators tuned to a
Speaker 1: different frequency, and that's what gives you the broader range
Speaker 1: that you can pick up. It's pretty fascinating. And again
Speaker 1: Armstrong was absolutely brilliant coming up with this. Uh. And
Speaker 1: then we move up to the nineteen twenties. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: the twenties is when this educational stuff that I was
Speaker 1: talking about earlier it really hits a boom. There was
Speaker 1: like more than two hundred educational organizations across the United
Speaker 1: States of America that, uh, we're requesting broadcasting licenses so
Speaker 1: that they could transmit, and whether they were using it
Speaker 1: as a an opportunity for their students to learn about
Speaker 1: the technology or to broadcast educational information, it didn't really matter.
Speaker 1: The unfortunate thing is that thirteen years later, by nine
Speaker 1: three or more of these educational institutions had folded and
Speaker 1: and basically it was because of and this is going
Speaker 1: to be a huge theme of this episode, because of
Speaker 1: ad based programming and stronger stations, commercial stations that were
Speaker 1: able to overlap their signal. Yeah, you essentially had not
Speaker 1: just the fact that the companies had more technological behind them,
Speaker 1: but that the government was favoring those over the educational ones.
Speaker 1: When we get into a little bit more about the politics,
Speaker 1: you're going to hear that repeated a few times, and
Speaker 1: it's it's a little upsetting, honestly. And I also i'd
Speaker 1: like to say, like, it's interesting because, despite whatever my
Speaker 1: political beliefs are reading. One of the articles that we
Speaker 1: used as as research for this was written in nineteen
Speaker 1: from the perspective of somebody at Harvard University looking back
Speaker 1: at the Federal Radio Radio Commission before it turned into
Speaker 1: the FCC that we have now and kind of just
Speaker 1: doing a broad review of the last like ten years
Speaker 1: of this. And it's very very similar and reminiscent of
Speaker 1: arguments that we've seen with media throughout the last hundred
Speaker 1: years and that we're seeing right now in arguments about
Speaker 1: net neutrality. Yeah, it's really similar to net neutrality, the
Speaker 1: idea being that everyone should be free to use the
Speaker 1: Internet to send and receive whatever information they want. In radio,
Speaker 1: we saw the same argument, except in that case radio,
Speaker 1: it was it ended up being that those folks were
Speaker 1: kind of pushed away and that the the the corporations,
Speaker 1: the companies that had the money were the ones that
Speaker 1: had the voice. Yeah, and and so like you know,
Speaker 1: as we're talking earlier, there's these amateur radio stations, right,
Speaker 1: and they here's the kind of content you might find
Speaker 1: an amateur radio stations. Maybe somebody's giving a sermon, or
Speaker 1: they're they're they're just reading out of their Bible, or
Speaker 1: they're talking about sports out of today's newspaper, updating their
Speaker 1: neighborhood on what happened in sports around the country that day.
Speaker 1: Maybe they're reading a poem, maybe they're giving a speech
Speaker 1: about something political at the time, perhaps the usage of radio,
Speaker 1: or like we were talking earlier, just playing records and
Speaker 1: at the time, there was no you know, licensing or
Speaker 1: copyright and effect for for how music was broadcasted. So
Speaker 1: they could just throw any record on and kind of
Speaker 1: entertain the neighborhood. Right in a way, you can think
Speaker 1: of it as like the predecessor of blogs. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: know it really in a in a real way it was.
Speaker 1: And uh, this was amazing. This was an ability for
Speaker 1: someone to have a platform to have their voice heard.
Speaker 1: Some people made very good use of that. Some people
Speaker 1: may you may think, made frivolous use of it, just
Speaker 1: like well, sure, yeah, exactly. And that's just like blogging,
Speaker 1: except for for people like us, I suppose who do
Speaker 1: get paid to do it. Uh, A lot of these
Speaker 1: 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. Like,
Speaker 1: it's really cool. Yeah, yeah, absolutely yeah. Moving over to
Speaker 1: to nineteen twenty, that's when we get the first commercial
Speaker 1: radio station launching. That's k d K A. Now, amateur
Speaker 1: radio stations, like Christian was saying, had already been around,
Speaker 1: and a guy named Henry P. Davis was inspired by
Speaker 1: an amateur named Frank Conrad and saw the potential to
Speaker 1: actually make some money off this whole radio thing, and
Speaker 1: not just not just broadcast out for free, but to
Speaker 1: actually make it a commercial enterprise. So the radio station
Speaker 1: went live on November two, nineteen twenty. Henry P. Davis
Speaker 1: himself read out the results of the presidential elections on
Speaker 1: the air, and he would become heavily involved in broadcast radio,
Speaker 1: in fact becoming the first chairman of the National Broadcasting
Speaker 1: Company also known as NBC. So yeah, exactly. Yeah. Then
Speaker 1: the opening of thirty Rock in NINETI kt k A
Speaker 1: 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 from whatever they could,
Speaker 1: and that's how they participated. But now we're talking about
Speaker 1: actually making commercial radio sets for people to go out
Speaker 1: and buy. And this is also the beginning of things
Speaker 1: starting to get a little dodgy on the corporate side
Speaker 1: of things, because previously the patents for radios were all
Speaker 1: over the place. But what happened was the big companies
Speaker 1: G E, A, T and T. Weird, they're such a
Speaker 1: familiar it is, G, A, T and T. International Radio
Speaker 1: and Telegraph and Westinghouse all got together and said, let's
Speaker 1: pull together our patent and they created r 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: out of business physically, so that they couldn't just go
Speaker 1: and buy an out of the box kit anymore. They
Speaker 1: would have to they would have to really build it themselves.
Speaker 1: R c A flexed its muscles in ways that I
Speaker 1: think just about anyone would describe as odious and uh
Speaker 1: and a lot of the stories we're gonna cover, yeah yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: um and and what's kind of interesting is just that,
Speaker 1: you know, there's there's this other article that I read
Speaker 1: for this that was called The Design of Symbiosis that
Speaker 1: was all about, you know, the the longevity of radio
Speaker 1: and then these corporations interacting. And there's a quote from
Speaker 1: it that I want to read, which is about this
Speaker 1: specific thing. It says it was no accident that the
Speaker 1: General Electric Corporation g after acquiring rights to the Marconi
Speaker 1: wireless patents in the United States, spearheaded the formation of
Speaker 1: the r c A, which in turn launched the National
Speaker 1: Broadcasting corporation NBC one of GS many subsidiaries. It still is,
Speaker 1: I believe right, Well again he got Universal Yeah great, Yeah,
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 their
Speaker 1: their business strategy. This is one of the so apparently
Speaker 1: they like repeatedly, we're trying to charge people for commercial
Speaker 1: broadcasting over their sets, and they wanted to charge tolls
Speaker 1: in the same way that they were charging people for
Speaker 1: phone calls, which I think is amazing when you when
Speaker 1: you think about it, you know, there's just these these
Speaker 1: negotiations between the public and the large corporations. When these
Speaker 1: new media hit the scene and we're in we're experiencing
Speaker 1: it right now, we'll probably always be experiencing it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I imagine so, And it's interesting to you. You make
Speaker 1: a delineation in our notes about how how the radio
Speaker 1: system is treated in America versus in other nations, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: So the thing that's unique about the American radio system.
Speaker 1: This isn't to say that that no other countries did this,
Speaker 1: but the American radio system specifically evolved as a unique
Speaker 1: combination between private enterprises like these ones that we were
Speaker 1: just talking about, in government regulation, whereas in other countries,
Speaker 1: for the most part, it went for public ownership. So
Speaker 1: places like Iceland, the United Kingdom obviously with the BBC, Italy, Turkey,
Speaker 1: and the USS are it was all public. Um. And
Speaker 1: so the problem that radio had that was unique in
Speaker 1: America was that all of these consumers could receive any
Speaker 1: signal at equal equality, very much like again blogging right
Speaker 1: in theory, and that any broadcaster, however, whether it's NBC
Speaker 1: or a guy operating out of his garage, would be
Speaker 1: able to overwhelm multiple frequencies and overwrite what was being
Speaker 1: played by somebody else's broadcast. Yeah, the very least you
Speaker 1: could interfere with the signal. Um. We'll talk about FM
Speaker 1: and a little bit. The interesting difference, one of the
Speaker 1: many interesting differences between a M and FM is that
Speaker 1: if you have two AM broadcasts that are coming out
Speaker 1: at the same signal. They interfere with one another the
Speaker 1: same frequency, should say, they interfere with one other FM.
Speaker 1: If you have two of the same frequency, it's whichever
Speaker 1: frequency is the most powerful is the one you will receive.
Speaker 1: So you could have a little station that is broadcasting
Speaker 1: in a very small amount of power that if you
Speaker 1: are close to it, you would be able to pick
Speaker 1: it up on an FM band that would normally be
Speaker 1: for a radio station that mean miles away. That could
Speaker 1: be a giant corporations one. So there's a lot of
Speaker 1: back and forth with this too, which is today we
Speaker 1: think of this. You and I were talking about this
Speaker 1: the other day when we proposed this idea. We think
Speaker 1: of it as pirate radio, right, and I think I
Speaker 1: always think of pup up the volume. Yeah, and Christians
Speaker 1: later driving around his neighborhood with his his pirate radio
Speaker 1: station at the back of his car. Yeah, it's also similar.
Speaker 1: I did a story with Chuck Bryant about it was
Speaker 1: television not radio, but the same same principle, uh the
Speaker 1: Max Headroom incident where in Chicago that was also the
Speaker 1: same principle as FM radio, and that if you were
Speaker 1: able to send a signal along the same frequency but
Speaker 1: at a higher power rate. Then you could overpower that
Speaker 1: and people would receive yours, no, not someone else's. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But and so as these these conflicts are going on,
Speaker 1: these like weird ven diagrams of stations playing up against
Speaker 1: one another, the government starts to become interested, as we
Speaker 1: as we've talked about, and especially because of military reasons.
Speaker 1: So the Navy says, you know what, we should really
Speaker 1: take control of this as a means of national defense.
Speaker 1: And the way that they thought it should be run
Speaker 1: was basically like the post office, that the you know,
Speaker 1: the federal government should own and control what is broadcast
Speaker 1: on radio signals. Obviously that that didn't end up happening,
Speaker 1: But then you get this huge boom because of the
Speaker 1: amateur radio movement. From nineteen to nineteen twenty three, the
Speaker 1: number of radio sets in America increased from sixty thousand
Speaker 1: to one point five millions. That's a huge, massive and
Speaker 1: uh in in nineteen twenty two there were twenty eight
Speaker 1: stations in operation, but I think it like exploded to
Speaker 1: hundreds very quickly. Um and then enter the scene a
Speaker 1: little guy named Herbert Hoover, who was at the time
Speaker 1: the Secretary of Commerce, right, and the and the Department
Speaker 1: of Commerce oversaw radio at this time. Yeah, yeah, And
Speaker 1: he was really the initiative of that idea. He was
Speaker 1: the one who said, uh, you know, uh, he really
Speaker 1: wanted the Department of Commerce to control it first of all.
Speaker 1: But he also said, and this is another quote, he said,
Speaker 1: at first, the idea of making money off radio seem profane.
Speaker 1: It is inconceivable that we should allow so great a
Speaker 1: possibility for service, for news, for entertainment, and for vital
Speaker 1: commercial purposes to be drowned in advertising chatter. This is
Speaker 1: Herbert Hoover who subsequently ends up using the government to
Speaker 1: support the businesses uh in terms of businesses over amateur
Speaker 1: radio stations, uh in terms of their licensing. And his
Speaker 1: other analogy for radio was that he thought of it
Speaker 1: as transportation, rather than the the post office analogy that
Speaker 1: the Navy was using. He thought it was like, we
Speaker 1: should think of them as like water ways, and that
Speaker 1: the public should be be able to ride these waterways,
Speaker 1: but that the government would regulate how they did. So.
Speaker 1: I like this this message here too, of the We're
Speaker 1: one of the world's first radio ads aired on August two,
Speaker 1: UH for a housing development in Queens. Yeah. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is the They were basically like, um, advocating what we
Speaker 1: would now call gentrification or like get this is a
Speaker 1: quote from that ad get away from the solid masses
Speaker 1: of brick, where children grow up starved for a run
Speaker 1: over a patch of grass. But my child's never seen
Speaker 1: what a tree looks like. A 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 two he calls together
Speaker 1: the first American Radio Conference, which is he brings together
Speaker 1: represent otives from and I put this in quote radio
Speaker 1: industry because it really wasn't an industry, you know, it's
Speaker 1: just 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 build a congress.
Speaker 1: Congress is like, no, we don't want to have anything
Speaker 1: to do with this. And there's political reasons behind that
Speaker 1: that I'll get into later. Um. But then by nine
Speaker 1: we've got fourteen hundred radio stations, not just what did
Speaker 1: I say? Yeah, And so you've got these big commercial
Speaker 1: broadcasters that are forming networks like NBC and CBS, both
Speaker 1: of them they formed in seven respectively. Uh, and it's
Speaker 1: very similar today to the same that NBC and CBS
Speaker 1: that we understand as being television. Right now, now I've
Speaker 1: got the beginning of one of the weirdest stories I've
Speaker 1: ever heard. This guy is my favorite. I think you
Speaker 1: should do a whole episode about this. I could easily
Speaker 1: do a whole episode about this guy. And and he's
Speaker 1: going to pepper through parts of the rest of this episode.
Speaker 1: So Ninete is what we're talking about here. We're going
Speaker 1: back just a little bit too to set the stage.
Speaker 1: That's when doctor using in quotes, John R. Brinkley starts
Speaker 1: up a radio station called kf KB in Kansas. So
Speaker 1: let me tell you about doctor Brinkley. First of all,
Speaker 1: he wasn't a real doctor. He's like the original snake
Speaker 1: oil salesman. He he at least perfected it to an
Speaker 1: art form. Right. He went to medical school by never graduated,
Speaker 1: but he bought a diploma from a diploma mill for
Speaker 1: five hundred dollars, not an insignificant amount of money. Uh,
Speaker 1: and it gave him the right to practice medicine in
Speaker 1: some states, including Kansas. He purchased diploma, not not an
Speaker 1: actual like proof that he had the training that would
Speaker 1: allow him to do this. So anyway, he starts practicing medicine.
Speaker 1: He had previously been involved in some scams and cons,
Speaker 1: including things like selling tinted water as if it were
Speaker 1: an actual medicinal cure and injecting it into people. But
Speaker 1: I want to see a movie about this guy's life.
Speaker 1: I want to I want to see a movie. I
Speaker 1: want to see a movie about this guy. I want
Speaker 1: to see him cast. I want I want Simon Peg
Speaker 1: to play him. He's just like deviously injecting things into
Speaker 1: people and cutting open their necks. I think I think
Speaker 1: either Simon Peg or Neil Patrick Harris that would be Yeah,
Speaker 1: he would be good. It's like evil Dookie Houser. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So he had he had been hired as a house
Speaker 1: doctor for a meat packing company, and he observed the
Speaker 1: rigorous mating habits of goats. Uh yeah, So let's slow
Speaker 1: down for a second. People, This means that he watched
Speaker 1: goats have sex for a long time and and enthusiastically
Speaker 1: the goats. At least I don't know about him, but
Speaker 1: the goats were certainly enthusiastics. So he was talking to
Speaker 1: him mail patient once about the fact that the mail
Speaker 1: patient was having problems in the bedroom. He was having
Speaker 1: a failing libido, a rectile dysfunction. Perhaps the the actual
Speaker 1: nature of the problem was not what explained in all
Speaker 1: the sources I looked at, but had something to do
Speaker 1: with failing libido or or um, you know, virility. And
Speaker 1: so supposedly what Dr Brinkley did was jokingly suggest that
Speaker 1: perhaps they should transplate plant some goat quote unquote glands
Speaker 1: as in gonads into the mail patient. And he said,
Speaker 1: let's let's do it. Let's firow up like the original
Speaker 1: body modification. Give me some give me some of them
Speaker 1: goat glands. So he does he actually did start performing this,
Speaker 1: and then he started to suggest like he began to
Speaker 1: essentially advertise, saying, this is a way to restore virility
Speaker 1: for men. Uh, let me do this this medical procedure
Speaker 1: for a not insignificant amount of money. So flash forward
Speaker 1: to when he gets the radio station and he starts
Speaker 1: to fill his broadcast time with music and medical lectures,
Speaker 1: and he would end up advocating for this kind of
Speaker 1: treatment and other treatments that were equally bogus in advertising too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and he was he was essentially throwing business to surgeons
Speaker 1: into pharmacists and getting kickbacks every single time and making
Speaker 1: a mint off it. So he's in full operation and
Speaker 1: will end up, believe it or not, defining in part
Speaker 1: why radio has regulated the way it is. But we'll
Speaker 1: get to that in a little Yeah, I know, he's
Speaker 1: important to the history of it. Um. In the meantime,
Speaker 1: Hoover is continuing to negotiate with stations and the government
Speaker 1: 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 when and how they overlaping. It wasn't
Speaker 1: really you know, handing it out. He wouldn't occasionally make decisions.
Speaker 1: And what happened was in the federal court was like whoa, whoa,
Speaker 1: you don't have this power. And specifically the Attorney General
Speaker 1: of the United States, who you know, was from the
Speaker 1: same administration that the Secretary of Commerce was, decided that
Speaker 1: Hoover didn't have this power, he could not grant permits
Speaker 1: at request, and that all of a sudden, these air
Speaker 1: waves turned into even more of this like wild wild
Speaker 1: West of broadcasting than they already were. Uh. And so
Speaker 1: obviously more regulation is even is necessary. And Coolidge is
Speaker 1: the president of the time. He favors the control by
Speaker 1: the Department of Commerce obviously because it's under his branch,
Speaker 1: and he opposes any kind of commission being formed. The Senate, however,
Speaker 1: didn't like the idea of one man being in control.
Speaker 1: And this is where the political angle comes in, because
Speaker 1: they knew that Herbert Hoover had his eye on the
Speaker 1: presidency and didn't want to give him any political prestige
Speaker 1: for taking care of the radio problem. Interesting and also
Speaker 1: this will probably seem familiar to people following the net
Speaker 1: neutrality arguments, where one of the big problems was the
Speaker 1: FCC had brought a case against Comcast for blocking bit
Speaker 1: torrent traffic. And then the response was you don't have
Speaker 1: authority to tell Comcast what it can and can't do
Speaker 1: because Internet transmissions were a title one classification, not titled
Speaker 1: too uh. And if you want to know more about that,
Speaker 1: you can listen to the title to podcast I did
Speaker 1: and Common Carrier podcast I did from a while back
Speaker 1: to to learn more about it, but just suffice it
Speaker 1: to say that this is something that we've seen before
Speaker 1: and we'll likely see again. I just I think it's
Speaker 1: fascinating that, like the future of this major media uh,
Speaker 1: was decided by people who wanted to screw over a
Speaker 1: political candidate potentially yeah, yeah, and sometimes just people who
Speaker 1: were wanted 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 Radioact 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 over 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 FARC Federal Radio Commission, it was really
Speaker 1: just like this compromise, this political compromise, and so the
Speaker 1: idea was like really like they just assumed, they being Congress,
Speaker 1: that it was going to go away after a year
Speaker 1: as part of a political deal basically to keep Hoover
Speaker 1: out of office, and especially because of the commercial radio interests.
Speaker 1: These guys who were lobbying their politicians. Uh, they wanted
Speaker 1: the regulation to go back to the Secretary of Commerce.
Speaker 1: They just didn't want it to be Hoover. Uh. And
Speaker 1: so they and their supporters in Congress would belittle the
Speaker 1: FARC's accomplishments even as they had they had subsequently argued
Speaker 1: that it should exist, and then as it was going along,
Speaker 1: they would say, oh, this is terrible, you're not doing
Speaker 1: a good job. And Uh. The FARC was handicapped by
Speaker 1: a number of things. At the limited financial resources, had
Speaker 1: 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 one
Speaker 1: of the things about the FARC was that they were
Speaker 1: organized so that the entire United States was divided into
Speaker 1: two zones. Yeah. They called this sectionalism, and each zone
Speaker 1: was giving given the same number of broadcast licenses essentially
Speaker 1: 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: fr C up for failure. It did, yeah, especially because
Speaker 1: when that happened and 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. And that so you know, obviously sexualism was
Speaker 1: a huge problem for the FARC. And this is even
Speaker 1: before we get into the business interest to angle right, right,
Speaker 1: this is just in the operation part of the f
Speaker 1: FRC not even getting into the business section, but these
Speaker 1: are definitely important things to to consider. The idea of
Speaker 1: being able to say, here's the frequency you are allowed
Speaker 1: to use, here's the amount of power your transmitter is
Speaker 1: allowed to have, so that way we can make sure
Speaker 1: that we don't have these battling frequencies interfering with one another,
Speaker 1: because that's not gonna be good for anybody. It's not
Speaker 1: good for the transmitter, it's not good for the consumer
Speaker 1: who's trying to receive these. All of that made sense,
Speaker 1: but they were hampered so much. And also, I mean,
Speaker 1: there were a lot of shady political goings on along
Speaker 1: with corporate goings on at the same time. Right, they
Speaker 1: were essentially trying to fulfill this mission of favoring big
Speaker 1: business over amateur radios. And they actually there's an actual
Speaker 1: FRC memo that says, quote, there is not room in
Speaker 1: the broadcast 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 were 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 FARC says,
Speaker 1: you know, this isn't a this isn't a pulpit for
Speaker 1: your beliefs. 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 FARC,
Speaker 1: saying you're really blowing it here. Yeah. So you've got
Speaker 1: a great bullet list here of the working principles of
Speaker 1: the FARC. Let's go through those. Yeah. So this is
Speaker 1: how they would ostensibly decide things. The first is that
Speaker 1: the station with the longest record of continuous service had
Speaker 1: the superior right for broadcasting on a particular channel, right,
Speaker 1: but they had a stipulation. There were other conditions as well.
Speaker 1: So in order to fulfill the fair and equitable distribution
Speaker 1: that was required by them, an applicant who wanted to
Speaker 1: broadcast needed firm financial standing and efficient equipment. That's pretty vague, right,
Speaker 1: So it's up to this f r C, not f
Speaker 1: c C f r C commissioner at the time to
Speaker 1: determine what firm financial standing means and what efficient equipment means,
Speaker 1: especially as this equipment is evolving at a rapid pace. UM.
Speaker 1: And then you also had to obey the rules of
Speaker 1: the obscene of not broadcasting obscene and content like we
Speaker 1: talked about earlier UH and basically keeping it so that
Speaker 1: this dissemination of propaganda wasn't controlled by a single group
Speaker 1: and that creeds were supposed to find that this is
Speaker 1: another quote that I loved. Find their way into the
Speaker 1: market of ideas to be on the air. There was
Speaker 1: this idea that UM, there was a there would be
Speaker 1: a natural kind of UH process throughout the radio operators
Speaker 1: in the public that would decide which political agendas should
Speaker 1: get to be broadcast on the radio or not, rather
Speaker 1: than just giving everyone the opportunity to Yeah, and that
Speaker 1: would actually change too. There would there would eventually become
Speaker 1: a decision where people would say, you know what, we
Speaker 1: need to make sure that everyone has equal opportunity to
Speaker 1: voice there, to to put their political voice out there.
Speaker 1: But that would be an idea that would come around
Speaker 1: a little later. Yeah, So you know, saying let's just
Speaker 1: put this out there and see what happens, and and
Speaker 1: I trust that whatever outcome there is, it will be
Speaker 1: for the best didn't always work out. It's like it's
Speaker 1: like saying, the laws of nature will decide who the
Speaker 1: best person for president of the United States would be.
Speaker 1: So what sort of stuff did we get as a
Speaker 1: result of this. Well, Subsequently, the FARC didn't want to
Speaker 1: regulate advertising. Uh, not only because you know, the advertiser's
Speaker 1: interests were also their interests, but also because the Commission
Speaker 1: chose to further the ends of the commercial broadcasters as
Speaker 1: part of what they called the public interest. So the
Speaker 1: FARC had this ability to claim that it didn't have
Speaker 1: powers of censorship, and it couldn't be held responsible for
Speaker 1: questionable advertising such as cigarettes. You know, those like old
Speaker 1: corny cigarette ads that you to hear on um radio
Speaker 1: if you listen, if you ever listen to old timey
Speaker 1: radio that has the commercial still in it, you will
Speaker 1: hear tons of these. So they didn't want to censor those.
Speaker 1: But at the same time they would rule that public
Speaker 1: stations that were on the air could or could not
Speaker 1: be on the air because of their quality of character,
Speaker 1: which I think is kind of fascinating that you know
Speaker 1: it was. I would assume at the time that it
Speaker 1: was maybe arguments of political beliefs, right, um, yeah, very
Speaker 1: likely religious. This actually makes me think of how it's unrelated.
Speaker 1: It's tangential. But how if I'm watching a streaming content
Speaker 1: on my one of my devices, whenever it gets to
Speaker 1: the content part, like whatever I'm actually trying to see,
Speaker 1: I might encounter buffering three or four times, depending upon
Speaker 1: the connection. But commercials always seemed to play with perfect
Speaker 1: clarity and no buffering whatsoever. Isn't that interesting, especially especially
Speaker 1: when you're when you're on YouTube, and YouTube has got
Speaker 1: that new sort of passive aggressive alert that comes up
Speaker 1: at the bottom that says, hey, just so you know,
Speaker 1: this isn't US, it's the limits of your bandwidth provider,
Speaker 1: right commercial. So it's interesting to me also that the public,
Speaker 1: you know, you would think like, oh, the public, were
Speaker 1: they crying out on behalf of the little guy, And
Speaker 1: it turns out they weren't. In large part, they were
Speaker 1: actually citing with the big networks. Yeah they were. And
Speaker 1: what's kind of interesting about this is, yeah, they were
Speaker 1: more interest did 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 minority is not not
Speaker 1: ethnic mind parities, but like minorities of voice, claiming that
Speaker 1: they aren't given equal opportunity to access to stations. So
Speaker 1: that's the one negative drawback to that. And he said,
Speaker 1: or we could a lot of fixed percentage of radio
Speaker 1: facilities just for nonprofit programs. UH. And then whatever it is,
Speaker 1: whether it's uh, they allocate a certain number of frequencies
Speaker 1: or maybe they say, you know, the commercial stations can
Speaker 1: broadcast for these twelve hours a day, and then another
Speaker 1: twelve hours a day, it's our nonprofit stations. UM. But
Speaker 1: even if they did that, there were so much demand
Speaker 1: for nonprofit amateur radio that they didn't have enough enough
Speaker 1: to accommodate everybody. There wasn't literally in this case, there
Speaker 1: wasn't There weren't enough frequencies to facilitate it. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So this is really between where we see the beginning
Speaker 1: of the radio industry an actual radio industry that is commercialized,
Speaker 1: and they're 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: I think of it as being like the fandom of today,
Speaker 1: you know, like I keep thinking that's amateur radios like
Speaker 1: the Tumbler of the twenties, um, and that there were
Speaker 1: so many fandoms expressed there. But ultimately other stations that
Speaker 1: had commercial enterprises behind them, or even commercial enterprises themselves,
Speaker 1: like department stores or music stores, or doctors or Mr
Speaker 1: Brinkley sorry Dr brink Yes, Uh, he didn't spend three
Speaker 1: years not graduating medical school to be called Mr exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that five was well spent. Uh. They ultimately
Speaker 1: were able to, you know, put push out these interests
Speaker 1: of the sort of amateur broadcasters. So like our C A, G. E.
Speaker 1: And Westinghouse, they form NBC because they want to keep
Speaker 1: their interests from diverging, even though their competitors they're also
Speaker 1: you know, united against amateur radio. This leads to the
Speaker 1: rise of advertising sponsorships, which were well familiar with in
Speaker 1: the podcasting world and with ad agents. This is really
Speaker 1: like the first time that they had like whole ad
Speaker 1: agencies that were working together with these companies kind of
Speaker 1: coming up with how this stuff is going to be
Speaker 1: broadcasting and how is the best way to convince the
Speaker 1: audience to to move from queens or to buy a cigarette. So,
Speaker 1: looking back to our friend that we referred to a
Speaker 1: second ago, Dr John R. Brinkley, Uh, the f RC
Speaker 1: denied his broadcast renewal license in nineteen thirty. So Dr
Speaker 1: Brinkley comes up to the f r C s as
Speaker 1: a time for me to get a little stamp on
Speaker 1: here so I can continue my my good deeds of
Speaker 1: posting are broadcasting fraudulent medical practices and getting kickbacks. And
Speaker 1: they said nope. They actually cited the fraudulent claims and
Speaker 1: the content as the reason, saying it was against their
Speaker 1: content rules and that's why they were not renewing his license.
Speaker 1: So actually an instance where they did that and it
Speaker 1: was for the good for the yeah, great for the
Speaker 1: greater good in this case, although Brinkley, Brinkley said that
Speaker 1: what was happening was effectively censorship um and so he protests,
Speaker 1: and what he does. He buys a radio station in
Speaker 1: Mexico that broadcasts had a much higher power than almost
Speaker 1: any station in the US. It was at a hundred
Speaker 1: thousand watts, uh eventually went up to a half million
Speaker 1: watts and so very powerful radio station compared to the
Speaker 1: other ones that were active at the time. He directs
Speaker 1: the antenna northward into the United States. It's amazing. So
Speaker 1: here's here's the deal. This is this is what's going
Speaker 1: to 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 I'm
Speaker 1: fascinated 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 radio,
Speaker 1: and it becomes an institution. The Presidency recognizes the importance
Speaker 1: of this media, the communicating to the mass public. Also
Speaker 1: in nineteen three, that's when Edwin Howard Edwin Howard Armstrong,
Speaker 1: remember we talked about them earlier, created frequency modulation radio
Speaker 1: or FM radio. So AM Remember we mentioned changes the
Speaker 1: peak to peak voltage changes the amplitude of that wavelength.
Speaker 1: Frequency modulation doesn't change the amplitude, it changes the number
Speaker 1: of oscillations per second, the actual frequency of the wave
Speaker 1: within a fairly narrow band because obviously you have to
Speaker 1: tune to a band of frequencies in order to pick
Speaker 1: things up. Then if it went outside of that, you
Speaker 1: wouldn't get anymore, which is why you can overlap stations
Speaker 1: instead of causing interference. Yeah, as long as you know,
Speaker 1: so you know, if you're if you're going in an
Speaker 1: area where the power levels are almost the same for
Speaker 1: the frequencies, that's when you start getting that weird thing
Speaker 1: where you'll hear one station and then the other station.
Speaker 1: Maybe you'll hear both the same time, but it's pretty rare.
Speaker 1: Uh So it's also not as prone to static, you
Speaker 1: don't have the same problems that you did with AM
Speaker 1: with electromagnetic interference. But before it could get widespread adoption,
Speaker 1: Armstrong was essentially backstabbed by his former friend David Starnoff,
Speaker 1: who was head of guess what r c A and
Speaker 1: now our c A obviously had a big vested interest
Speaker 1: in AM radio. FM was rising as a competing technology.
Speaker 1: Starnoff went nuclear. He he had wanted Armstrong to go
Speaker 1: and create technology to make AM radio broadcast more clear,
Speaker 1: more free of static, and instead Armstrong comes up with
Speaker 1: this alternative to AM radio. But our c A is
Speaker 1: heavily invested in AM, so rather than say, let's adopt
Speaker 1: this new technology and build on it, he went nuclear
Speaker 1: and he started lobbying the FCC to deny an experimental
Speaker 1: license for UH testing FM radio. Essentially, every time Armstrong
Speaker 1: tried to make a move to push FM radio forward,
Speaker 1: r c A blocked it or tried to block it,
Speaker 1: or complicated litigation ensued. It got very expensive, and here's
Speaker 1: where things get really tragic. UH in the by the
Speaker 1: time you get to the nineteen forties, Armstrong was effectively
Speaker 1: bankrupted by the litigation. He was still trying to pursue this,
Speaker 1: He goes to his wife to ask her for some
Speaker 1: of the money he had given her in their earlier
Speaker 1: part of their relationship that she had put aside for
Speaker 1: their retirement. She denies him this. He he has been
Speaker 1: beaten down totally, and he gets enraged and does a
Speaker 1: horrible act. He grabs a fire poker, hits his wife
Speaker 1: in the arm uh injuring her arm. She leaves, obviously,
Speaker 1: she leaves him that evening. He sits down, writes an
Speaker 1: apologetic letter, and jumps out the window of his thirteenth
Speaker 1: floor building and kills himself. Tragic, tragic story. So there
Speaker 1: are some amazing and powerful stories here. Brinkley, Armstrong Tesla Marconi.
Speaker 1: Is I mean there's a movie? There are many movies
Speaker 1: to be made from this. Moving on the nineteen thirty
Speaker 1: four Communications Act, huge, huge piece of legislation. This is
Speaker 1: the formation of the fcc UM. The one section of
Speaker 1: that Act is actually referred to as the Brinkley Act.
Speaker 1: This is within the overall nineteen 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 is before the United States was in
Speaker 1: 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 but Brinkley, I mean, his his actions
Speaker 1: are what in fact there was not. There was a
Speaker 1: case back in the nineteen nineties that related to shutting
Speaker 1: down a uh AN organization that was using a similar
Speaker 1: means of transmitting from the United States to a radio
Speaker 1: antenna in Mexico because they had the facility that they
Speaker 1: could use, and it was largely unregulated. Even as late
Speaker 1: we've had cases that fall under this part of the
Speaker 1: air for some reason, I'm thinking about d d O
Speaker 1: S attacks, But it's it's like the their version of yeah,
Speaker 1: it's all about stepping around the yeah yeah. Well um. Congress,
Speaker 1: like you said, had abolished the f r C, which
Speaker 1: they were hoping to do to begin with, but instead
Speaker 1: of just turning it back over to the Department of Commerce,
Speaker 1: they established the FCC. The mandate of the SEC is
Speaker 1: Interstate and Foreign Commerce in Communication, which is where the
Speaker 1: Brinkley thing comes in. And this is these are the
Speaker 1: three claims that they maintainer. The reason for the FCC.
Speaker 1: Make sure that radio is available to all for reasonable
Speaker 1: charges and with adequate facilities, so that you're not necessarily
Speaker 1: listening to No longer would you be listening to an
Speaker 1: amateur out of their garage, out of their gas station,
Speaker 1: would walk away for five minutes to go pump some
Speaker 1: gas and then come back. You want reliable radio service, America,
Speaker 1: and we're going to give it to you. And so
Speaker 1: this is also when we start seeing the allocation of
Speaker 1: large frequency bands for AM radio and FM radio. There's
Speaker 1: still is amateur radio. You can get a license to
Speaker 1: operate an amateur radio, but there are very specific band
Speaker 1: of frequencies you are allowed to use and you can't
Speaker 1: use anything outside of that. Yeah, it's kind of it's
Speaker 1: kind of what Herring was arguing back in the nineteen
Speaker 1: thirties 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 FEC at the time had
Speaker 1: to decide whether they were going to support commercial broadcasters
Speaker 1: at the expense of nonprofit ones. And ultimately, as we know,
Speaker 1: they decided to do that. Um and even though they
Speaker 1: were hearings going on and reports were being pulled together
Speaker 1: and the f CC was looking at all these things,
Speaker 1: you know, ultimately what we know of as the Golden
Speaker 1: Age of radio saw the growth of these he's a
Speaker 1: multi uh corporate networks across the country, right and by
Speaker 1: this time we're talking about World War two. Radio now
Speaker 1: was adopted by a huge percentage of the population. Nine
Speaker 1: and ten families owned a radio and listened to an
Speaker 1: average of three to four hours of programming a day
Speaker 1: picture of that, like family gathered right time my place
Speaker 1: is going and they're all gathered around the radio, a
Speaker 1: little orphan Annie and and lone Ranger and green hornet
Speaker 1: and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, this is this
Speaker 1: is where we're going to kind of draw and end
Speaker 1: to this because while we're right here at the dawn
Speaker 1: of the Golden Age, I think that you know, what's
Speaker 1: the cool story that we've been able to tell is
Speaker 1: the rocky journey it took to get there, and clearly, uh,
Speaker 1: it was one that had a lot of drama in it.
Speaker 1: And maybe if you guys are really interested in this topic,
Speaker 1: you want to hear more about it, you should let
Speaker 1: us know. Will be happy to explore it further, whether
Speaker 1: it means, you know, concentrating on a much smaller segment
Speaker 1: to really get to the stories. Armstrong's fascinating person. Brinkley
Speaker 1: is a fascinating person. A lot of people that we
Speaker 1: could talk about. Fessendon very fascinating guy, So lots of
Speaker 1: things we can chat about. Just let us know. You
Speaker 1: can always get in touch with me by sending me
Speaker 1: an email at a message That address is tech Stuff
Speaker 1: at how stuff works dot com. Or drop me a
Speaker 1: line on Facebook, Twitter or Tumbler. The handle it all
Speaker 1: three is tech Stuff hs W. You can catch Christians
Speaker 1: work all over How Stuff Works. You do a lot
Speaker 1: of writing for our various video series. I do get
Speaker 1: for what the Stuff and for brain Stuff, and we've
Speaker 1: got a lot of great new content that's gonna be
Speaker 1: coming out on the How Stuff Works channel on YouTube
Speaker 1: the next couple of months. So if you have, if
Speaker 1: you have watched something from How Stuff Works on YouTube,
Speaker 1: odds are good that Christian was at least in some
Speaker 1: way involved in that. Probably yeah, yeah, I either wrote
Speaker 1: it or was somehow in the studio or on set
Speaker 1: at the time trying to wrangle things together. Right. These
Speaker 1: are the people who keep me in line whenever you
Speaker 1: see me on camera. So, guys, I hope you enjoyed this.
Speaker 1: I look forward to hearing from you and you look
Speaker 1: her from me again. Releases for more on thiss and
Speaker 1: thousands of other topics because it has stuff Works dot
Speaker 1: Com