Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from My Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland, executive producer or I heart radio and I
Speaker 1: love all things tech. Today we're going to listen to
Speaker 1: a classic episode the Golden Age of radio. This episode
Speaker 1: originally published March eleven, two thousand fifteen. I will now
Speaker 1: stop talking like that, because I know it's obnoxious. I
Speaker 1: couldn't resist it. Probably should have. I apologize, but no,
Speaker 1: We're gonna listen to this classic episode of the Golden
Speaker 1: Age of radio. I hope you enjoy. Radio is one
Speaker 1: of those things that I have loved all my life. Um,
Speaker 1: well before I started working for a company that owns
Speaker 1: hundreds of radio stations. Uh, and I have been a
Speaker 1: part of radio drama groups that didn't produce classic radio drama,
Speaker 1: but rather wrote new radio dramas in the style of
Speaker 1: the classic radio plays. So I have a real fondness
Speaker 1: for Golden age radio. Anyway, let's take a listen to
Speaker 1: this episode, which originally published on March eleventh, two thousand
Speaker 1: and fifteen. Today, Christian and I are going to talk
Speaker 1: about a subject that was suggested by a listener, and
Speaker 1: first of all, I must apologize to said listener because
Speaker 1: despite my heroic efforts of researching where this suggestion came from,
Speaker 1: couldn't find it. So I'm guessing this was actually an
Speaker 1: older one. But said the forward thinking, bad prediction story
Speaker 1: about Hugo Gernsback got me thinking about how crazy it
Speaker 1: must have been to have lived through the debut of
Speaker 1: public radio, all the excitement and so little understanding, fireside chats,
Speaker 1: fearmongering about radio death rays. A history episode about the
Speaker 1: promises in popular notions surrounding radio could be fun and
Speaker 1: uh so we wanted to talk about the dawn of
Speaker 1: broadcast radio. Before we get into that, I should mentioned
Speaker 1: that way back in April two thousand eleven, Chris Palette
Speaker 1: and I sat down and recorded an episode titled Who
Speaker 1: Invented the Radio, which was mostly about the inventors who
Speaker 1: discovered radio waves and found ways to generate radio waves,
Speaker 1: obviously including the two big names Tesla and Marconi. Anyone
Speaker 1: who knows anything about the patent wars knows about there
Speaker 1: was a big kerfuffle between the two of those guys.
Speaker 1: Uh 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, recorded it all over. Because the ghost
Speaker 1: of Marconi was haunting you. There was that, and we
Speaker 1: had in the old studio, we had a portrait of
Speaker 1: Nicola Tesla on the wall, and 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 made no sense as we after talking it through
Speaker 1: once we went back rerecorded, so that first episode that
Speaker 1: we recorded it's lost to time. We don't have it anymore.
Speaker 1: I wish I could, at least hope will be more
Speaker 1: organized today. But I'll tell you just from going through
Speaker 1: all this research that this is such a vast amount
Speaker 1: of information for this period of time, and I feel
Speaker 1: like and it's and you can you can get a
Speaker 1: PhD in radio communication in the history of radio and
Speaker 1: understanding these things, and it's yeah, we will probably only
Speaker 1: scratch the surface today. I imagine, Yeah, they're there. And
Speaker 1: there's so many crazy dramatic stories of betrayal, of of
Speaker 1: con men, of big ball early media. It's like this
Speaker 1: pirate industry of people just messing with each other. 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.
Speaker 1: So first thing I gotta mentioned 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 essentially invented am radio. That would be uh, the
Speaker 1: amplitude modulated radio. And so from your notes here your notes,
Speaker 1: it says he worked with Edison for Edison. He actually
Speaker 1: he actually worked for both Westinghouse and Edison at different
Speaker 1: it's in his career. So yeah, he just like Tesla.
Speaker 1: Tesla also worked for both yea, although you know again
Speaker 1: 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 Feestenden Marconi uh
Speaker 1: model of transmissions as like the baseline for it. And
Speaker 1: it's all about like ending 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
Speaker 1: media or it's uh like like in the early days
Speaker 1: of radio. That the way they literally thought of it
Speaker 1: was two ships that were thousands of yards away from
Speaker 1: one another trying to contact each other using this old
Speaker 1: radio technology, and they would have so much static they
Speaker 1: would have to constantly give each other feedback and feed
Speaker 1: forward to make sure the message was understood. It makes
Speaker 1: perfect sense, I mean, especially when you see the brilliance
Speaker 1: of Fessenden. He thought, well, they I can. I can
Speaker 1: create these sparks of electricity, create these electromagnetic 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 is genius, It's absolutely genius. Uh.
Speaker 1: So this was a M radio. This was the idea
Speaker 1: that 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 at 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 phenomenon 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 revolutionary.
Speaker 1: I mean he tested it successfully. He did a short
Speaker 1: distance test between two towers and it worked fine. And
Speaker 1: then in n six he had his infamous Christmas concert
Speaker 1: for sailors. See this is yeah, this is where I
Speaker 1: think that that boat to boat the idea comes from, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: Because it turns out the disaster of the Titanic would
Speaker 1: end up really making this uh clear that there needed
Speaker 1: to be some radio communication for ships at sea. But
Speaker 1: what he wanted to do was he wanted to send
Speaker 1: out a message to essentially telegraph operators aboard ships. That
Speaker 1: was his plan. So he proceeded the concert with an
Speaker 1: actual telegraph message that essentially translates into hey, pay attention.
Speaker 1: And then once he did that, he started knew it
Speaker 1: was coming though, right they were not most of them.
Speaker 1: They just knew to pay attention because they got the message.
Speaker 1: Yeah there, they were like, well, here's the message, whatever
Speaker 1: is going to happen, We need to really focus. And
Speaker 1: so what they were expecting to hear were just the
Speaker 1: noises they would hear for the dot, some dashes of
Speaker 1: Morse code. So then he he gives a short speech.
Speaker 1: He plays a violin, uh and plays a Holy Night.
Speaker 1: There were supposed to be other people who talked into
Speaker 1: the microphone too, but most of them chickened out because
Speaker 1: they got like terrible stage fright because they realized all
Speaker 1: of a sudden that they were speaking to like hundreds
Speaker 1: of people, right right, yeah. Yeah, And so anyway, it
Speaker 1: ended up being a big hit. Sailors up and down
Speaker 1: the Atlantic coast were we're able to hear him and
Speaker 1: reported back to it, so it was known to be
Speaker 1: a success. And that's how AM radio got started. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: I like that. Yeah, so that's a nice start to
Speaker 1: it ends up being industry. Yeah. So so he he
Speaker 1: demonstrates this capability, and immediately other physicists and engineers start
Speaker 1: to experiment with it because some of them had been
Speaker 1: independently working on this same kind of idea. Fessenden ended
Speaker 1: up being the first to make it really work in
Speaker 1: a public demonstration. So you had a lot of other
Speaker 1: people who were who either adopted his ideas or continued
Speaker 1: to develop their own ideas, and a lot of amateurs
Speaker 1: were starting to experiment with radio transmissions, including transmitting out
Speaker 1: to telegraph operators who often were very much entertained by
Speaker 1: this because it was different from just listening to clicks
Speaker 1: on the headphones. This is the part that's the most
Speaker 1: fascinating about the evolution of radio to me is that
Speaker 1: even though the technology is ultimately made for mass communication,
Speaker 1: people originally started using it as one to one communication
Speaker 1: across long distances, replacing a telegraph. And then uh, these
Speaker 1: amateur operators, these like d I y uh people in
Speaker 1: their in their garage, is just you know, tinkering around
Speaker 1: with the technology that they could get a hold of.
Speaker 1: We're able to turn it into this mass communication then yeah.
Speaker 1: And it's funny because when you look at the early ones,
Speaker 1: obviously they were using very low wattage transmitters, so that
Speaker 1: meant that they couldn't transmit very far, most of them.
Speaker 1: I mean, if you were a big name, you might
Speaker 1: be able to work with someone like General Electric to
Speaker 1: get a really big transmitter and be able to send
Speaker 1: a signal far away. Because the signals reach is largely
Speaker 1: dependent upon the power of the transmitter. Right, the further
Speaker 1: way you get, the weaker the signal is, and the
Speaker 1: less you'll be likely you are able to pick it
Speaker 1: up with a receiver. So in the early days, people
Speaker 1: were happy to experiment with this, and there was really
Speaker 1: no regulation because there there hadn't been a demonstrable need
Speaker 1: to regulate yet, because no one had the power to
Speaker 1: interfere that much with anything that was important. We have
Speaker 1: more to say about the golden age of radio after
Speaker 1: these brief messages, Festal would invent a high frequency electric
Speaker 1: generator to create radio waves in the Hurts frequency, which
Speaker 1: was really important. And in 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 So college.
Speaker 1: I've never it's it's in a town called bell Watt actually,
Speaker 1: but set up a radio telegraph assembly which became the
Speaker 1: foundation for the college is radio station, though voice in
Speaker 1: music transmission wouldn't be part of it until the nineteen twenties.
Speaker 1: But this this became like again, it was someone a
Speaker 1: physics professor, in this case, a physics professor who was
Speaker 1: already interested in radio and had been working on it independently,
Speaker 1: setting up a thing that would eventually evolve into an
Speaker 1: early early radio station. Yeah, and that's kind of another
Speaker 1: interesting aspect of this too, is that these early amateur
Speaker 1: radio stations weren't just uh d I y kind of
Speaker 1: hobbyists doing it on their own. A lot of it
Speaker 1: was educational institutions, not just colleges, but also high schools
Speaker 1: that were just you know, trying to use it for
Speaker 1: educational purposes. Yeah, and that it's interesting later on what
Speaker 1: happens when amateur radio sort of gets more regulated. It
Speaker 1: really reminds me of the early days of personal computers
Speaker 1: and how how it first started off as a hobbyist thing,
Speaker 1: and then you know, you had bleeding edge adopters who
Speaker 1: might not build a computer, but they're curious about how
Speaker 1: they might use it. And then later you had people
Speaker 1: who were uh, you know more it became more and
Speaker 1: more mainstream as time went on. So we've seen other
Speaker 1: emerging technologies that have followed a similar pathway to radio.
Speaker 1: Uh not always with the dramatics. I mean, there were
Speaker 1: some deffinite dramatics and early personal computers too. But we
Speaker 1: got some crazy stories to tell. But first we have
Speaker 1: another big name in radio that we have to mention. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so in nine and ten, this guy lead to Forest
Speaker 1: really podcasted like the first sort of broad meant for
Speaker 1: mass communication. Radio broadcast uh, specifically of a guy named
Speaker 1: Enrico Caruso singing. I believe it was opera singing from
Speaker 1: what I understood, um, and that he he ushered in
Speaker 1: this area era of radio communications. And unfortunately, though even
Speaker 1: though he was broadcasting, probably on Fessenden's news system, for
Speaker 1: the most part it was static and radio interference, so
Speaker 1: the audience barely heard anything. But you know, for a
Speaker 1: decade afterwards, radio fans were both using uh, these amateur
Speaker 1: radio units to broadcast and receive. Yeah, it wasn't just
Speaker 1: them receiving. Yeah, it wasn't like they were a passive audience.
Speaker 1: They were creating as well. And again, depending upon the
Speaker 1: power of their radio transmitters, it maybe that they were
Speaker 1: only transmitting to people in their general neighborhood or even
Speaker 1: small time, but you wouldn't be able to necessarily pick
Speaker 1: up that signal for much. Further, also depends on the
Speaker 1: quality of the receiver as well. Like you could build
Speaker 1: a very simple a radio receiver that doesn't even require
Speaker 1: a battery and as a crystal, a very long antenna
Speaker 1: and some headphones, and uh, you can pick up radio
Speaker 1: signals if you're close enough to a transmitter. Uh. And
Speaker 1: in fact, that's a fun project to do. You can
Speaker 1: look up how to do that online. So also in
Speaker 1: nineteen ten, the same time Leada Forrest was was experimenting
Speaker 1: with us, you had a guy named Charles David Harold
Speaker 1: who opened a school that he called the Herald College
Speaker 1: of Engineering and Wireless, and he was experimenting with wireless
Speaker 1: voice transmissions as early as nineteen o nine and providing
Speaker 1: a thrill to telegraph operators who suddenly were able to
Speaker 1: hear voices over the telegraph lines. Now this is out
Speaker 1: in California, so he's surprising people out there who normally
Speaker 1: they weren't expecting it at all, but they loved it
Speaker 1: because you would imagine this job is a little probably
Speaker 1: very tedious. Yeah. So he actually started setting up a
Speaker 1: regular broadcast time, like the first radio programming in a way.
Speaker 1: And by nineteen ten he had created this, uh, this
Speaker 1: program that would include reading out news to telegraph operators.
Speaker 1: And his wife Sybil got involved and she started playing
Speaker 1: records that the description I said was the kind of
Speaker 1: records young people like to listen to back in Yeah,
Speaker 1: so playing records, So playing music for these telegraph operators
Speaker 1: and holding the first radio contests, and here's all the
Speaker 1: radio contest work. Back then. She would instruct people listening
Speaker 1: to come by their house sign a guest book with
Speaker 1: their name and where they were from, and then they
Speaker 1: might win a little prize Number seven. No, wasn't calling
Speaker 1: number seven. Uh. And here's the coolest part. I think
Speaker 1: this little amateur station eventually over time in ninety one
Speaker 1: would become k q W, and in nineteen it would
Speaker 1: evolve into k CBS, then the CBS. Yeah. I thought
Speaker 1: that was really interesting, especially like we'll talk later about,
Speaker 1: CBS is sort of importance in the big game of
Speaker 1: radio development. Yeah. So nineteen ten is also when the
Speaker 1: US passed the Wireless Ship Act, which required all ships
Speaker 1: of the US traveling more than two miles off the
Speaker 1: coast and carrying more than fifty passengers to have a
Speaker 1: wireless radio equipment on board with a with an operator,
Speaker 1: and the transmission range had to be at least a
Speaker 1: hundred miles. And that meant that it created a lot
Speaker 1: more radio transmissions broadcast without any regulation. This is where
Speaker 1: the United States government starts to say, this is going
Speaker 1: to become a problem because now we we already have
Speaker 1: a lot of radio traffic going on just through amateurs
Speaker 1: as well as ship to land land to ship communication. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's starting to get a little crowded and we're starting
Speaker 1: to get interference. We need to figure out how to
Speaker 1: handle this. So in nineteen twelve, they passed the Radio
Speaker 1: Act of nineteen twelve, which is good because if they
Speaker 1: had passed the Radio Act of nineteen twelve and like
Speaker 1: nineteen eleven, every one would have been confused. Uh, and
Speaker 1: marked the first time the US government required radio stations
Speaker 1: to be licensed. So the licensing was really just to
Speaker 1: create order in chaos, and it was really kind of like,
Speaker 1: you know, we want to make sure that we're keeping
Speaker 1: certain frequencies free so that we can have these these
Speaker 1: very important transmissions go uninterrupted because am transmissions, if you
Speaker 1: transmit two things on the same frequency, you get lots
Speaker 1: of interference and just different from there was a military
Speaker 1: component to this as well, because World War One was
Speaker 1: on the horizon, was happening, and they the government banned
Speaker 1: amateur radio broadcasting during the war for you know, the
Speaker 1: reason that they were trying to transmit signals to one
Speaker 1: another of important nature. If somebody was talking in their
Speaker 1: garage about, uh, you know, their favorite records something or you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the ones that the young people listened to, they would
Speaker 1: overlap and they didn't get these important messages, so they
Speaker 1: shut it all down. And also just radio detection to
Speaker 1: the the remote possibility that they might detect radio transmissions
Speaker 1: from either allies or enemies. It would mean that yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is this is before the whole Bletchley Park on
Speaker 1: Enigma thing, which is I've talked about that in the
Speaker 1: previous episode of tech Stuff. But fascinating story fourteen Edwin Armstrong,
Speaker 1: who's going to be important throughout this conversation, and his
Speaker 1: story is amazing and tragic. Uh. He patents a radio
Speaker 1: receiver circuit that increases the selectivity which allows you to
Speaker 1: tune into specific frequencies and the sensitivity of radio receivers.
Speaker 1: That means it was able to pick up weaker radio
Speaker 1: signals than previous receivers. So selectivity obviously very important. You
Speaker 1: want to be able to say, I'm looking at this
Speaker 1: particular band of frequencies and I don't want anything outside
Speaker 1: of that um and we would see that get better
Speaker 1: and better. In en he would invent the super heterodyne
Speaker 1: radio receiver or superhead. So this principle is actually really fascinating,
Speaker 1: and I gotta admit to you, Christian, I had to
Speaker 1: really sit down and read this a few times to
Speaker 1: kind of get what was going on. Yeah, because I
Speaker 1: mean this is radio, electromagnetic and radio broadcast. I have
Speaker 1: a basic understanding of it, but it does go well
Speaker 1: beyond what I studied in school. And it took a while,
Speaker 1: but now I think I've got it. Will explain it
Speaker 1: to me, because yeah, I'm more of the on the
Speaker 1: side of the like cultural examination of radio, whereas like
Speaker 1: the technology of it escapes me sometimes, So yeah, hit me.
Speaker 1: All right. Let's say, let's say I want to transmit
Speaker 1: a radio signal at a high frequency, so it's not
Speaker 1: going to interfere with anything else, but that processing high
Speaker 1: frequencies is a little tricky, so you might have a
Speaker 1: receiver that can process frequencies up to I'm just gonna
Speaker 1: take an arbitrary number, a hundred killer hurts. But I
Speaker 1: want to transmit at fifteen 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
Speaker 1: that uh, not just at the original frequency. I transmit
Speaker 1: at but the difference between that and the oscillating one.
Speaker 1: So another easy example, let's say they have an oscillating
Speaker 1: frequency at a thousand killer hurts. Yeah, okay, that would
Speaker 1: mean that if you used a receiver tuned to five
Speaker 1: killer hurts, killer hurts or two thousand five killer hurts,
Speaker 1: you would pick up that signal one could process it. Okay,
Speaker 1: So and I'm imagining that this is a process that's
Speaker 1: still used today. Yeah. This is the principle of transmitting
Speaker 1: and receiving with a radio so that your radio doesn't
Speaker 1: have to have as wide a spectrum. It's called an
Speaker 1: interminute frequency. And it took me a long time to
Speaker 1: figure out what was going on, is the oscillator was
Speaker 1: throwing me off. And then I realized, oh, the oscilators
Speaker 1: tuned to a different frequency, and that's what gives you
Speaker 1: the broader range that you can pick up. It's pretty fascinating.
Speaker 1: And again Armstrong was absolutely brilliant coming up with this. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then we move up to the nineteen twenties. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the twenties is when this educational stuff that I
Speaker 1: was talking about earlier, it really hits a boom. There
Speaker 1: was like more than two hundred educational organizations across the
Speaker 1: United States of America that 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 didn't really matter.
Speaker 1: The unfortunate thing is that thirteen years later, by three
Speaker 1: or more of these educational institutions had folded and and
Speaker 1: basically it was because of and this is going to
Speaker 1: be a huge theme of this episode, because of ad
Speaker 1: based programming and stronger stations, commercial stations that were able
Speaker 1: to overlapped their signal. Yeah, you essentially had not just
Speaker 1: the fact that the companies had more technological behind them,
Speaker 1: but 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 were talking earlier, there's these amateur radio stations,
Speaker 1: right and they here's the kind of content you might
Speaker 1: find on amateur radio stations. Maybe somebody's giving a sermon,
Speaker 1: or they're they're they're just reading out of their Bible,
Speaker 1: or they're talking about sports out of today's newspaper, updating
Speaker 1: their neighborhood on what happened in sports around the country
Speaker 1: that day. Maybe they're reading a poem, maybe they're giving
Speaker 1: a speech about something political at the time, perhaps the
Speaker 1: usage of radio, or like we were talking earlier, just
Speaker 1: playing records and at the time there was no you know,
Speaker 1: aacensing or copyright and effect for for how music was broadcasted.
Speaker 1: So they 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 the internet. 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. A lot of these these
Speaker 1: amateur radioists that they weren't getting paid for this. They
Speaker 1: had day jobs. In fact, Like one of the stories
Speaker 1: I read was about how there's this guy who ran
Speaker 1: a gas station, but he also had a radio station
Speaker 1: running out of his gas station, and so he'd be
Speaker 1: 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 just appear for five minutes, and they had come
Speaker 1: back and just pick up again. And that was just
Speaker 1: how it is. They didn't really worry about dead air
Speaker 1: or anything like that. Yeah. Um. And and at the
Speaker 1: same time, there's also this other, like broader, more important thing,
Speaker 1: which I think is why the government started to become
Speaker 1: more involved in it, which is that radio allowed the
Speaker 1: listeners to sample other cultures from far away states that
Speaker 1: and and and learn more about what this kind of
Speaker 1: idea of America as a nation meant. You know, even
Speaker 1: though they may have never visited Nebraska, they would be
Speaker 1: hearing what these amateur radioists in Nebraska were talking about.
Speaker 1: They were giving them sort of a peek into what
Speaker 1: the culture in those towns were like. It's really cool. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: absolutely yeah. And moving over to nineteen twenty, that's when
Speaker 1: we get the first commercial radio station launching. That's Kadi
Speaker 1: k A. Now, amateur radio stations, like Christian was saying,
Speaker 1: had already been around, and a guy named Henry P.
Speaker 1: Davis was inspired by an mature named Frank Conrad and
Speaker 1: saw the potential to actually make some money off this
Speaker 1: whole radio thing, and not just not just broadcast out
Speaker 1: for free, but to actually make it a commercial enterprise.
Speaker 1: So the radio station went live on November two, nineteen twenty,
Speaker 1: Henry P. Davis himself read out the results of the
Speaker 1: presidential elections on the air, and he would become heavily
Speaker 1: involved in broadcast radio, in fact becoming the first chairman
Speaker 1: of the National Broadcasting Company also known as NBC. So yeah, exactly, pacock. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Then the opening of thirty Rock in nine s kt
Speaker 1: k A was owned and operated by Westinghouse Electric and
Speaker 1: Manufacturing Company, and you might not be surprised to hear
Speaker 1: that Westinghouse used the radio station as a means of
Speaker 1: convincing people to go out and buy radios, because up
Speaker 1: to this point, again it was very much an amateur thing.
Speaker 1: People who were interested in the science would go out
Speaker 1: and get the equipment or build the equipment from from
Speaker 1: whatever they could, and that's how they participated. But now
Speaker 1: we're talking about actually making commercial radio sets for people
Speaker 1: to go out and buy. And this is also the
Speaker 1: beginning of things starting to get a little dodgy on
Speaker 1: the corporate side of things, because previously the patents for
Speaker 1: radios were all over the place. But what happened was
Speaker 1: the big companies G E, A, T and T. Weird,
Speaker 1: they're 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 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, basically 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,
Speaker 1: yeah yeah, um. 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 in 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 you got Universal Yeah, 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 as 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 we will conclude the
Speaker 1: story of the Golden Age of radio, if I can
Speaker 1: say such a grandiose thing, after we take this quick break.
Speaker 1: I love that you have this bit about a T
Speaker 1: and T and their their business strategy. This is one
Speaker 1: of the so apparently they like repeatedly, we're trying to
Speaker 1: charge people for commercial broadcasting over their sets, and they
Speaker 1: wanted to charge tolls in the same way that they
Speaker 1: were charging people for phone calls, which I think is
Speaker 1: amazing when you when you think about it, you know,
Speaker 1: there's just these these negotiations between the public and the
Speaker 1: large corporations. When these new media hit the scene, and
Speaker 1: and we're experiencing it right now, we'll probably always be
Speaker 1: experiencing it, I imagine. So, and it's interesting to you
Speaker 1: you make a delineation in our notes about how how
Speaker 1: the radio 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,
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 broadcasts. 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 on 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 mean
Speaker 1: miles way. That could be a giant corporations one. So
Speaker 1: there's 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 Yeah, and Christians later driving around his
Speaker 1: neighborhood with his his pirate radio station at the back
Speaker 1: of his car. Yeah, it's also similar. I did a
Speaker 1: 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 rates massive and UH
Speaker 1: in nineteen two there were twenty eight stations in operation,
Speaker 1: but 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, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, uh, he really wanted the Department of Commerce
Speaker 1: to control it first of all. But he also said,
Speaker 1: and this is another quote, he said, at first, the
Speaker 1: idea of making money off radio seemed profane. It is
Speaker 1: inconceivable that we should allow so great a possibility for service,
Speaker 1: for news, for entertainment, and for vital commercial purposes to
Speaker 1: be drowned in advertising chatter. This is Herbert Hoover who
Speaker 1: subsequently ends up using the government to support the businesses
Speaker 1: UH in terms of businesses over amateur radio stations, UH
Speaker 1: in terms of their licensing and his other analogy for
Speaker 1: radio was that he thought of it as transportation rather
Speaker 1: than the post office analogy that the Navy was using.
Speaker 1: He thought it was like, we should think of them
Speaker 1: as like waterways, and that the public should be be
Speaker 1: able to ride these waterways, but that the government would
Speaker 1: regulate how they did. So I like this this message
Speaker 1: year two of the We're one of the world's first
Speaker 1: radio ads aired on August two, uh for a housing
Speaker 1: development in Queens. Yeah. Yeah, this is the They were
Speaker 1: basically like um advocating what we would now call gentrification
Speaker 1: or like get This is a quote from that ad.
Speaker 1: Get away from the solid masses of brick, where children
Speaker 1: grow up starved for a run over a patch of grass,
Speaker 1: but my child's never seen what a tree looks like.
Speaker 1: The Queen this is the first thing that we we
Speaker 1: sold on radio. That's hilarious. Yeah. But so Hoover goes
Speaker 1: on in inwo He calls together the first American Radio Conference,
Speaker 1: which is he brings together representatives from and I put
Speaker 1: this in quote radio industry because it really wasn't an industry,
Speaker 1: you know, it's just kind of and and this included
Speaker 1: not only you know, the businesses that had interests in mind,
Speaker 1: but also the amateur radio operators, and no action was taken. Uh,
Speaker 1: there 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. Then by nineteen we've
Speaker 1: got fourteen hundred radio stations, not just what did I say? Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you So you've got these big commercial broadcasters that
Speaker 1: are forming networks like NBC and CBS, both of them
Speaker 1: they've formed in ven respectively. Uh, and it's very similar
Speaker 1: today to the same that NBC and CBS that we
Speaker 1: understand as being television. Right now, now I've got the
Speaker 1: 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 stay age. That's when doctor used it.
Speaker 1: In quotes. John R. Brinkley starts up a radio station
Speaker 1: called kf KB in Kansas. So let me tell you
Speaker 1: about doctor Brinkley. First of all, he wasn't a real doctor.
Speaker 1: He's like the original snake oil salesman. He he at
Speaker 1: least perfected it to an art form, right. He went
Speaker 1: to medical school. They never graduated, but he bought a
Speaker 1: diploma from a diploma mill for five hundred dollars not
Speaker 1: an insignificant amount of money. That's bad, uh, And it
Speaker 1: gave him the right to practice medicine in some states,
Speaker 1: including Kansas. He purchased diploma, not not an actual like
Speaker 1: proof that he had the training that would allow him
Speaker 1: to do this. So anyway, he starts practicing medicine. He
Speaker 1: had previously been involved in some scams and cons including
Speaker 1: things like selling tinted water as if it were an
Speaker 1: actual medicinal cure and injecting it into people. But I
Speaker 1: want to see a movie about this guy his life,
Speaker 1: and I want to see a movie. I want to
Speaker 1: see a movie about this guy. I want to see
Speaker 1: him cast. I want I want Simon Peg to play him.
Speaker 1: He's just like deviously injecting things into people and cutting
Speaker 1: open their necks. I think I think either Simon Peg
Speaker 1: or Neil Patrick Harris. That would be prilliant. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: would be good. It's like evil dookie houser. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: he had he had been hired as a house doctor
Speaker 1: for a meat packing company and he observed the rigorous
Speaker 1: mating habits of goats. Uh. Yeah, So let's slow down
Speaker 1: for a second, of people, This means that he watched
Speaker 1: goats have sex for a long time and enthusiastically the
Speaker 1: goats at least I don't know about him, but the
Speaker 1: goats were certainly enthusiastic. So he was talking to a
Speaker 1: male patient once about the fact that the male patient
Speaker 1: was having problems in the bedroom. He was having a
Speaker 1: failing libido rectile dysfunction. Perhaps the the actual nature of
Speaker 1: the problem was not what explained in all the sources
Speaker 1: I looked at, but had something to do with failing
Speaker 1: libido or or um, you know, virility. And so supposedly
Speaker 1: what Dr Brinkley did was jokingly suggest that perhaps they
Speaker 1: should transplant plant some goat quote unquote glands and gonads
Speaker 1: into the mail patient. And he said, let's do it.
Speaker 1: Let's fire us like the original body modification. Give me
Speaker 1: some give me some of them goat glands. So he
Speaker 1: does he actually did start performing this, and then he
Speaker 1: started to suggest, like he began to essentially advertise saying,
Speaker 1: 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 forward 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 advertise thing to Yeah, and
Speaker 1: he was. He was essentially throwing business to surgeons, into
Speaker 1: pharmacists and getting kickbacks every single time and making a
Speaker 1: mint off it. So he's in full operation and will
Speaker 1: end up, believe it or not, defining in part why
Speaker 1: radio has regulated the way it is. But we'll get
Speaker 1: to that. Yeah, I know he's important to the history
Speaker 1: of it UM. In the meantime, Hoover's continuing to negotiate
Speaker 1: with stations and the government on how it should be regulated.
Speaker 1: And you know, basically, as the Secretary of Commerce, his
Speaker 1: work is to let the stations work out amongst themselves
Speaker 1: which frequency is going to be used and when and
Speaker 1: how they overlap. You it it wasn't really you know, handing
Speaker 1: it out. He wouldn't occasionally make decisions. And what happened
Speaker 1: was in the federal court was like whoa, whoa, you
Speaker 1: don't have this power. And specifically, the Attorney General of
Speaker 1: the United States, who you know, was from the same
Speaker 1: administration that the Secretary of Commerce was, decided that Hoover
Speaker 1: didn't have this power, he could not grant permits at request,
Speaker 1: and that all of a sudden, these air waves turned
Speaker 1: into even more of this like wild wild West of
Speaker 1: broadcasting than they already were. Uh. And so obviously more
Speaker 1: regulation is even is necessary. And Coolidge is the president
Speaker 1: of the time. He favors the control by the Department
Speaker 1: of Commerce obviously because it's under his branch, and he
Speaker 1: 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 they didn't want to give him any political
Speaker 1: prestige for taking care of the radio problem. Interesting, and
Speaker 1: also this will probably seem familiar to people following them,
Speaker 1: that neutrality arguments where one of the big problems was
Speaker 1: the FCC had brought a race against Comcast for blocking
Speaker 1: bit torrent traffic, and then the response was, you don't
Speaker 1: have authority to tell Comcast what it can and can't
Speaker 1: do because Internet transmissions were a title one classification, not
Speaker 1: titled two. Uh. And if you want to know more
Speaker 1: about that, you can listen to the title to podcast
Speaker 1: I did and Common Carrier podcast I did from a
Speaker 1: while back to to learn more about it. But just
Speaker 1: suffice it to say that this is something that we've
Speaker 1: seen before and we'll likely see again. I just I
Speaker 1: think it's fascinating that, like the future of this major
Speaker 1: media uh, was decided by people who wanted to screw
Speaker 1: over a political candidate potentially running Yeah yeah, and sometimes
Speaker 1: just people who were wanting to screw over inventors. Uh.
Speaker 1: It's crazy. We'll talk more about those two in Congress
Speaker 1: creates the Federal Radio Commission and passes the Radio Act
Speaker 1: of nineteen twenty seven. Now, before that time, it was
Speaker 1: all the Department of Commerce, like Christian was saying, So
Speaker 1: the Commission's job was to get radio into shape, and
Speaker 1: they wanted to have a little more power than Department
Speaker 1: of Commerce, which could grant broadcast licenses, but couldn't deny
Speaker 1: a broadcast license. So if you requested it, if you
Speaker 1: did all the things you were supposed to do, you
Speaker 1: would get one. You couldn't be told no, So the
Speaker 1: Federal Radio Commission was supposed to be able to say
Speaker 1: no if it was warranted. Um, the question of how
Speaker 1: they determined how it was warranted was something of a problem.
Speaker 1: And uh. The Act also laid out rules for content.
Speaker 1: Programming could not have obscene, in decent or profane language,
Speaker 1: and the Commission could and did use content as a
Speaker 1: factor when deciding whether or not to renew a broadcast license.
Speaker 1: So if you were broadcasting and not paying a whole
Speaker 1: attention to those content rules, you wouldn't necessarily have your
Speaker 1: license revoked, but when you went back to get your
Speaker 1: license renewed, you might be denied. Right, And this makes
Speaker 1: sense in light of other arguments that were going on
Speaker 1: with media over the you know, the twenty years probably
Speaker 1: surrounding this, both with the cinema, and I would assume
Speaker 1: newspapers and comic books as well. Yeah, all looking at
Speaker 1: the government, the government trying to deem what was profane
Speaker 1: or wasn't, but also trying to leave it in the
Speaker 1: public's hands to decide. Yeah. There was also a real
Speaker 1: worry about how far can you rule on these things
Speaker 1: before it becomes censorship, So that, I mean, that's a
Speaker 1: real worry, right, because they didn't want to be accused
Speaker 1: of taking away somebody's right to free speech. 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 who were out of office, and especially because of
Speaker 1: the commercial radio interests, these guys who were lobbying their politicians. Uh,
Speaker 1: they wanted the 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 and station power for each of
Speaker 1: these five zones 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 to angle right, right, right,
Speaker 1: This is just in the operation part of the FARC,
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 gonna be good for anybody. It's not good for
Speaker 1: the transmitter, it's not good for the consumer who's trying
Speaker 1: to receive these. All of that made sense, but they
Speaker 1: were hampered so much. And also, I mean, there were
Speaker 1: a lot of shady political goings on along with corporate
Speaker 1: goings on at the same time. They were essentially trying
Speaker 1: to fulfill this mission of favoring big business over amateur radios.
Speaker 1: And they actually there's an actual FARC memo that says, quote,
Speaker 1: there is not room in the broadcast band for every
Speaker 1: school of thought, whether it's religious, political, social, social, or economic.
Speaker 1: Each can't have its own separate broadcasting station or a
Speaker 1: mouthpiece in the ether. Uh So they, you know, they
Speaker 1: were coming down pretty hard on these these amateur stations
Speaker 1: that were given providing you know, a pulpit essentially to
Speaker 1: anybody who had the means to to operate a broadcast
Speaker 1: 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 our c says,
Speaker 1: you know, this isn't this isn't a pulpit for your beliefs,
Speaker 1: and then the labor movement, which is very powerful at
Speaker 1: the time, says, wait a minute, we should have a
Speaker 1: clear channel that we can broadcast over these five zones
Speaker 1: so we can talk to people about labor interests. And
Speaker 1: then educators said, yeah, so should we uh, And so
Speaker 1: there's all this pressure from the public, and then subsequently
Speaker 1: Congress uses that and just keeps pushing on the f
Speaker 1: r C, saying you're really blowing it here. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: you've got a great bullet list here of the working
Speaker 1: 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 find ancial standing
Speaker 1: and efficient equipment. That's pretty vague, right, So it's up
Speaker 1: to this f r C, not f c C f
Speaker 1: r C commissioner at the time to determine what firm
Speaker 1: financial standing means and what efficient equipment means, especially as
Speaker 1: this equipment is evolving at a rapid pace. Um. And
Speaker 1: then you also had to obey the rules of the
Speaker 1: obscene of not broadcasting obscene content like we talked about earlier,
Speaker 1: and basically keeping it so that the dissemination of propaganda
Speaker 1: wasn't controlled by a single group, and that creeds were
Speaker 1: supposed to find that this is another quote that I loved,
Speaker 1: find their way into the market of ideas to be
Speaker 1: on the air. There was this idea that, um, there
Speaker 1: was a there would be a natural kind of uh
Speaker 1: process throughout the radio operators in the public that decide
Speaker 1: which political agendas should get to be broadcast on the
Speaker 1: radio or not, rather than just give everyone the opportunity
Speaker 1: to Yeah, and that would actually change too. There would
Speaker 1: 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 FRC didn't
Speaker 1: want to regulate advertising. Uh, not only because you know,
Speaker 1: the advertiser's interests were also their interests, but also because
Speaker 1: the commission chose to further the ends of the commercial
Speaker 1: broadcasters as part of what they called the public interest.
Speaker 1: So the FARC had this ability to claim that it
Speaker 1: didn't have powers of censorship and it couldn't be held
Speaker 1: responsible for questionable advertising such as cigarettes. You know, those
Speaker 1: like old corny cigarette ads that Judy hear on radio
Speaker 1: right now. If you listen, if you ever listen to
Speaker 1: old timey radio that has the commercial still in it,
Speaker 1: you will hear tons of these. So they didn't want
Speaker 1: to censor those. But at the same time, they would
Speaker 1: rule that public stations that were on the air could
Speaker 1: or could not be on the air because of their
Speaker 1: quality of character, which I think is kind of fascinating
Speaker 1: that you know it was. I would assume at the
Speaker 1: 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 chances. 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 nine article by this
Speaker 1: guy Herring out of the Harvard Review, and he proposed
Speaker 1: that there are two potential solutions, which I think are
Speaker 1: really interesting now that we have the the advantage of
Speaker 1: being 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 is whether it's
Speaker 1: uh they allocate a certain number of 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. I keep thinking that's amateur radios
Speaker 1: like the tumbler of the twenties, UM, and that there
Speaker 1: were so many fandoms expressed there. But ultimately other stations
Speaker 1: that 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 familiarly 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 was going to be broadcasting,
Speaker 1: How is the best way to convince the audience to
Speaker 1: to move from queens or to a cigarette. So looking
Speaker 1: back to our friend that we referred to a second ago,
Speaker 1: doctor John R. Brinkley. Uh, the FRC denied his broadcast
Speaker 1: renewal license in nineteen thirty. So Dr Brinkley comes up
Speaker 1: to the f r C s as a time for
Speaker 1: me to get a little stamp on here so I
Speaker 1: can continue my my good deeds of posting are broadcasting
Speaker 1: fraudulent medical practices and getting kickbacks, and they said nope.
Speaker 1: They actually cited the fraudulent claims and the content as
Speaker 1: the reason, saying it was against their content rules and
Speaker 1: that's why they were not renewing his license. So Brinley
Speaker 1: actually an instance or they did that. Yeah, and it
Speaker 1: was for the good. Yeah, yeah, great for the greater
Speaker 1: good in this case, although Brinkley, Brinkley said that what
Speaker 1: 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, eventually went up to a half million watts
Speaker 1: and so very powerful radio station compared to the other
Speaker 1: ones that were active at the time. He directs the
Speaker 1: antenna northward into the United States. It's amazing. So here's
Speaker 1: here's the deal. This is this is what's going to
Speaker 1: come back and haunt him. The way this worked was
Speaker 1: that he would, uh, he would actually his studio was
Speaker 1: in the United States, the the stuff he was broadcasting
Speaker 1: would go to Mexico to be transmitted by radio, and
Speaker 1: that's what would eventually come back to get him. But
Speaker 1: that would be another couple of years. He's unfascinating it
Speaker 1: by this guy, he's uh 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 United States
Speaker 1: 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, 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 within a fairly narrow band, because obviously you
Speaker 1: have to tune to a band of frequencies in order
Speaker 1: to pick things up. Then if it went outside of
Speaker 1: that you wouldn't get it anymore, which is why you
Speaker 1: can overlap stations instead of causing interference. Yeah, as long
Speaker 1: as you know, so you know if you're if you're
Speaker 1: going in an area where the power levels are almost
Speaker 1: the same for the frequencies, that's when you start getting
Speaker 1: that weird thing where you'll hear one station and then
Speaker 1: 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. Starnoff 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 of 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 c 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 there 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 N four Communications Act, huge, huge piece of legislation.
Speaker 1: This is the formation of the fcc UM. The one
Speaker 1: section of that Act is actually where two as the
Speaker 1: Brinkley Act. This is within the overall nine Communications Act.
Speaker 1: And of course the Brinkley Act is in fact named
Speaker 1: after our good buddy, doctor John R. Brinkley. So this
Speaker 1: was the US government's attempt to finally shut down Brinkley
Speaker 1: and his attempts to continue broadcasting. And they said that
Speaker 1: if you are transmitting information from the United States to
Speaker 1: another country to be broadcast, that is a type of
Speaker 1: international commerce and thus can be regulated. And they laid
Speaker 1: down rules and they said, you cannot do this, it
Speaker 1: is against the law. Now we have put that into law.
Speaker 1: It put a stop to his transmitting and he ended
Speaker 1: up 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 Center
Speaker 1: of the Ward exactly, it's before the United States was
Speaker 1: in in World War Two. But he started with the
Speaker 1: Nazis did not go over well. Uh, he eventually would
Speaker 1: die of a heart attack in ninety Yeah, and insane
Speaker 1: with Dr Brinkley. 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: as nine nineties, we've had cases that fall under this
Speaker 1: part of the Act. For some reason, I'm thinking about
Speaker 1: d d O S attacks. It's like the their version
Speaker 1: of yeah, it's all about stepping around the regulations, right 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 gonna 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 you you can't use anything
Speaker 1: outside of that. Yeah, it's kind of it's kind of
Speaker 1: what Herrying was arguing back in the nineteen thirties that
Speaker 1: that there, but it's far more limited than that. I
Speaker 1: think what he was envisioning with that there there would
Speaker 1: be a spectrum for nonprofit radio um and, and he
Speaker 1: also argued that the f c C at the time
Speaker 1: had to decide whether they were going to support commercial
Speaker 1: broadcasters at the expense of nonprofit ones, and ultimately, as
Speaker 1: we know, they decided to do that. Um and even
Speaker 1: though they were hearings going on and reports were being
Speaker 1: pulled together, and the f CC was looking at all
Speaker 1: these things. You know, Ultimately, what we know of as
Speaker 1: the Golden Age of Radio saw the growth of these
Speaker 1: these uh multi corporate networks across the country. Right and
Speaker 1: by this time we're talking about World War two, radio
Speaker 1: now was adopted by a huge percentage of the population.
Speaker 1: Nine and ten families owned a radio and listen to
Speaker 1: an average of three to four hours of programming a day.
Speaker 1: This is like what we picture of that like family
Speaker 1: gathered right time. My place is going in there, all
Speaker 1: gathered around the radio, little orphan nanny and the lone
Speaker 1: Ranger and green hornet and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: And that was the Tech Stuff classic episode the Golden
Speaker 1: Age of Radio, which originally published March eleventh, two. Hope
Speaker 1: you enjoyed it, and we will be back next week
Speaker 1: with another classic episode. Of course, we'll have all new
Speaker 1: episodes next week as well. If you have a suggestion
Speaker 1: for topics I should cover in a new episode, please
Speaker 1: reach out to me. The best way to do that
Speaker 1: is on Twitter. The handle for the show is text
Speaker 1: Stuff H s W. And I'll talk to you again
Speaker 1: really soon. Text Stuff is an I heart Radio production.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i
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