History History · 2 min
The first voices on the air
From telegraph clicks to a voice over the ocean to stations in every town: radio's first half-century, and the claims historians still argue over.
Draft. Not yet checked by an editor.
Radio began as a telegraph without wires: dots and dashes sent through the air. The leap to voices, then to programmes meant for anyone listening, took about two decades, and much of it is still argued over.
Timeline
- 1895
Guglielmo Marconi sends wireless telegraph signals over increasing distances in Italy, building on Heinrich Hertz's experiments with electromagnetic waves.
- 1901
Marconi reports receiving the Morse letter "S" across the Atlantic, from Cornwall to Newfoundland. The claim has been questioned since, but transatlantic wireless followed within a few years.
- 1906
Reginald Fessenden is said to have broadcast speech and music on Christmas Eve from Brant Rock, Massachusetts. The only accounts come years later, and historians disagree about whether it happened as told.
- 1920
KDKA in Pittsburgh broadcasts the US presidential election returns, often counted as the start of scheduled commercial broadcasting.
- 1922
The British Broadcasting Company begins transmitting; it becomes the public British Broadcasting Corporation in 1927.
- 1932
The BBC Empire Service starts on shortwave, the service later called the World Service.
- 1947
Researchers at Bell Labs demonstrate the transistor, which would make radios small, cheap and portable within a decade.
What the dates leave out
Most of these milestones are European and North American because that is where the patents and the newspapers were. Radio arrived across Africa, Asia and Latin America largely through colonial and then national broadcasters, and later through community and pirate stations. Those histories are less often written down, and Learn will tell them in their own pieces.
Check yourself
01What did early wireless send before it sent voices?
Telegraph signals: Morse code dots and dashes.
02Why is Fessenden's 1906 broadcast disputed?
The accounts of it were written years later and no contemporary record confirms it as described.