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UNITED STATES EARLY RADIO HISTORY
THOMAS H. WHITE | |
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Financing Radio Broadcasting (1898-1927)
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Soon after Marconi's groundbreaking demonstrations, there was speculation about transmitting radio signals to paying customers. However, there was no practical way to limit broadcasts to specific receivers, so for a couple decades broadcasting activities were largely limited to experiments, plus a limited number of public service transmissions by government stations. During the 1922 "broadcasting boom", most programming was commercial-free, and entertainers, caught up in the excitement of this revolutionary new invention, performed for free. Meanwhile, a few people wondered how to pay for all this. In early 1922, the American Telephone & Telegraph Company began promoting the controversial idea of using advertising to finance programming. Initially AT&T claimed that its patent rights gave it a monopoly over U.S. radio advertising, but a 1923 industry settlement paved the way for other stations to begin to sell time. And eventually advertising-supported private stations became the standard for U.S. broadcasting stations. EARLY IDEAS AND APPROACHES Radio broadcasts -- simultaneous transmission to multiple locations -- are such an obvious development that it really doesn't make sense to try to identify any one person or station as the originator of the idea. Wire-based systems, including telegraph "tickers" used for transmitting stock market reports, and telephone news and entertainment services, showed the possibilities for instantaneously distributing information and audio programming. The next question was whether the same thing could be done on a wider scale, without the connecting wires. The ticker and telephone systems were financed by subscriber fees, and the Budapest Telefon Hirmondó, which began operation in 1893, received money for reading short commercials, and also charged for such things as instruction books for its language lessons. However, the wire systems were expensive to build and operate, and had limited transmission ranges and relatively small service areas. Even the simpler tickers were established only in larger cities, while the more elaborate telephone-based entertainment systems operated in an even smaller number of localities in Europe. Some early demonstrations of short-range wireless-induction systems, which were developed prior to radio, included speculation about their use for broadcasting purposes. A review of Nathan Stubblefield's induction wireless-telephone, Telephoning Without Wires from Trumbull White's 1902 Our Wonderful Progress, quoted the inventor as saying that, although "I have as yet devised no method whereby it can be used with privacy", despite this limitation someday his system might be used "by anyone having a receiving instument... for the general transmission of news of every description". An article in the March 9, 1902, The Atlanta Constitution, Kentucky Inventor Solves Problem of Wireless Telephony, reprinted from The Sunny South magazine, reported on a New Year's transmission of music and spoken words to seven receivers located throughout Murray, Kentucky, with hopes for improvements so that someday "A single message can be sent from a central station to all parts of the United States." Waldos Fawcett's Latest Advance in Wireless Telephony, from the May 24, 1902 Scientific American, also reviewed Stubblefield's work. However, despite high hopes, induction transmissions never got much beyond the experimental stage. The possibility of using radio signals for broadcasting was discussed soon after Marconi's successful tests, although there was a question whether there was any way to finance the operations. In the October 14, 1898 The Electrician (London), an overview of Wireless Telegraphy noted that "there are rare cases where, as Dr. Lodge once expressed it, it might be advantageous to 'shout' the message, spreading it broadcast to receivers in all directions". But an earlier review of Oliver Lodge's presentation, Hertzian Telegraphy at the Physical Society, from the January 28, 1898 issue of the same weekly, had been dubious about the economics, stating "As to the practical applications, there were occasions when one wanted to 'shout to the world'--as in distributing political speeches to the Press--and for such a purpose the Hertz-wave and the coherer might be of service. But did not Prof. Lodge forget that no one wants to pay for shouting to the world on a system by which it would be impossible to prevent non-subscribers from benefiting gratuitously?" In an interview with Charles H. Garrett which appeared in the December 2, 1899 Success magazine, Marconi and Wireless, the inventor thought that restricting transmissions to a single frequency would hide broadcasts from persons who hadn't paid to receive them, so that "a news agency may flash news to its subscribers within one hundred miles in all directions, and none but its subscribers can receive it, because others are not tuned to that particular transmitter". However, this was not a feasible idea, as Marconi had vastly underestimated how easy it was to intercept transmissions, no matter what frequency was used. One area where a form of subscription broadcasting did produce revenue, especially for the Marconi companies, was in overnight news transmissions sent out by powerful shore stations to trans-oceanic passenger ships -- subscribing ship lines were allowed to incorporate these Press reports in the onboard newspapers sold to passengers. The Marconi company began this service in 1904, and although there was no way to keep others, including onshore amateurs, from hearing these news summaries without paying, these non-subscribers were limited to technically skilled persons who were willing to stay up late and knew how to read Morse Code, so there was little loss of revenue. GOVERNMENT PUBLIC SERVICE BOADCASTING And some "gratuitous" broadcasting was in fact introduced by numerous governments beginning in the first decade of the 1900s, for distributing public service information, such as time signals, weather and market reports, and shipping warnings. The time services were particularly popular -- H. E. Duncan, in an address to the Annual Convention of the Indiana Retail Jewelers' Association, reprinted in Wireless Time for Jewelers from the July, 1912 The American Jeweler, noted that "we are on the eve of a new condition", where anyone could take advantage "of obtaining the 'ticks' of the Naval Observatory transmitting clock", and provided basic information on how to "grab the time signals as they go by as wireless waves" for free. Transmission of Time Signals/Weather Reports by Naval Radio Stations, from the July 1, 1915 edition of the Commerce Department's Radio Stations of the United States, reviewed daily transmissions by numerous U.S. Navy stations, while 250 Amateurs Take Reports in Iowa from the September, 1916 The Electrical Experimenter reported the daily weather and news reports broadcast by Iowa State College's station, 9YI. However, until the early 1920s almost all of these transmissions were in Morse code, which greatly limited the number of people who could make use of the services. AUDIO BROADCASTING EXPERIMENTS Although it was clear that full-audio transmissions had the potential to greatly expand radio audiences, it required a couple decades of development before reliable, cost-effective audio transmitters would be perfected. The first audio broadcast using radio signals is generally believed to be Reginald Fessenden's experimental transmission on the evening of December 24, 1906 (Christmas Eve), using his new alternator-transmitter located at Brant Rock, Massachusetts, as reported by Helen Fessenden in the first broadcast section of Builder of Tomorrows. There continued to be speculation that entertainment transmissions might be financed by somehow limiting their reception to paying subscribers. In the June, 1907 issue of The American Monthly Review of Reviews, Herbert T. Wade's Wireless Telephony by the De Forest System noted that "The great and universal appreciation of music reproduced by graphophone, telharmonium, or other device has suggested to Dr. De Forest that radio-telephony has also a field in the distribution of music from a central station, such as an opera house. By installing a wireless telephone transmission station on the roof, the music of singers and orchestra could be supplied to all subscribers who would have aerial wires on or near their homes. The transmission stations for such music would be tuned for an entirely different wave length from that used for any other form of wave telegraph or telephone transmission, and the inventor believes that by using four different forms of wave as many classes of music can be sent out as desired by the different subscribers." R. Burt's The Wireless Telephone from the November, 1908 issue of a United Wireless publication, The Aerogram, suggested that someday "The wireless message sent from one central station, in a special tone or to be more exact having a special electrical 'resistance,' may be received in every home, within the range of station, by every subscriber having a receiver corresponding to the electrical resistance of the sending station. By this means it will be possible to send news, stock quotations, lectures, monologues, music, merchants bargain announcements, etc., etc., broadcast for whomsoever may subscribe for that service." However, the lack of a means to restrict and charge for reception wasn't seen as an obstacle by everyone -- a letter from M. Freimark, Simplified Wireless Telephony, published in the April 13, 1911 Electrical World, suggested that perhaps the lack of privacy in transmitting radio signals could be an advantage because "anybody equipped with a receiver can pick up the message" that was "accessible to everybody, rich or poor", and "A city equipped with such a station could, for example, send out orders to the whole police force in an instant, publish election or ball-game returns, give free concerts to the whole population and accomplish a good many other things which would tend to better the social life of its citizens." Over the next decade, numerous experimenters would make test broadcasts, some on regular schedules. However, initially most employed alternator or, more commonly, arc-transmitters, which never quite achieved the practicality needed for setting up a regular service, and there continued to be no way to limit reception to paying customers. In was only in the mid-1910s that the engineering question of how to effectively transmit, and receive, full-audio radio signals would be answered the same way worldwide: vacuum-tube transmitters and receivers. But the second question -- how to finance radio broadcasting -- would have multiple answers, which varied greatly by country. Assorted examples of radio being used to generate revenue date back to some of the earliest experiments. The January 28, 1905 issue of Electrical Review reported that "Two English inventors have made an adaption of wireless telegraphy for entertaining patrons. Music boxes placed in different parts of the room are caused to play on the placing of a coin in a receptacle at a common centre." With the development of audio transmissions, just the idea of hearing "voices sent through the air" was a novelty, and some enterprising individuals made money by offering people the chance to personally witness this scientific marvel. In the March, 1938 issue of Radio-Craft, William Dubilier's entry in Reminisciences of Old-Timers remembered a Seattle amusement park owner, who in 1909 charged persons 10 cents to listen to test transmissions from an experimental station operated by Dubilier. Eleven years later, on the Asbury Park, New Jersey boardwalk, Harold Warren modified a roller chair to add a radio receiver, so riders could listen to experimental transmissions, as reviewed in Wireless Music and News for the Roller Chair Passenger, from the August 7, 1920 Scientific American. When regularly scheduled audio transmissions started to be established, one obvious potential revenue source was the sale or barter of airtime for commercial messages. Most pre-World War One broadcasts featured phonograph records, and in many cases stations obtained records by bartering with a local record store, which provided the latest releases in return for promoting the store during the program. This practice was independently adopted by numerous stations, going back to at least 1912, when a weekly broadcast by "Doc" Charles Herrold's station in San Jose, California featured records provided by the Wiley B. Allen Company. One particularly ambitious example of this barter relationship was written up in Advertising by Radio, from the October, 1921 Radio News, as a Portland, Oregon station operated nightly by Charles L. Austin joined forces with the local Remick Song Shop. Another innovative application appeared in a December, 1921 Radio News report about a Canadian amateur selling radio equipment, who ran an advertisement in the September 20, 1921 Toronto Globe announcing that local amateurs could use their transmitters to Call "9BA" for Anything You Want for Your Wireless Apparatus. This same issue carried an article by Victor Rawlings, Radio in Department Stores which reviewed how the Hamburger's Department Store in Los Angeles, California was using its experimental station, 6XAK, to promote both the store and radio equipment sales. In the June 15, 1921 issue of the Atlanta Constitution, First Ad Over Radio-Phone Received by Constitution enthusiastically reported that for the first time wireless telephony had been employed to call a newspaper and purchase an advertisement, however, newspapers would shortly find that the radio would be far more often used as competition for advertising dollars than a way for people to purchase more newspaper ads. In 1916, broadcasts by the DeForest Radio Telephone & Telegraph Company's "Highbridge Station", 2XG in New York City, featured records provided by the Columbia Phonograph Company. This station briefly became one of the first to also include advertising messages of a more general nature, when it added announcements about products sold by the station owner. But, as noted in his autobiography -- Father of Radio (2XG advertising extract) -- Lee DeForest abruptly ended the practice when he became embarrassed by critical comments made by Western Electric engineers. Ironically, five years later Western Electric's parent company, AT&T, would become the main proponent of advertising-supported broadcasting in the United States. But DeForest continued to vigorously rail against advertising for the rest of his life -- for example, the September, 1930 issue of Radio News included Dr. DeForest designs the ANTI-AD, written by the inventor, which described a remote-control device for silencing radio commercials. This ability to eliminate advertising was, according to DeForest, "a new joy not unlike one would experience in shooting a noisy tom-cat on top of a back fence on a moonlight night and thus terminating the awful caterwaul". PROPOSED FINANCING ALTERNATIVES In Grand Opera By Wireless from the September, 1919 issue of Radio Amateur News -- written before the introduction of organized radio broadcasting -- Hugo Gernsback reviewed the possibilities for financing broadcasts originating from opera houses. Noting the difficulty of getting radio listeners to pay for the privilege of receiving the transmissions, he declared "the only practical solution" was to request voluntarily payment for broadcasts ahead of time, and, given a ten percent participation, there would be enough revenue to support the project. Gernsback also suggested that an additional source of revenue would be to offer filmed operas -- movies were still silent at this time -- shown at scattered movie theaters and synchronized with a live radio transmission of the opera. But despite Gernback's "confident" assertion that "this scheme will be in use thruout the country very shortly", it was in fact completely unworkable. Most of the broadcasting stations that sprang up during the boom of 1922 did not sell airtime, and their financial support depended entirely on the generosity of their owners, who saw the stations mainly as promotional vehicles. But Austin C. Lescarboura warned in the With an Eye to the Future section of his book Radio for Everybody that, because of the costs involved, "this gratuitous service cannot continue indefinitely" and advertising was inevitable. In the debut appearance of his On the Crest of the Radio Wave column, in the June, 1922 Popular Science Monthly, Jack Binns also reviewed the looming economic problems, noting that the significant expense of running a radio station meant that "free broadcasting services obviously cannot go on forever". Binns' proposed solution was for stations to broadcast scrambled signals, which could only be unscrambled by special coin-operated receivers. Although this particular approach would not be tried for radio at this time, similar setups would eventually be adopted in later decades for such thing as Subscription TV, premium channels on cable TV, and satellite TV and radio. Binns' article asked "Will we have Nickel-in-the-Slot radio receiving sets?", and Hugo Gernsback, in the The Slot-Machine Radio from the September, 1922, Science and Invention, answered -- incorrectly -- in the affirmative, declaring that "We shall shortly see this Coin-in-the-Slot radio receiver installed in hotels, railroad stations, and other public places". The September, 1922 Popular Radio reviewed A Scheme for Paying Artists for Broadcasting which was being promoted by the National Co-Operative Radio Society -- the idea was to access fees from its members to finance broadcasts from a network of high-powered stations, but the plan did not get very far. In How the Radio Corporation is Using Advertising to Stabilize a New Industry, from the August 31, 1922 Printers' Ink, Waldemar Kaempffert stated that because "action of some kind was needed to stabilize the market" for "the few stations that are really necessary", and because "to build solidly for the future... was a task that could be performed only by an organization which believed in radio, and which had the resources to advertise nationally and to act nationally", it had been decided that "the Radio Corporation of America intends to guide the industry into the channels that it should follow for its own good and for the good of the public". As to the question of financing radio broadcasting, the newly formed Radio Apparatus Section of the Associated Manufacturers of Electrical Supplies had formed a corps of "responsible manufacturers" that was "considering a plan of levying on themselves a tax proportionate to the volume of their radio sales and to apply the funds thus raised to the maintenance of as many stations as may be required to broadcast". However, this overall plan was viewed with suspicion, for it appeared to call for a small number of manufacturers, dominated by RCA, controlling a reduced number of stations, also dominated by RCA, which raised the prospect of an RCA monopoly in both programming and manufacturing. RCA's industry financing idea proved to be both unpopular and impractical, and Kaempffert's subsequent review of Who Will Pay For Broadcasting?, in the December, 1922 Popular Radio, added AT&T's idea of selling airtime over networks of stations, and the possibility, in urban areas, of charging subscription fees for personal reception of "wired-wireless" transmissions. COMMERCIAL SPONSORSHIP In February, 1922, AT&T announced its plan to establish a national radio network and sell airtime -- which it called "toll broadcasting" -- for programs supported by advertising. At this time AT&T believed, based on patent rights it claimed under a series of cross-licencing agreements made with various companies including General Electric and Westinghouse, that it was the only company in the U.S. allowed to operate broadcasting stations, with the exception of a few permitted to other companies under the cross-licencing agreements, plus a small number of stations which had purchased transmitters from its Western Electric subsidiary. The idea of radio stations broadcasting commercial messages was, however, very controversial. In the summer of 1922, there were already concerns about stations including commercial messages, as Radio: Problem Created by Advertising, from the August 13, 1922 New York Times, complained that "Many a concert or lecture has been spoiled by a station broadcasting advertising information such as the price of eggs or the bargains at some store." In the July, 1922 issue of The Radio Dealer, a letter from AT&T Publicity Department employee J. H. Ellsworth gave AT&T's side of the debate in Explains Broadcasting of Advertising Programming, stating that "the fear which is sometimes expressed that advertising will destroy broadcasting is seen to be without foundation". But another Publicity Department employee, Westinghouse's J. C. McQuiston, was more skeptical, and in his article appearing in the August, 1922 Radio News, Advertising by Radio. Can It and Should It Be Done?, a caption editorialized that "Advertising by radio cannot be done; it would ruin the radio business, for nobody would stand for it". And a letter from Hugo Gernsback -- now sixteen years removed from the days when he had introduced Telimco Wireless Outfits -- proclaimed that "If the future of radio rests upon a foundation of advertising, it would be better that broadcasting did not exist at all", according to Radio and Advertising, printed in the May 6, 1923 New York Times. In March and April, 1922, Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover sponsored a national Conference on Radio Telephony, which in part addressed the question of radio advertising. During the meeting Hoover warned that "It is inconceivable that we should allow so great a possibility for service to be drowned in advertising chatter", and the conference recommendations for advertising standards would have restricted it to near non-existence. The final report called for "toll broadcasting" to be the least important of four categories of stations, with limited transmitting ranges, and their development kept under "close observation". Moreover, commercial messages were to be "indirect" only, and "limited to a statement of the call letters of the station and of the name of the firm responsible for the matter broadcasted". The conference report, however, was never adopted as official policy, and a year later, the report of the second national conference did not include any restrictions -- or even references -- to toll broadcasting. However, the industry continued to cast a wary eye on developments, and at the third conference, in 1924, Hoover famously warned that "if the speech by the President is to be used as the meat in the sandwich of two patent medicine advertisements there will be no radio left". However, he added that "The listeners will decide in any event. Nor do I believe there is any practical method of payment from the listeners." Meanwhile, in spite of initial optimism, AT&T found it very difficult at first to convince potential customers to purchase radio airtime. AT&T began its broadcasting operations in New York City, which was perhaps the most difficult place in the country to try to make sales, because there were plenty of competing stations which were more than willing to carry the same programs for free. AT&T began broadcasts from its new station, WBAY, on July 25, 1922, but because of technical problems, in mid-August the broadcasts were transferred to WEAF, a station operated by AT&T's Western Electric subsidiary. Up to this point they hadn't sold any airtime; AT&T's first sponsored program over WEAF -- 15 minutes for a talk promoting a Queensboro Corporation apartment complex -- finally aired August 28, 1922. The text of this debut offering, Hawthorne Court Advertisement, comes from Gleason Archer's History of Radio to 1926. Although the Hawthorne Court talk has often been called "the first-ever radio commercial", there actually is evidence that other stations had previously sold airtime to commercial buyers. In Jersey City, New Jersey, Frank V. Bremer reportedly leased his amateur station, 2IA, to the Jersey Review in May, 1920, charging $35 for twice-a-week broadcasts. This station was also reportedly rented out, for $50, to a second newspaper, the Jersey Journal, for a one-hour New Year's broadcast on January 1, 1922. Also, in late 1921 the American Radio & Research Corp.'s (AMRAD) experimental station, 1XE in Medford Hillside, Massachusetts, reportedly received money for reading stories from the Little Folk's Magazine and Youth's Companion. On February 7, 1922, following the recently adopted regulation that broadcasting stations had to have Limited Commercial licences, AMRAD received a new licence with the callsign WGI. A short time later, AMRAD president Harold J. Power decided to expand into commercial programming, hiring a salesman to sell 30 hours of programming a week at the rate of $1 per minute. On April 4, 1922, nearly five months before WEAF's Hawthorne ad, WGI inaugurated its commercial operations with a program sponsored by the Packard Motor Company of Boston. However, WGI's commercial programs were almost immediately suspended, with the explanation varying whether it was due to the intervention by the local District Radio Inspector, or AT&T enforcing what it felt was an infringement of its patent rights. With an almost pathological fear of ever offending anyone, AT&T initially set very high standards for the sponsored programs it would accept for WEAF, which meant it sometimes refused to sell airtime to prospective advertisers. This provided an opportunity for competing stations whose standards weren't quite so high. In I looked and I Listened (WAAM extract), Ben Gross recalled a Newark, New Jersey, station, WAAM, which quietly sold airtime -- cash only please -- to advertisers which WEAF didn't want, at the same time worrying that federal regulators might take offense and shut the station down. By the end of 1922, there were over 500 broadcasting stations in the United States, and AT&T, which originally thought its patent rights would give it a near-monopoly of U.S. broadcasting, claimed that all except 41 of these were infringing on its rights. At this point the phone company accepted the inevitable, and in early 1923 announced that it would, for the proper fee, licence its broadcasting-related patents to the infringing stations. However, in the words of Erik Barnouw, "The hundreds of stations did not rush to comply." Finally, in early 1924 AT&T filed a patent-infringement lawsuit against WHN in New York City, which was eventually settled out of court. At the time of this settlement, WHN management loudly complained that the licence agreement prohibited them from carrying advertising. This quickly brought an outcry against AT&T's supposed plan to "monopolize" radio, although Radio Broadcast opined that if any company were to monopolize the radio industry, perhaps AT&T wasn't a bad choice. However, the WHN charges were false -- there were no restrictions on commercial broadcasts in the agreement, and in fact all stations settling with AT&T were permitted to sell advertising, and also gained access to telephone company lines for remote broadcasts. Radio Broadcast's corrected report on the controversy, Licensing Broadcasting Stations, appeared in its August, 1924 issue. At this point, the rest of the broadcasting stations followed WHN's lead, and those that wanted to remain on the air paid for AT&T patent licences. By the mid-1920s, many broadcasting stations found themselves facing increasing financial pressure. In addition to the AT&T patent licence fees, entertainers started to demand payment for their performances in something more tangible than publicity, tighter government engineering standards required better -- and more expensive -- station equipment, and music publishers successfully argued that they were due royalty payments for all copyrighted music that was aired, even if the stations weren't collecting any revenues. This led to more and more stations selling airtime. But radio advertising continued to be controversial. In its May, 1924 issue Radio Broadcast magazine announced a $500 contest soliciting the best essay on the topic of Who Is to Pay for Broadcasting--and How? -- the fact that the magazine ran this contest suggested it didn't believe on-air advertising was a suitable solution. However, with only a few exceptions, at this time no other financing ideas proved feasible for United States stations. WHAS in Louisville, Kentucky, after operating its first three years without commercials, began carrying advertising in late 1925, which prompted one irate listener to write "If it's the last act of my life, I'm going to invent something to turn my radio off during those advertising talks, and turn it on again when the music starts!", according to Credo Fitch Harris' 1937 Microphone Memoirs (advertising extract). But there was no turning back, and even Radio Broadcast magazine eventually endorsed advertiser sponsored broadcasting in general, and AT&T's network in particular, in articles like Austin C. Lescarboura's How Much It Costs to Broadcast, which ran in its September, 1926 issue. And what became known as the "American Plan" for financing broadcasting -- private stations supported by on-air advertising -- remains the most common method used in the United States to this day. After a couple of years of shaky finances, AT&T's "toll broadcasting" experiment eventually began to generate significant revenues, especially once its network operations started up. In particular, weekly network programs, beginning with "The Eveready Hour" on October 6, 1924, greatly expanded advertiser interest and network billing. Meanwhile, AT&T had used its interpretation of the cross-licencing agreements it had with the "radio group" (General Electric, Westinghouse, and the Radio Corporation of America) to prohibit them from selling airtime, so as these companies' program offerings got more ambitious, they also began to lose increasingly large sums of money. By mid-1925 there was starting to be a financial crisis for the radio group due to the increasing expenses of their broadcasting stations, and a committee was formed to study whether they could continue to support broadcasting operations without selling advertising. The committee's conclusion was "there is no way". Around this time, the cross-licencing agreements between AT&T and the radio group unraveled, freeing the latter to make commercial broadcasts, at the same time that AT&T was deciding to exit the programming side of radio. According to Gleason Archer's Big Business and Radio, in late 1925, as the radio group was still contemplating their purchase of WEAF's radio network, General Electric and Westinghouse employees reviewing the proposal specified that the reorganized network should "have the exclusive right to broadcast for revenue so far as that right can be given it". However, due to AT&T's earlier settlement with the broadcasting industry, the radio group would not be able to monopolize commercial broadcasting. When stations began selling airtime, advertiser influence naturally increased. Around late 1928, NBC President "Deac" Aylesworth received a somewhat surreal demonstration of the saying "He who pays the piper calls the tune" when his top advertiser, George Washington Hill of the American Tobacco Company, decided on a unique "test" of the dance music sponsored by his firm. As recounted in Ben Gross' book I Looked and I Listened (George Washington Hill extract), in order to "evaluate" the programs, Hill commandeered the NBC Board of Director's room for weekly dancing with a company model, moreover, he insisted that Aylesworth join the two, compelling the NBC president to dance with another NBC executive, Program Manager Bertha Brainard. (Another odd incident Gross related in his book was "a mysterious bearded old man who bought a minute of time daily over WLTH of Brooklyn to say, 'I love you!... I love you!... I love you!' Whom, what or why he loved, he would not explain and the station did not care.") CONTINUING ALTERNATIVE PROPOSALS In late 1921, Postmaster General Hays sent Robert B. Howell to Europe to review radio developments in the Old World -- Howell's report was included in the Radio in European Countries chapter of Charles William Taussig's The Book of Radio. Most European countries would ultimately decide to set up broadcasting as a government monopoly, in many cases charging their citizens fees for listening licences. (A few countries also briefly experimented with radio receivers that were constructed so they only picked up specific paid-for stations, however this proved difficult to implement and too easy to circumvent.) In the United States, most early radio broadcasting was done by private stations, although not everyone was happy with their program offerings. In the October, 1922 Popular Science Monthly, Charles E. Duffie, in Why I Believe in Government Radio, complained about "the indiscriminate competitive jumble of phonograph music, uninteresting lectures, and disguised advertising talks, which have, in part, made up many programs". Duffie looked toward the federal government to provide a better selection of programming, an idea shared by Robert B. Howell, now the Republican candidate for U.S. senator from Nebraska, who, following his tour of Europe, felt that "in the practical application of the radiotelephone -- especially for broadcasting news over wide areas -- Europe has been in advance of the United States". (Interestingly, the European program service which most influenced Howell wasn't a radio station, but instead was the Budapest Telefon Hirmondó, now 27 years old, which used telephone-line distribution. However, Howell noted that "All that has been done of this character with the wire telephone can be done with the wireless telephone.") Howell in particular thought that, in contrast to the "amusing vaudeville" offered by private stations, the government should set up its own high-powered stations, providing "in addition to news bulletins, market and weather reports, other features, such as short stories, discussion of popular current topics, and music and entertainment of the highest type". At the time this article appeared, there was already a limited amount of broadcasting by government-owned facilities -- one early example of a state-owned station was WOS, which operated from Missouri's capitol building in Jefferson City, and was set up primarily to serve rural listeners, as reviewed in A. B. Macdonald's Missouri Goes in for Wireless from the May 22, 1922 The Country Gentleman. Unlike the multitude of privately owned stations which sprang up during the broadcasting boom of 1922, WOS was supported by public funds, which meant state officials had to justify its existance along the lines of "What practical good is this sending of wireless messages? We know it's good from an entertainment standpoint, but if we take money that the farmer pays in taxes and spend it this way, we must know that he is getting his money's worth out of it." However, in the United States broadcasting by government stations would actually decline after this point, and would generally be restricted to a small number of stations operated by local governments and colleges, plus basic public service efforts, such as time signals and weather reports. WIRED WIRELESS After broadcasting became popular, a common observation was that one of radio's perceived flaws -- the lack of privacy, since anyone who wanted to could listen to a signal -- had actually turned out to be its greatest strength. But even after the rise of radio broadcasting, a few experimenters continued to try to develop a way to set up multi-program audio services that were limited to paying subscribers. One alternative to over-the-air broadcasting dated back to work begun in 1910 by General George Owen Squier of the U.S. Army Signal Corps. General Squier noted that because metallic wires act as wave-guides for radio signals, multiple low-power transmissions could be carried along telegraph, telephone or electrical wires to distant points, and received only by persons located along the line. Squier became an evangelist for what he called "wired wireless" -- later known as "carrier current" transmissions -- and over succeeding decades the basic idea has been developed into a wide variety of innovations, from the Muzak audio service to Cable TV. An early adaptation was by electrical companies, for private long-distance telephone service along their power lines, with a successful test reported in Power Company Experimenting with "Wired Wireless", from the September 11, 1920 Telephony. In the August, 1922 Popular Science Monthly, Jack Binns' "On the Crest of the Radio Wave!" column reviewed General Squier's ideas in Can Wired Wireless Change Radio Broadcasting?. However, Binns was skeptical about this innovation's potential, and noted the limitations compared to radio, in both the number of programs offered, and the difficulty in covering rural areas, especially in the many regions which didn't have electricity at this time. Giving the Public a Light-Socket Broadcasting Service, by William Harris, from the October, 1923 Radio Broadcast magazine, reviewed an early (and ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to set up a subscription-based "wired radio" programming service in Staten Island, New York City. |
| "In seeking the good will and support of the public, big business has attempted to propagate a convenient but misleading idea. Its public-relations experts have sought to persuade us that it is to big business, in terms of its annual investment of millions of dollars in radio, that we owe the fine program services we get. Accompanying this questionable claim there is often the suggestion that we, the public, are therefore somehow beholden to the advertiser and to the networks and stations, as though a benefit had been conferred for which we should be grateful. There is no doubt that many innocent listeners genuinely feel beholden in this way and regard themselves as fortunate beneficiaries of a generous patron. This is a dangerously sentimental state of mind, implying a subservience on the part of the public which is neither justified nor healthy. Business is not philanthropy. It is a system of exchange. The businessman provides us with the goods and we provide him with his profits. We can cry quits on the deal. We should never feel subservient or anything but incidentally grateful."--Charles A. Siepmann, Radio's Second Chance, 1946. |