The Golden Age of Radio

How did broadcast radio get its start? What were the challenges and controversies? And how did the golden age fade into history?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Get in touch with technology. It was tex Stuff from
dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm
Jonathan Strickland and I am joined by a special guest,
my buddy Christian, who is here. Hey Jonathan, Hey Christian,
how you doing. I am good? Windy outside it is.
It's a little windy, a little rainy outside in Atlanta today.

(00:26):
It's terrible because this morning it was it was, it
was raining, but the temperature was about twenty degrees warmer. Yeah,
and it dropped significantly. I'm regretting my choice of jackets well,
especially because it was in the seventies yesterday. Yeah. Yeah,
And now this is this is Atlanta people complaining about
whether right. Yeah. Sorry for all of you who are
in Montreal or New York or you know, any place

(00:47):
where the temperature drops below, say zero, on a regular basis.
Here we're like, it's a little chilly, that's raining. Uh. Today,
Christian and I are going to talk about a subject
that was suggested by a listener, And first of all,
I must apologize to said listener because despite my heroic
efforts of researching where this suggestion came from, I couldn't

(01:09):
find it. So I'm guessing this was actually an older one,
but said the forward thinking, bad prediction story about Hugo
Gernsback got me thinking about how crazy it must have
been to have lived through the debut of public radio,
all the excitement and so little understanding, fireside chats, fearmongering
about radio death rays. A history episode about the promises
in popular notions surrounding radio could be fun and uh

(01:31):
so we wanted to talk about the dawn of broadcast
radio before we get into that. I should mention that
way back in April two thousand eleven, Chris Pallette and
I sat down and recorded an episode titled Who Invented
the Radio, which was mostly about the inventors who discovered
radio waves and found ways to generate radio waves, obviously

(01:53):
including the two big names Tesla and Marconi. Anyone who
knows anything about the patent wars knows about there was
a big kerfuffle between the two of those guys. Uh
little peek behind the curtain. That is the first time,
and I think the only time I have recorded an
entire episode and immediately said we can't use that, let's

(02:15):
do it again, or recorded it all over because the
ghost of Marconi was haunting you there was that, and
we had in the old studio we had a portrait
of Nicola Tesla on the wall. We felt judged, but
mainly Chris and I both felt that we gave such
a disjointed story that we were jumping around so much

(02:36):
that it made no sense. And so we we after
talking it through once we went back re recorded, so
that first episode that we recorded it's lost to time.
We don't have it anymore, at least I hope will
be more organized today. But I'll tell you just from
going through all this research that this is such a
vast amount of information for this period of time, and

(02:58):
I feel like it's in you can you can get
a PhD in radio communication in the history of radio
and understanding these things, and it's yeah, we will probably
only scratch the surface today. Ig Yeah, there there and
there's so many crazy dramatic stories of the trail of

(03:19):
of con men, of big media. It's like this pirate
industry of people just messing with each other. It's it's fascinating.
In fact, there there's probably two or three podcast worth
of information that we could cover, but we're gonna try
and get this in one if we can. So first
thing I got to mention is that radio and broadcast
radio are two different things. You know, radio in the

(03:41):
sense of what Tesla and Marconi were looking at, they
were looking at ways of transmitting short signals across distances
without using wires, so that was it. They were looking
largely at using Morse code. So they might use a
spark gap technology where they would create sparks and send
messages that way. But you couldn't really do a sustained

(04:04):
message that way without creating a lot of static and noise,
and that was a real problem. So we need to
look at another person for broadcast radio. That would be
a Canadian by the name of Reginald Fessenden, who essentially
invented a M radio that would be uh, the amplitude

(04:24):
modulated radio. And so from your notes here your notes,
it says he worked with Edison for Edison. Actually he
actually worked for both Westinghouse and Edison at different points
in his career. So yeah, he just like Tesla, Tesla
also worked for both, although you know, again working for

(04:44):
like it's like me saying that, you know, I worked
for the head of our parent company. Technically I do,
but I don't have any contact with them. So uh,
he had dropped out of school as a young man.
He actually did not complete his school work, but he
was mainly interested in electricity and this potential to transmit
messages wirelessly, and he was using that spark gap technology.

(05:07):
But that was the problem, was that it was creating
so much static and noise that it was very difficult
to get any intelligible message across. Yeah. So actually I
want to interject here for a second. So, um, in
like the model of human communication, when scholars are looking
at how human beings communicate with each other regardless of media,
they actually use uh this Fessenden Marconi uh model of

(05:33):
transmissions as like the baseline for it. And it's all
about like sending and receiving with feedback and feed forward
and then there's a signal to noise ratio. That's how
it's all understood, whether you and I are sitting here
talking in the same room, or it's mass media or
it's uh like like in the early days of radio,

(05:53):
that the way they literally thought of it was two
ships that were thousands of yards away from one another
trying to contact each other using this old radio technology,
and they would have so much static they would have
to constantly give each other feedback and feed forward to
make sure the message was understood. It makes perfect sense,
I mean, especially when you see the brilliance of Fessenden.

(06:15):
He thought, well, they I can. I can create these
sparks of electricity, create these electromagnetic fields and thus creating
radio waves, but it isn't giving me the fidelity I
need in order to communicate properly. He then thought, what
if I used a continuous wave. So I create a
sign wave and oscillating wave with the same amplitude, same frequency,

(06:37):
So it's just steady. Now that's not carrying any information
by itself. It's if you could if you could hear it,
it would just be a steady tone. But it's actually
talking about using frequencies above the limit of human hearing.
So let's say you create this wave, and then you
were too introduce a second wave, one that was created

(07:00):
by your voice. So you speak into a microphone, it
gets converted into electric waves. You add that on top
of the uh the existing wave you've already created, and
you allow it to change the amplitude of that wave.
As the two waves are overlaid on top of one another. Sure,
it's genius. It is genius. It's absolutely genius. Uh. So

(07:23):
this was a M radio. This was the idea that
what that became a M radio because it does modulate
the amplitude of that wave. So the amplitude, by the way,
is the the peak to peak uh difference, Right, it's not.
It's not how many oscillations. This is just the the
amplitude of the wave itself, how tall the peaks are,

(07:46):
how low the troughs are, if you were looking at
the wave across a line the way. It's assuming that
this innovation of his significantly reduced the noise and static.
It did, it did. It did still have issues and
that you could have interference with other waves that were
created at that same frequency. It also meant that you

(08:10):
could get interference with other electromagnetic phenomenons, like like a
lightning strike. So also if you pass below, like if
you go under a bridge, you would hear, you know,
the disruption of the signal. So it wasn't perfect, but
it was an incredible step forward. And this was a

(08:31):
revolutionary I mean he tested it successfully. He did a
short distance test between two towers and it worked fine.
And then in nineteen o six he had his infamous
Christmas concert for sailors. See this is yeah, this is
where I think that that boat to boat idea comes from,
right yeah, Because it turns out the disaster of the

(08:54):
Titanic would end up really making this uh clear that
needed to be some radio communication for ships at sea.
But what he wanted to do was he wanted to
send out a message to essentially telegraph operators aboard ships.
That was his plan. So he proceeded the concert with
an actual telegraph message that essentially translates into hey, pay attention.

(09:19):
And then once he did that, he started it was
coming right. They were not, most of them. They just
knew to pay attention because I got yeah there. They
were like, well, here's the message. Whatever is going to happen,
We need to really focus. And so what they were
expecting to hear were just the noises they would hear
for the dots and dashes of Morse code. So then
he he gives a short speech, he plays a violin

(09:44):
uh and plays a Holy Night. There were supposed to
be other people who talked into the microphone too, but
most of them chickened out because they they got like
terrible stage fright because they realized all of a sudden
that they were speaking to like hundreds of people, right, Yeah,
And so anyway, it ended up being a big hit.
Sailors up and down the Atlantic coast we're we're able

(10:05):
to hear him and reported back to it. So it
was known to be a success, and that's how AM
radio got started. Yeah, yeah, I like that. Yeah, so
that's a nice start to it ends up being. Yeah,
so so he he demonstrates this capability, and immediately other

(10:26):
physicists and engineers start to experiment with it because some
of them had been independently working on the same kind
of idea. Fessendon ended up being the first to make
it really work in a public demonstration. So you had
a lot of other people who were who either adopted
his ideas or continued to develop their own ideas, and

(10:46):
a lot of amateurs were starting to experiment with radio transmissions,
including transmitting out to telegraph operators, who often were very
much entertained by this because it was different from just
listening to clicks on the headphones. This is the part
that's the most fascinating about the evolution of radio to

(11:06):
me is that even though the technology is ultimately made
for mass communication. People originally started using it as one
to one communication across long distances, replacing a telegraph. And
then uh, these amateur operators, these like d I y
uh people in their in their garage, is just you know,

(11:29):
tinkering around with the technology that they could get a
hold of. We're able to turn it into this mass
communication then yeah, And it's funny because when you look
at the early ones, obviously they were using very low
wattage transmitters, so that meant that they couldn't transmit very far,
most of them. I mean, if you were a big name,
you might be able to work with someone like General
Electric to get a really big transmitter and be able

(11:52):
to send a signal far away, because the signals reach
is largely dependent upon the power of the transmitter. Right.
The further way you get, the weaker the signal is,
and the less you'll be likely you are able to
pick it up with a receiver. So in the early days,
people were happy to experiment with this, and there was
really no regulation because there there hadn't been a demonstrable

(12:16):
need to regulate yet, because no one had the power
to interfere that much with anything that was important. Seven
Festan would invent a high frequency electric generator to create
radio waves in the Hurts frequency, which was really important,
and in night. Dr Charles Aaron Culver, who was newly

(12:36):
hired as a professor of physics at Beloit College or
bell Watt if you prefer um. It's it's in a
town called bell Watt actually um, but set up a
radio telegraph assembly which became the foundation for the college
is radio station, though voice in music transmission wouldn't be

(12:59):
part of it until the ninth twenties. But this this
became like again, it was someone a physics professor, in
this case, a physics professor who was already interested in
radio and had been working on it independently, setting up
a thing that would eventually evolve into an early early
radio station. Yeah, and that's kind of another interesting aspect

(13:19):
of this too, is that these early amateur radio stations
weren't just uh d I y kind of hobbyists doing
it on their own. A lot of it was educational institutions,
not just colleges but also high schools that were just
you know, trying to use it for educational purposes. And
that it's interesting later on what happens when amateur radio

(13:42):
sort of gets more regulated. It really reminds me of
the early days of personal computers and how how it
first started off as a hobbyist thing, and then you know,
you had bleeding edge adopters who might not build a computer,
but they're curious about how they might use it. And
then later who had people who were uh you know

(14:03):
more it became more and more mainstream as time went on.
So we've seen other emerging technologies that have followed a
similar pathway to radio. Uh. Not always with the dramatics.
I mean, there were some definite dramatics and early personal
computers too. But we got some crazy stories to tell.
But first we have another big name in radio that

(14:23):
we have to mention. Yeah, so in nineteen ten, this
guy lead to Forest uh really broadcasted like the first
sort of broad meant for mass communication radio broadcast uh,
specifically of a guy named Enrico Caruso singing. I believe
it was opera singing from what I understood, UM, and

(14:44):
that he he ushered in this area era of radio communications.
And unfortunately, though even though he was broadcasting probably on
Fessenden's new system, for the most part it was static
and radio interference, so the audience barely heard anything. But
you know, for a decade afterwards, radio fans were both
using uh, these amateur radio units to broadcast and receive. Yeah,

(15:08):
it wasn't just them receiving. Yeah, it wasn't like they
were a passive audience. They were creating as well. And again,
depending upon the power of their radio transmitters. It maybe
that they were only transmitting to people in their general
neighborhood or even small town, but you wouldn't be able
to necessarily pick up that signal for much further. It

(15:28):
also depends on the quality of the receiver as well.
Like you could build a very simple a radio receiver
that doesn't even require a battery and as a crystal,
a very long antenna and some headphones and uh, you
can pick up radio signals if you're close enough to
a transmitter. Uh. And in fact, that's a fun project
to do. You can look up how to do that online.

(15:49):
So also in nineteen ten, the same time Leada Forest
was was experimenting with us, you had a guy named
Charles David Harold who opened a school that he called
the Herald College of Engineering and Wireless and he was
experimenting with wireless voice transmissions as early as nineteen o
nine and providing a thrill to telegraph operators who suddenly
were able to hear voices over the telegraph lines. Now

(16:10):
this is out in California, so he's surprising people out
there who normally they weren't expecting it at all, but
they loved it because he would imagine, this job is
a little probably very tedious. Yeah. So he actually started
setting up a regular broadcast time, like the first radio
programming in a way, And by nineteen ten he had

(16:32):
created this, uh, this program that would include reading out
news to telegraph operators. And his wife Sybil, got involved
and she started playing records that the description I said
was the kind of records young people like to listen
to back in nineteen Yeah, so playing records, So playing
music for these telegraph operators and holding the first radio contests.

(16:59):
And here's how already contest work. Back then, she would
instruct people listening to come by their house sign a
guest book with their name and where they were from,
and then they might win a little prize. Number seven. No,
wasn't calling number seven. Uh. And here's the coolest part.
I think this little amateur station. Eventually, over time in

(17:19):
ninety one would become kq W, and in nineteen it
would evolve into k CBS as then the CBS. Yeah,
I thought that was really interesting, especially like we'll talk
later about, CBS is sort of importance in the big
game of radio development. Yeah. So nineteen ten is also

(17:40):
when the US passed the Wireless Ship Act, which required
all ships of the US traveling more than two miles
off the coast and carrying more than fifty passengers to
have a wireless radio equipment on board with a with
an operator, and the transmission range had to be at
least a hundred miles. And that meant that it created
a lot more our radio transmissions broadcast without any regulation.

(18:03):
This is where the United States government starts to say,
this is going to become a problem because now we
we already have a lot of radio traffic going on
just through amateurs as well as ship to land land
to ship communication. Uh, it's starting to get a little
crowded and we're starting to get interference. We need to
figure out how to handle this. So in nineteen twelve
they passed the Radio Act of nineteen twelve, which is

(18:25):
good because if they had passed the Radio Act of
nineteen twelve, and like nineteen eleven, everyone would have been confused. Uh.
And it marked the first time the US government required
radio stations to be licensed. So the licensing was really
just to create order in chaos. Uh. And it was
really kind of like, you know, we want to make
sure that we're keeping certain frequencies free so that we

(18:46):
can have these these very important transmissions go uninterrupted because
am transmissions, if you transmit two things on the same frequency,
you get lots of interference, which is different from there
was a military on it too. This as well because
World War One was on the horizon, was happening, and
they the government banned amateur radio broadcasting during the war

(19:12):
for you know, the reason that they were trying to
transmit signals to one another of important nature. If somebody
was talking in their garage about uh, you know, their
favorite records or something or young people. Yeah, the ones
that the young people listened to, they would overlap and
they wouldn't get these important messages. So they shut it
all down. And also just radio detection to the the

(19:34):
remote possibility that they might detect radio transmissions from either
allies or enemies. It would mean that before they had Yeah, yeah,
this is this is before the whole Bletchley park On
Dygma thing, which is I've talked about that in the
previous episode of tex stuff. But fascinating story. So nineteen
fourteen Edwin Armstrong, who's going to be important throughout this conversation,

(19:58):
and his story is a ma using and tragic. Uh.
He patents a radio receiver circuit that increases the selectivity
which allows you to tune into specific frequencies and the
sensitivity of radio receivers. That means it was able to
pick up weaker radio signals than previous receivers. So selectivity
obviously very important. You want to be able to say
I'm looking at this particular band of frequencies and I

(20:22):
don't want anything outside of that um and we would
see that get better and better. In en he would
invent the super heterodyne radio receiver or superhead. So this
principle is actually really fascinating, and I gotta admit to you,
a Christian, I had to really sit down and read
this a few times to kind of get what was

(20:43):
going on. Yeah, because I mean this is radio electromagnetic
and radio broadcast I have a basic understanding of it,
but it does go well beyond what I studied in school.
And it took a while, but now I think I've
got to explain it to me, because yeah, I'm more
of the on the side of the leg cultural examination
of radio, whereas like the technology of it escapes me sometimes,

(21:06):
So yeah, hit me. All right. Let's say, let's say
I want to transmit a radio signal at a high frequency,
so it's not going to interfere with anything else, but
that processing high frequencies is a little tricky, So you
might have a receiver that can process frequencies up to
I'm just gonna take an arbitrary number hurts. But I

(21:30):
want to transmit at five hundred killer hurts. If I
were to introduce that frequency to an oscillator tuned to
a different frequency, suddenly I would be able to receive that. Uh,
not just at the original frequency I transmit at, but
the difference between that and the oscillating one. So another

(21:51):
easy example, let's say they have an oscillating frequency at
a thousand killer hurts. Okay, that would mean that if
you use a receiver tuned to five killer hurts, killer hurts,
or two thousand five Killer Hurts. You would pick up
that signal and could process it. Okay, So and I'm
imagining that this is a process that's still used today. Yeah.

(22:14):
This is the principle of transmitting and and receiving with
a radios so that your radio doesn't have to have
as wide a spectrum. It's called interminute frequency. And it
took me a long time to figure out what was
going on. Is the oscillator that was throwing me off?
And then I realized, oh, the oscillators tuned to a
different frequency, and that's what gives you the broader range

(22:34):
that you can pick up. It's pretty fascinating. And again
Armstrong was absolutely brilliant coming up with this. Uh. And
then we move up to the nineteen twenties. Yeah, and
the twenties is when this educational stuff that I was
talking about earlier it really hits a boom. There was
like more than two hundred educational organizations across the United
States of America that, uh, we're requesting broadcasting licenses so

(22:57):
that they could transmit, and whether they were using it
as a an opportunity for their students to learn about
the technology or to broadcast educational information, it didn't really matter.
The unfortunate thing is that thirteen years later, by nine
three or more of these educational institutions had folded and

(23:18):
and basically it was because of and this is going
to be a huge theme of this episode, because of
ad based programming and stronger stations, commercial stations that were
able to overlap their signal. Yeah, you essentially had not
just the fact that the companies had more technological behind them,
but that the government was favoring those over the educational ones.

(23:41):
When we get into a little bit more about the politics,
you're going to hear that repeated a few times, and
it's it's a little upsetting, honestly. And I also i'd
like to say, like, it's interesting because, despite whatever my
political beliefs are reading. One of the articles that we
used as as research for this was written in nineteen

(24:02):
from the perspective of somebody at Harvard University looking back
at the Federal Radio Radio Commission before it turned into
the FCC that we have now and kind of just
doing a broad review of the last like ten years
of this. And it's very very similar and reminiscent of
arguments that we've seen with media throughout the last hundred

(24:23):
years and that we're seeing right now in arguments about
net neutrality. Yeah, it's really similar to net neutrality, the
idea being that everyone should be free to use the
Internet to send and receive whatever information they want. In radio,
we saw the same argument, except in that case radio,
it was it ended up being that those folks were

(24:44):
kind of pushed away and that the the the corporations,
the companies that had the money were the ones that
had the voice. Yeah, and and so like you know,
as we're talking earlier, there's these amateur radio stations, right,
and they here's the kind of content you might find
an amateur radio stations. Maybe somebody's giving a sermon, or
they're they're they're just reading out of their Bible, or

(25:05):
they're talking about sports out of today's newspaper, updating their
neighborhood on what happened in sports around the country that day.
Maybe they're reading a poem, maybe they're giving a speech
about something political at the time, perhaps the usage of radio,
or like we were talking earlier, just playing records and

(25:26):
at the time, there was no you know, licensing or
copyright and effect for for how music was broadcasted. So
they could just throw any record on and kind of
entertain the neighborhood. Right in a way, you can think
of it as like the predecessor of blogs. Yeah, you
know it really in a in a real way it was.
And uh, this was amazing. This was an ability for

(25:48):
someone to have a platform to have their voice heard.
Some people made very good use of that. Some people
may you may think, made frivolous use of it, just
like well, sure, yeah, exactly. And that's just like blogging,
except for for people like us, I suppose who do
get paid to do it. Uh, A lot of these

(26:10):
these amateur radioists that they weren't getting paid for this.
They had day jobs. In fact, Like one of the
stories I read was about how there's this guy who
ran a gas station, but he also had a radio
station running out of his gas station, and so he'd
be on air and then he'd say, hold on a minute,
I have to go, uh sell some gas, and he'd go.
He'd disappeared for five minutes, and they'd come back and

(26:31):
just pick up again. And that was just how it is.
They didn't really worry about dead air or anything like that. Yeah. Um.
And and at the same time, there's also this other,
like broader, more important thing, which I think is why
the government started to become more involved in it, which
is that radio allowed the listeners to sample other cultures
from far away states, that and and and learn more

(26:54):
about what this kind of idea of America as a
nation meant. You know, even though they may have never
visited Nebraska, they would be hearing what these amateur radioists
in Nebraska were talking about. They were giving them sort
of a peek into what the culture in those towns were. Like,
it's really cool. Yeah, yeah, absolutely yeah. Moving over to

(27:16):
to nineteen twenty, that's when we get the first commercial
radio station launching. That's k d K A. Now, amateur
radio stations, like Christian was saying, had already been around,
and a guy named Henry P. Davis was inspired by
an amateur named Frank Conrad and saw the potential to
actually make some money off this whole radio thing, and
not just not just broadcast out for free, but to

(27:36):
actually make it a commercial enterprise. So the radio station
went live on November two, nineteen twenty. Henry P. Davis
himself read out the results of the presidential elections on
the air, and he would become heavily involved in broadcast radio,
in fact becoming the first chairman of the National Broadcasting
Company also known as NBC. So yeah, exactly. Yeah. Then

(28:03):
the opening of thirty Rock in NINETI kt k A
was owned and operated by Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company,
and you might not be surprised to hear that Westinghouse
used the radio station as a means of convincing people
to go out and buy radios, because up to this point,
again it was very much an amateur thing. People who
were interested in the science would go out and get

(28:26):
the equipment or build the equipment from from whatever they could,
and that's how they participated. But now we're talking about
actually making commercial radio sets for people to go out
and buy. And this is also the beginning of things
starting to get a little dodgy on the corporate side
of things, because previously the patents for radios were all
over the place. But what happened was the big companies

(28:48):
G E, A, T and T. Weird, they're such a
familiar it is, G, A, T and T. International Radio
and Telegraph and Westinghouse all got together and said, let's
pull together our patent and they created r C A
the Radio Corporation of America for the express purpose of
allowing them to build and sell radio equipment like transmitters

(29:10):
and receivers that were designed not for broadcast broadcast but
for for telegraphing, but also to keep these amateur radio
out of business physically, so that they couldn't just go
and buy an out of the box kit anymore. They
would have to they would have to really build it themselves.
R c A flexed its muscles in ways that I

(29:33):
think just about anyone would describe as odious and uh
and a lot of the stories we're gonna cover, yeah yeah, yeah, yeah,
um and and what's kind of interesting is just that,
you know, there's there's this other article that I read
for this that was called The Design of Symbiosis that
was all about, you know, the the longevity of radio

(29:53):
and then these corporations interacting. And there's a quote from
it that I want to read, which is about this
specific thing. It says it was no accident that the
General Electric Corporation g after acquiring rights to the Marconi
wireless patents in the United States, spearheaded the formation of
the r c A, which in turn launched the National

(30:14):
Broadcasting corporation NBC one of GS many subsidiaries. It still is,
I believe right, Well again he got Universal Yeah great, Yeah,
it's even larger than that and a leading content company.
So it's like one thing led to another, from one
corporation to the next. Is they kind of built out
their their subsidiaries and spread their spread out kind of

(30:35):
like an umbrella and it and it. Don't get me wrong,
this wasn't all negative. They were very positive effects at
the time as well. From this, I love that you
have this bit about a T and T and their
their business strategy. This is one of the so apparently

(30:55):
they like repeatedly, we're trying to charge people for commercial
broadcasting over their sets, and they wanted to charge tolls
in the same way that they were charging people for
phone calls, which I think is amazing when you when
you think about it, you know, there's just these these
negotiations between the public and the large corporations. When these

(31:16):
new media hit the scene and we're in we're experiencing
it right now, we'll probably always be experiencing it. Yeah,
I imagine so, And it's interesting to you. You make
a delineation in our notes about how how the radio
system is treated in America versus in other nations, right, Yeah,
So the thing that's unique about the American radio system.

(31:39):
This isn't to say that that no other countries did this,
but the American radio system specifically evolved as a unique
combination between private enterprises like these ones that we were
just talking about, in government regulation, whereas in other countries,
for the most part, it went for public ownership. So
places like Iceland, the United Kingdom obviously with the BBC, Italy, Turkey,

(32:01):
and the USS are it was all public. Um. And
so the problem that radio had that was unique in
America was that all of these consumers could receive any
signal at equal equality, very much like again blogging right
in theory, and that any broadcaster, however, whether it's NBC

(32:24):
or a guy operating out of his garage, would be
able to overwhelm multiple frequencies and overwrite what was being
played by somebody else's broadcast. Yeah, the very least you
could interfere with the signal. Um. We'll talk about FM
and a little bit. The interesting difference, one of the
many interesting differences between a M and FM is that

(32:45):
if you have two AM broadcasts that are coming out
at the same signal. They interfere with one another the
same frequency, should say, they interfere with one other FM.
If you have two of the same frequency, it's whichever
frequency is the most powerful is the one you will receive.
So you could have a little station that is broadcasting

(33:07):
in a very small amount of power that if you
are close to it, you would be able to pick
it up on an FM band that would normally be
for a radio station that mean miles away. That could
be a giant corporations one. So there's a lot of
back and forth with this too, which is today we
think of this. You and I were talking about this
the other day when we proposed this idea. We think
of it as pirate radio, right, and I think I

(33:29):
always think of pup up the volume. Yeah, and Christians
later driving around his neighborhood with his his pirate radio
station at the back of his car. Yeah, it's also similar.
I did a story with Chuck Bryant about it was
television not radio, but the same same principle, uh the
Max Headroom incident where in Chicago that was also the

(33:50):
same principle as FM radio, and that if you were
able to send a signal along the same frequency but
at a higher power rate. Then you could overpower that
and people would receive yours, no, not someone else's. Yeah.
But and so as these these conflicts are going on,
these like weird ven diagrams of stations playing up against

(34:10):
one another, the government starts to become interested, as we
as we've talked about, and especially because of military reasons.
So the Navy says, you know what, we should really
take control of this as a means of national defense.
And the way that they thought it should be run
was basically like the post office, that the you know,
the federal government should own and control what is broadcast

(34:32):
on radio signals. Obviously that that didn't end up happening,
But then you get this huge boom because of the
amateur radio movement. From nineteen to nineteen twenty three, the
number of radio sets in America increased from sixty thousand
to one point five millions. That's a huge, massive and

(34:52):
uh in in nineteen twenty two there were twenty eight
stations in operation, but I think it like exploded to
hundreds very quickly. Um and then enter the scene a
little guy named Herbert Hoover, who was at the time
the Secretary of Commerce, right, and the and the Department
of Commerce oversaw radio at this time. Yeah, yeah, And

(35:14):
he was really the initiative of that idea. He was
the one who said, uh, you know, uh, he really
wanted the Department of Commerce to control it first of all.
But he also said, and this is another quote, he said,
at first, the idea of making money off radio seem profane.
It is inconceivable that we should allow so great a

(35:36):
possibility for service, for news, for entertainment, and for vital
commercial purposes to be drowned in advertising chatter. This is
Herbert Hoover who subsequently ends up using the government to
support the businesses uh in terms of businesses over amateur
radio stations, uh in terms of their licensing. And his

(35:58):
other analogy for radio was that he thought of it
as transportation, rather than the the post office analogy that
the Navy was using. He thought it was like, we
should think of them as like water ways, and that
the public should be be able to ride these waterways,
but that the government would regulate how they did. So.
I like this this message here too, of the We're
one of the world's first radio ads aired on August two,

(36:23):
UH for a housing development in Queens. Yeah. Yeah, this
is the They were basically like, um, advocating what we
would now call gentrification or like get this is a
quote from that ad get away from the solid masses
of brick, where children grow up starved for a run
over a patch of grass. But my child's never seen

(36:44):
what a tree looks like. A queen. This is the
first thing that we we sold on radio. That's hilarious. Yeah.
But so Hoover goes on in two he calls together
the first American Radio Conference, which is he brings together
represent otives from and I put this in quote radio
industry because it really wasn't an industry, you know, it's

(37:05):
just kind of and and this included not only you know,
the businesses that had interests in mind, but also the
amateur radio operators. And no action was taken. Uh, there
were calls for legislation they introduced to build a congress.
Congress is like, no, we don't want to have anything
to do with this. And there's political reasons behind that
that I'll get into later. Um. But then by nine

(37:29):
we've got fourteen hundred radio stations, not just what did
I say? Yeah, And so you've got these big commercial
broadcasters that are forming networks like NBC and CBS, both
of them they formed in seven respectively. Uh, and it's
very similar today to the same that NBC and CBS

(37:52):
that we understand as being television. Right now, now I've
got the beginning of one of the weirdest stories I've
ever heard. This guy is my favorite. I think you
should do a whole episode about this. I could easily
do a whole episode about this guy. And and he's
going to pepper through parts of the rest of this episode.
So Ninete is what we're talking about here. We're going

(38:14):
back just a little bit too to set the stage.
That's when doctor using in quotes, John R. Brinkley starts
up a radio station called kf KB in Kansas. So
let me tell you about doctor Brinkley. First of all,
he wasn't a real doctor. He's like the original snake
oil salesman. He he at least perfected it to an

(38:35):
art form. Right. He went to medical school by never graduated,
but he bought a diploma from a diploma mill for
five hundred dollars, not an insignificant amount of money. Uh,
and it gave him the right to practice medicine in
some states, including Kansas. He purchased diploma, not not an
actual like proof that he had the training that would

(38:58):
allow him to do this. So anyway, he starts practicing medicine.
He had previously been involved in some scams and cons,
including things like selling tinted water as if it were
an actual medicinal cure and injecting it into people. But
I want to see a movie about this guy's life.
I want to I want to see a movie. I

(39:18):
want to see a movie about this guy. I want
to see him cast. I want I want Simon Peg
to play him. He's just like deviously injecting things into
people and cutting open their necks. I think I think
either Simon Peg or Neil Patrick Harris that would be Yeah,
he would be good. It's like evil Dookie Houser. Yeah.
So he had he had been hired as a house

(39:39):
doctor for a meat packing company, and he observed the
rigorous mating habits of goats. Uh yeah, So let's slow
down for a second. People, This means that he watched
goats have sex for a long time and and enthusiastically
the goats. At least I don't know about him, but
the goats were certainly enthusiastics. So he was talking to

(39:59):
him mail patient once about the fact that the mail
patient was having problems in the bedroom. He was having
a failing libido, a rectile dysfunction. Perhaps the the actual
nature of the problem was not what explained in all
the sources I looked at, but had something to do
with failing libido or or um, you know, virility. And

(40:22):
so supposedly what Dr Brinkley did was jokingly suggest that
perhaps they should transplate plant some goat quote unquote glands
as in gonads into the mail patient. And he said,
let's let's do it. Let's firow up like the original
body modification. Give me some give me some of them
goat glands. So he does he actually did start performing this,

(40:45):
and then he started to suggest like he began to
essentially advertise, saying, this is a way to restore virility
for men. Uh, let me do this this medical procedure
for a not insignificant amount of money. So flash forward
to when he gets the radio station and he starts
to fill his broadcast time with music and medical lectures,

(41:09):
and he would end up advocating for this kind of
treatment and other treatments that were equally bogus in advertising too. Yeah,
and he was he was essentially throwing business to surgeons
into pharmacists and getting kickbacks every single time and making
a mint off it. So he's in full operation and

(41:31):
will end up, believe it or not, defining in part
why radio has regulated the way it is. But we'll
get to that in a little Yeah, I know, he's
important to the history of it. Um. In the meantime,
Hoover is continuing to negotiate with stations and the government
on how it should be regulated. And you know, basically,

(41:52):
as the Secretary of Commerce, his work is to let
the stations work out amongst themselves which frequency is going
to be used when and how they overlaping. It wasn't
really you know, handing it out. He wouldn't occasionally make decisions.
And what happened was in the federal court was like whoa, whoa,
you don't have this power. And specifically the Attorney General

(42:14):
of the United States, who you know, was from the
same administration that the Secretary of Commerce was, decided that
Hoover didn't have this power, he could not grant permits
at request, and that all of a sudden, these air
waves turned into even more of this like wild wild
West of broadcasting than they already were. Uh. And so

(42:34):
obviously more regulation is even is necessary. And Coolidge is
the president of the time. He favors the control by
the Department of Commerce obviously because it's under his branch,
and he opposes any kind of commission being formed. The Senate, however,
didn't like the idea of one man being in control.
And this is where the political angle comes in, because

(42:55):
they knew that Herbert Hoover had his eye on the
presidency and didn't want to give him any political prestige
for taking care of the radio problem. Interesting and also
this will probably seem familiar to people following the net
neutrality arguments, where one of the big problems was the
FCC had brought a case against Comcast for blocking bit

(43:18):
torrent traffic. And then the response was you don't have
authority to tell Comcast what it can and can't do
because Internet transmissions were a title one classification, not titled
too uh. And if you want to know more about that,
you can listen to the title to podcast I did
and Common Carrier podcast I did from a while back

(43:39):
to to learn more about it, but just suffice it
to say that this is something that we've seen before
and we'll likely see again. I just I think it's
fascinating that, like the future of this major media uh,
was decided by people who wanted to screw over a
political candidate potentially yeah, yeah, and sometimes just people who

(44:02):
were wanted to screw over inventors. Uh, it's crazy. We'll
talk more about those two in Congress creates the Federal
Radio Commission and passes the Radioact of nineteen twenty seven. Now,
before that time, it was all the Department of Commerce,
like Christian was saying. So the Commission's job was to
get radio into shape, and they wanted to have a

(44:24):
little more power than Department of Commerce, which could grant
broadcast licenses but couldn't deny a broadcast license. So if
you requested it, if you did all the things you
were supposed to do, you would get one. You couldn't
be told no. So the Federal Radio Commission was supposed
to be able to say no if it was warranted. Um,
the question of how they determined how it was warranted

(44:45):
was something of a problem. And UH. The Act also
laid out rules for content programming could not have obscene,
in decent or profane language, and the Commission could and
did use content as a factor when deciding whether or
not to renew a broadcast license. So if you were
broadcasting and not paying a whole attention to those content rules,

(45:08):
you wouldn't necessarily have your license revoked, but when you
went back to get your license renewed, you might be denied, right,
And this makes sense in light of other arguments that
were going on with media over the you know, the
twenty years probably surrounding this, both with the cinema and
I would assume newspapers and comic books as well. Yeah,

(45:29):
all looking at the government, the government trying to deem
what was profane or wasn't, but also trying to leave
it in the public's hands to decide. Yeah, there was
also a real worry about how far can you rule
on these things before it becomes censorship, So that, I mean,

(45:50):
that's a real worry, right, because they didn't want to
be accused of taking away somebody's right to free speech. Sure, yeah, um,
And so the FARC Federal Radio Commission, it was really
just like this compromise, this political compromise, and so the
idea was like really like they just assumed, they being Congress,

(46:12):
that it was going to go away after a year
as part of a political deal basically to keep Hoover
out of office, and especially because of the commercial radio interests.
These guys who were lobbying their politicians. Uh, they wanted
the regulation to go back to the Secretary of Commerce.
They just didn't want it to be Hoover. Uh. And
so they and their supporters in Congress would belittle the

(46:33):
FARC's accomplishments even as they had they had subsequently argued
that it should exist, and then as it was going along,
they would say, oh, this is terrible, you're not doing
a good job. And Uh. The FARC was handicapped by
a number of things. At the limited financial resources, had
an inadequate staff. Uh, and as we're talking about here,

(46:54):
it really didn't have any power authority, and its existence
was in question from the very day that it was
it was created. It was like they were constantly on probation. Yeah.
It was one of those things where, um, they're also
they're very organization ended up being a problem. So one
of the things about the FARC was that they were

(47:15):
organized so that the entire United States was divided into
two zones. Yeah. They called this sectionalism, and each zone
was giving given the same number of broadcast licenses essentially
as every other zone, which you know, from one perspective,
sounds like it would be fair, like everybody gets the
same amount, But then you think where's the population distribution.

(47:37):
The Northeast is very heavily populated and the Southwest is
very lightly populated, and so you don't have enough broadcast
licenses for the Northeast and you have too many for
the Southwest. So these were so simple things, like just
the way things were set up kind of set the
fr C up for failure. It did, yeah, especially because

(47:58):
when that happened and Southerners in particular felt like they
weren't being treated fairly. Uh, And it led to the
Davis Amendment in March. The idea was that there had
to be an equal allocation of licenses, band frequencies, periods
of time for operation station power for each of these
five zones. And that so you know, obviously sexualism was

(48:22):
a huge problem for the FARC. And this is even
before we get into the business interest to angle right, right,
this is just in the operation part of the f
FRC not even getting into the business section, but these
are definitely important things to to consider. The idea of
being able to say, here's the frequency you are allowed
to use, here's the amount of power your transmitter is

(48:43):
allowed to have, so that way we can make sure
that we don't have these battling frequencies interfering with one another,
because that's not gonna be good for anybody. It's not
good for the transmitter, it's not good for the consumer
who's trying to receive these. All of that made sense,
but they were hampered so much. And also, I mean,
there were a lot of shady political goings on along

(49:04):
with corporate goings on at the same time. Right, they
were essentially trying to fulfill this mission of favoring big
business over amateur radios. And they actually there's an actual
FRC memo that says, quote, there is not room in
the broadcast band for every school of thought, whether it's religious, political, social, social,

(49:25):
or economic. Each can't have its own separate broadcasting station
or a mouthpiece in the ether. Uh So they, you know,
they were coming down pretty hard on these these amateur
stations that were given providing you know, a pulpit essentially
to anybody who had the means to to operate a
broadcast um in favor of the businesses that were, you know,

(49:50):
lobbying to have them created in the first place. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, So,
you know, very complicated issue. The technology oddly enough, less
complicated than the politics and culture surrounding it. In this case,
like the stories end up getting um like it's the
human element that really throws the monkey wrench in here. Yeah. So,

(50:13):
for instance, like you've got this happens, the FARC says,
you know, this isn't a this isn't a pulpit for
your beliefs. And then the labor movement, which is very
powerful at the time, says, wait a minute, we should
have a clear channel that we can broadcast over these
five zones so we can talk to people about labor interests.
And then educators said, yeah, so should we. Uh, And

(50:33):
so there's all this pressure from the public, and then
subsequently Congress uses that and just keeps pushing on the FARC,
saying you're really blowing it here. Yeah. So you've got
a great bullet list here of the working principles of
the FARC. Let's go through those. Yeah. So this is
how they would ostensibly decide things. The first is that

(50:54):
the station with the longest record of continuous service had
the superior right for broadcasting on a particular channel, right,
but they had a stipulation. There were other conditions as well.
So in order to fulfill the fair and equitable distribution
that was required by them, an applicant who wanted to
broadcast needed firm financial standing and efficient equipment. That's pretty vague, right,

(51:21):
So it's up to this f r C, not f
c C f r C commissioner at the time to
determine what firm financial standing means and what efficient equipment means,
especially as this equipment is evolving at a rapid pace. UM.
And then you also had to obey the rules of
the obscene of not broadcasting obscene and content like we

(51:41):
talked about earlier UH and basically keeping it so that
this dissemination of propaganda wasn't controlled by a single group
and that creeds were supposed to find that this is
another quote that I loved. Find their way into the
market of ideas to be on the air. There was
this idea that UM, there was a there would be

(52:03):
a natural kind of UH process throughout the radio operators
in the public that would decide which political agendas should
get to be broadcast on the radio or not, rather
than just giving everyone the opportunity to Yeah, and that
would actually change too. There would there would eventually become
a decision where people would say, you know what, we

(52:24):
need to make sure that everyone has equal opportunity to
voice there, to to put their political voice out there.
But that would be an idea that would come around
a little later. Yeah, So you know, saying let's just
put this out there and see what happens, and and
I trust that whatever outcome there is, it will be

(52:46):
for the best didn't always work out. It's like it's
like saying, the laws of nature will decide who the
best person for president of the United States would be.
So what sort of stuff did we get as a
result of this. Well, Subsequently, the FARC didn't want to
regulate advertising. Uh, not only because you know, the advertiser's

(53:09):
interests were also their interests, but also because the Commission
chose to further the ends of the commercial broadcasters as
part of what they called the public interest. So the
FARC had this ability to claim that it didn't have
powers of censorship, and it couldn't be held responsible for
questionable advertising such as cigarettes. You know, those like old

(53:30):
corny cigarette ads that you to hear on um radio
if you listen, if you ever listen to old timey
radio that has the commercial still in it, you will
hear tons of these. So they didn't want to censor those.
But at the same time they would rule that public
stations that were on the air could or could not
be on the air because of their quality of character,

(53:50):
which I think is kind of fascinating that you know
it was. I would assume at the time that it
was maybe arguments of political beliefs, right, um, yeah, very
likely religious. This actually makes me think of how it's unrelated.
It's tangential. But how if I'm watching a streaming content
on my one of my devices, whenever it gets to

(54:14):
the content part, like whatever I'm actually trying to see,
I might encounter buffering three or four times, depending upon
the connection. But commercials always seemed to play with perfect
clarity and no buffering whatsoever. Isn't that interesting, especially especially
when you're when you're on YouTube, and YouTube has got
that new sort of passive aggressive alert that comes up

(54:34):
at the bottom that says, hey, just so you know,
this isn't US, it's the limits of your bandwidth provider,
right commercial. So it's interesting to me also that the public,
you know, you would think like, oh, the public, were
they crying out on behalf of the little guy, And
it turns out they weren't. In large part, they were
actually citing with the big networks. Yeah they were. And

(54:57):
what's kind of interesting about this is, yeah, they were
more interest did in the content that NBC, r c
A and CBS was we're putting out um. And even
though some people argued, you know, our c has a
monopoly on this industry. Uh, it's interesting, Like there was
another argument that was essentially that look, the mass public
just wants entertainment from these radio channels. They don't want

(55:17):
to be educated, they don't want to listen to your
political screeds, and so subsequently they're complacent about the whole
thing and they don't really care whether or not these
amateur radio stations are getting edged out um. And so again,
like I turned back to this article by this guy
Herring out of the Harvard Review, and he proposed that

(55:39):
there are two potential solutions which I think are really
interesting now that we have the the advantage of being
so far ahead and time and looking back on this,
and he said, the only possible solutions are that we
go for full government ownership. His example was the BBC
at the time. UH. And he said, yeah, there's criticisms
that come in the form of minority is not not
ethnic mind parities, but like minorities of voice, claiming that

(56:03):
they aren't given equal opportunity to access to stations. So
that's the one negative drawback to that. And he said,
or we could a lot of fixed percentage of radio
facilities just for nonprofit programs. UH. And then whatever it is,
whether it's uh, they allocate a certain number of frequencies
or maybe they say, you know, the commercial stations can

(56:23):
broadcast for these twelve hours a day, and then another
twelve hours a day, it's our nonprofit stations. UM. But
even if they did that, there were so much demand
for nonprofit amateur radio that they didn't have enough enough
to accommodate everybody. There wasn't literally in this case, there
wasn't There weren't enough frequencies to facilitate it. Yeah. Yeah,

(56:47):
So this is really between where we see the beginning
of the radio industry an actual radio industry that is commercialized,
and they're questions that we're going around about, well, how
should broadcasting be financed, how should we produce our programs?
How should we distribute all of this stuff? And amateur

(57:10):
broadcasting moved away as much as it was, like kind
I think of it as being like the fandom of today,
you know, like I keep thinking that's amateur radios like
the Tumbler of the twenties, um, and that there were
so many fandoms expressed there. But ultimately other stations that

(57:30):
had commercial enterprises behind them, or even commercial enterprises themselves,
like department stores or music stores, or doctors or Mr
Brinkley sorry Dr brink Yes, Uh, he didn't spend three
years not graduating medical school to be called Mr exactly. Yeah,
I mean that five was well spent. Uh. They ultimately

(57:53):
were able to, you know, put push out these interests
of the sort of amateur broadcasters. So like our C A, G. E.
And Westinghouse, they form NBC because they want to keep
their interests from diverging, even though their competitors they're also
you know, united against amateur radio. This leads to the

(58:14):
rise of advertising sponsorships, which were well familiar with in
the podcasting world and with ad agents. This is really
like the first time that they had like whole ad
agencies that were working together with these companies kind of
coming up with how this stuff is going to be
broadcasting and how is the best way to convince the
audience to to move from queens or to buy a cigarette. So,

(58:39):
looking back to our friend that we referred to a
second ago, Dr John R. Brinkley, Uh, the f RC
denied his broadcast renewal license in nineteen thirty. So Dr
Brinkley comes up to the f r C s as
a time for me to get a little stamp on
here so I can continue my my good deeds of
posting are broadcasting fraudulent medical practices and getting kickbacks. And

(59:04):
they said nope. They actually cited the fraudulent claims and
the content as the reason, saying it was against their
content rules and that's why they were not renewing his license.
So actually an instance where they did that and it
was for the good for the yeah, great for the
greater good in this case, although Brinkley, Brinkley said that
what was happening was effectively censorship um and so he protests,

(59:29):
and what he does. He buys a radio station in
Mexico that broadcasts had a much higher power than almost
any station in the US. It was at a hundred
thousand watts, uh eventually went up to a half million
watts and so very powerful radio station compared to the
other ones that were active at the time. He directs
the antenna northward into the United States. It's amazing. So

(59:51):
here's here's the deal. This is this is what's going
to come back and haunt him. The way this worked
was that he would, uh, he would actually his studio
was in the United States. The the stuff he was
broadcasting would go to Mexico to be transmitted by radio,
and that's what would eventually come back to get him,

(01:00:12):
but that would be another couple of years. He's I'm
fascinated by this guy. He's the brass, the moxie. Yeah. Um. Well.
As a side note, one of the things that was
mentioned at the top from that listener message was FDRs
fireside chats, and those began in nineteen thirty three. So

(01:00:35):
this is really when I mean fireside chats don't happen anymore.
But I'm fairly certain that the president of the United
States still records a weekly message that goes out on radio,
and it becomes an institution. The Presidency recognizes the importance
of this media, the communicating to the mass public. Also

(01:00:55):
in nineteen three, that's when Edwin Howard Edwin Howard Armstrong,
remember we talked about them earlier, created frequency modulation radio
or FM radio. So AM Remember we mentioned changes the
peak to peak voltage changes the amplitude of that wavelength.
Frequency modulation doesn't change the amplitude, it changes the number
of oscillations per second, the actual frequency of the wave

(01:01:18):
within a fairly narrow band because obviously you have to
tune to a band of frequencies in order to pick
things up. Then if it went outside of that, you
wouldn't get anymore, which is why you can overlap stations
instead of causing interference. Yeah, as long as you know,
so you know, if you're if you're going in an
area where the power levels are almost the same for

(01:01:39):
the frequencies, that's when you start getting that weird thing
where you'll hear one station and then the other station.
Maybe you'll hear both the same time, but it's pretty rare.
Uh So it's also not as prone to static, you
don't have the same problems that you did with AM
with electromagnetic interference. But before it could get widespread adoption,
Armstrong was essentially backstabbed by his former friend David Starnoff,

(01:02:01):
who was head of guess what r c A and
now our c A obviously had a big vested interest
in AM radio. FM was rising as a competing technology.
Starnoff went nuclear. He he had wanted Armstrong to go
and create technology to make AM radio broadcast more clear,
more free of static, and instead Armstrong comes up with

(01:02:23):
this alternative to AM radio. But our c A is
heavily invested in AM, so rather than say, let's adopt
this new technology and build on it, he went nuclear
and he started lobbying the FCC to deny an experimental
license for UH testing FM radio. Essentially, every time Armstrong

(01:02:46):
tried to make a move to push FM radio forward,
r c A blocked it or tried to block it,
or complicated litigation ensued. It got very expensive, and here's
where things get really tragic. UH in the by the
time you get to the nineteen forties, Armstrong was effectively
bankrupted by the litigation. He was still trying to pursue this,

(01:03:11):
He goes to his wife to ask her for some
of the money he had given her in their earlier
part of their relationship that she had put aside for
their retirement. She denies him this. He he has been
beaten down totally, and he gets enraged and does a
horrible act. He grabs a fire poker, hits his wife

(01:03:32):
in the arm uh injuring her arm. She leaves, obviously,
she leaves him that evening. He sits down, writes an
apologetic letter, and jumps out the window of his thirteenth
floor building and kills himself. Tragic, tragic story. So there
are some amazing and powerful stories here. Brinkley, Armstrong Tesla Marconi.

(01:03:58):
Is I mean there's a movie? There are many movies
to be made from this. Moving on the nineteen thirty
four Communications Act, huge, huge piece of legislation. This is
the formation of the fcc UM. The one section of
that Act is actually referred to as the Brinkley Act.
This is within the overall nineteen Communications Act. And of

(01:04:22):
course the Brinkley Act is in fact named after our
good buddy, doctor John R. Brinkley. So this was the
US government's attempt to finally shut down Brinkley and his
attempts to continue broadcasting. And they said that if you
are transmitting information from the United States to another country
to be broadcast, that is a type of international commerce

(01:04:46):
and thus can be regulated. And they laid down rules
and they said, you cannot do this, it is against
the law. Now we have put that into law. It
put a stop to his transmitting and he ended up
trying to do other things. He also, by the way,
really got the government's attention, not just by transmitting messages

(01:05:06):
about quackery and terrible medicinal cures for things. He sided
with the Nazis before the before the United States entered
the war exactly is before the United States was in
in World War Two. But he started with the Nazis.
Did not go over well. Uh. He eventually would die

(01:05:27):
of a heart attack in nine. Yeah, and insane with
Dr Brinkley. But but Brinkley, I mean, his his actions
are what in fact there was not. There was a
case back in the nineteen nineties that related to shutting
down a uh AN organization that was using a similar

(01:05:49):
means of transmitting from the United States to a radio
antenna in Mexico because they had the facility that they
could use, and it was largely unregulated. Even as late
we've had cases that fall under this part of the
air for some reason, I'm thinking about d d O
S attacks, But it's it's like the their version of yeah,

(01:06:10):
it's all about stepping around the yeah yeah. Well um. Congress,
like you said, had abolished the f r C, which
they were hoping to do to begin with, but instead
of just turning it back over to the Department of Commerce,
they established the FCC. The mandate of the SEC is
Interstate and Foreign Commerce in Communication, which is where the

(01:06:32):
Brinkley thing comes in. And this is these are the
three claims that they maintainer. The reason for the FCC.
Make sure that radio is available to all for reasonable
charges and with adequate facilities, so that you're not necessarily
listening to No longer would you be listening to an
amateur out of their garage, out of their gas station,

(01:06:53):
would walk away for five minutes to go pump some
gas and then come back. You want reliable radio service, America,
and we're going to give it to you. And so
this is also when we start seeing the allocation of
large frequency bands for AM radio and FM radio. There's
still is amateur radio. You can get a license to
operate an amateur radio, but there are very specific band

(01:07:14):
of frequencies you are allowed to use and you can't
use anything outside of that. Yeah, it's kind of it's
kind of what Herring was arguing back in the nineteen
thirties that that there, but it's far more limited than that.
I think what he was envisioning with that there there
would be a spectrum for nonprofit radio um and, and
he also argued that the FEC at the time had

(01:07:37):
to decide whether they were going to support commercial broadcasters
at the expense of nonprofit ones. And ultimately, as we know,
they decided to do that. Um and even though they
were hearings going on and reports were being pulled together
and the f CC was looking at all these things,
you know, ultimately what we know of as the Golden

(01:07:57):
Age of radio saw the growth of these he's a
multi uh corporate networks across the country, right and by
this time we're talking about World War two. Radio now
was adopted by a huge percentage of the population. Nine
and ten families owned a radio and listened to an

(01:08:17):
average of three to four hours of programming a day
picture of that, like family gathered right time my place
is going and they're all gathered around the radio, a
little orphan Annie and and lone Ranger and green hornet
and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, this is this
is where we're going to kind of draw and end

(01:08:37):
to this because while we're right here at the dawn
of the Golden Age, I think that you know, what's
the cool story that we've been able to tell is
the rocky journey it took to get there, and clearly, uh,
it was one that had a lot of drama in it.
And maybe if you guys are really interested in this topic,
you want to hear more about it, you should let

(01:08:59):
us know. Will be happy to explore it further, whether
it means, you know, concentrating on a much smaller segment
to really get to the stories. Armstrong's fascinating person. Brinkley
is a fascinating person. A lot of people that we
could talk about. Fessendon very fascinating guy, So lots of
things we can chat about. Just let us know. You
can always get in touch with me by sending me

(01:09:19):
an email at a message That address is tech Stuff
at how stuff works dot com. Or drop me a
line on Facebook, Twitter or Tumbler. The handle it all
three is tech Stuff hs W. You can catch Christians
work all over How Stuff Works. You do a lot
of writing for our various video series. I do get
for what the Stuff and for brain Stuff, and we've
got a lot of great new content that's gonna be

(01:09:40):
coming out on the How Stuff Works channel on YouTube
the next couple of months. So if you have, if
you have watched something from How Stuff Works on YouTube,
odds are good that Christian was at least in some
way involved in that. Probably yeah, yeah, I either wrote
it or was somehow in the studio or on set
at the time trying to wrangle things together. Right. These
are the people who keep me in line whenever you

(01:10:02):
see me on camera. So, guys, I hope you enjoyed this.
I look forward to hearing from you and you look
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