Last Year's Lesson: BBC Began Daily Radio Broadcasting - Nov. 14, 1922

BBC began daily radio broadcasts on this day in 1922.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, history fans, if you want a double dose of history,
here's a rerun for today, brought to you by Tracy V. Wilson.
We hope it makes previous episodes for this date easier
to find in the feed. Welcome to this Day in
History Class from how Stuff Works dot com and from
the desk of Stuff you missed in History Class. It's
the show where we explore the past one day at

(00:20):
a time with a quick look at what happened today
in history. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson,
and it's November four. The BBC began daily radio broadcasts
on this day in two making it the world's oldest
national broadcasting organization. Radio at this point was still relatively new.

(00:45):
It was developed through the work of multiple inventors and
engineers and businessmen at the end of the nineteenth century,
and once people worked out how to communicate wirelessly using
radio waves, it became super easy to build the receiver
needed to do that. A lot of people got really
interested in amateur radio. But all of this amateur use

(01:08):
of radio quickly started to crowd out the increasingly important
radio transmissions that were being used in an official capacity.
For example, during World War One, civilian radio signals could
overwhelm military communications, so governments started regulating amateur use of
radio and passing laws about who could use radio and how,

(01:29):
and regulating exactly what frequencies could be used for what purpose.
By the nineteen twenties, the British public was lobbying for
some kind of national broadcasting service. It was inspired in
part by broadcasting services that had sprung up in the
United States and had already started to be developed. The
amateur broadcasters in the UK had already been shut down

(01:51):
and regulated alternatives had been slow to develop because of
the fears that the signals would interfere with more critical
radio community sations. In May, though, the Postmaster General announced
that a national broadcaster would be authorized, and then, after
a series of meetings and committee discussions, the British Broadcasting

(02:12):
Company was formed on October nineteenth. It would be the
following January, though before it was formerly licensed, and at
that point it was already sending broadcasts. Six leading wireless
manufacturers were involved in creating the original British Broadcasting Company.
One of them was the Marconi Company, and the first

(02:34):
broadcasts on this new radio service came from Marconi's studio
called two l oh. This was a daily service, but
it wasn't all day. The first broadcast was a news
report that was provided by news agencies, and then the weather.
It was foggy and a lot of England that day,
and London was seeing some smog. At first, a typical

(02:55):
broadcast day was just a few hours of music, news
and weather, which eventually expanded to also include things like audio,
drama and receiving. The broadcast required a person to have
a broadcast receiving license. More than a million of these
licenses were issued before that very first day of broadcasting
even happened. The British Broadcasting Company was, as his name suggests,

(03:19):
a company, but it reorganized in seven to be more
like the public corporation that it is today. We don't
know very much about how listeners really responded to the
first few years of daily broadcasting from the BBC because
audience research didn't start until nineteen thirty six. BBC television
service also began in nineteen thirty six. On August twenty six,

(03:42):
the BBC actually adopted television a lot quicker than it
had adopted radio, and now, of course it's known as
just the BBC, although in a lot of minds, including mine,
still stands for British Broadcasting Company or maybe British Broadcasting Corporation,
at least in Pople's heads. Thanks very much to Eve's
Jeff Cote for her research work on Today's podcast, and

(04:04):
thanks to Casey P. Graham and Chandler May's for their
audio work on this show. You can subscribe to This
Day in History Class and Apple podcasts, Google podcasts and
We're Real to get podcasts, and you can tune in
tomorrow for an incredibly destructive March