Abstract
Radio has definitely been one of the most significant technological devices for more than a century. From the moment of its invention in the early 1800s till new developments in recent years, radio has performed a lot of important functions. Throughout the history, radios helped to supply communication and provide entertainment to many cultures. More than one hundred years already, radio still remains a powerful force in American life that will also retain its potency for some time to come.
This unique form of mass media has the potential to reach any people, even the illiterate ones. No matter what social class humans belonged to or what are their main interests, everybody could be attracted by the incredible power of the radio. The traumatic events of the 1930s and 1940s broadcasted by the radio news, for example, managed to have a strong emotional influence on the listening public that later grew into the sense of the nation’s unity.
Moreover, the great cohesion can be felt between the development of music and the history of radio. It was radio that stimulated the rise of the national popular music stars, as well as introduced regional sounds to wider public. Thus, modern popular culture could not even exist without the early impact of radio.
This paper made an attempt to trace the history of the radio from the very first moment of its invention till its significant role nowadays. It also described the great connection between music and radio throughout the history and paid some attention to the way that a technology in development was pushed and inclined into social existence.
One of the most important electronic technological innovations of the twentieth century is probably the radio. It is considered to be the first device that allowed for mass communication, that’s why its effect cannot be undervalued. First of all, radio readjusted notions of private and public and assisted in introducing a new form of the consumer economy. This type of mass marketing provided a way for all advertisers in selling products to a fascinated audience. Secondly, it played important role in the creation of the star system in the entertainment industry and offered the possibility for the information to be transferred far and wide, not only nationally wide but internationally too.
Radio’s power as a medium is really immense. Newspaper that had been existed years before radio, were in fact able to reach a wide audience. Radio, however, had the potential to reach almost everyone. Its ongoing success could be prevented by neither a busy schedule nor ignorance. It was quite possible to perform an activity and listen to the radio at the same time. As a result, radio turned into an instrument of social cohesion that reconciled members of different classes and backgrounds to feel the world as a nation. Owing to radio the nation altogether with its heart, soul and nerves was exhibited to the necessities of its unlucky creatures
(Brown, 1998 ).
It is almost impossible to imagine modern popular culture without the early impact of radio. Music and radio could even be called as two inseparable friends that managed to complement one another harmoniously. On the one hand, entire genres of music that are now taken as read, such as rock or country are obliged for their popularity and even existence to different early radio programs that plugged new forms. On the other hand, music’s role in the publicizing of radio and its early uses is really tremendous, especially in the very first years of its inception before the rise of the comedy programs. There even existed special discussions in the press that proposed various ways of using the radio. People were suggested to utilize it in the car, in the boat, on the beach or camping and in such way quicken the process of integration of the new technology into their everyday lives.
In this essay we will attempt to trace the development of radio from its early days till modern time and at the same time find out what role music played in its promoting. Most workers in the field of science and technology studies used to focus their attention only on the development of a new technology and its consequent utilization. However, the same amount of attention should also be paid to the way that a technology in development is pushed and inclined into social existence. Science and technology studies unfortunately failed to illustrate this long moment, so we will try to investigate it by ourselves.
The history of radio can be traced to the year 1893, when Nikolai Tesla organized the demonstration of wireless radio communication in St. Louis, Missouri. This event laid the foundation for other scientists who were stimulated to improve the radio all people use now. The man who is associated with the inception of the radio is an Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi who succeeded in bringing electromagnetic waves out of the laboratory and into the world. In 1986 he was awarded the official patent for the radio by the British Government.
The first short-distanced broadcasts were started by Marconi in his own back yard. The world was really amazed when the man telegraphed the results of the America's Cup yacht races from a ship at sea to a land-based station in New York in 1899 (Carter, 1987). Gradually, by the end of 1901 Marconi had successfully organized his own commercial wireless company and broadcasted the first transatlantic signal. That was how everything started.
Radio invented by Nikolai Tesla in 1893 was mainly used with the purpose of maintaining contact between two or more ships at sea. Original radio designs were not capable of transmitting voices or music and were only utilized to transmit Morse code. During the depression, the radio was used to message nearby vessels and stations on the land and ask them for help.
Widely used the radio tended to be during the First World War. It was equally utilized by two sides to relay messages to troops and top officials and also ordinary people who were not on the battle front. At the end of the war, the amount of radio receivers has extremely increased. Finally, this led to the beginning of the broadcasting in Europe and The United States. In comparison with modern world, the radio is now believed to be the primary source of weather, news and entertainment which popularity is first of all explained by its availability to almost anyone.
The most famous broadcasting station in Europe, the British Broadcasting Company or BBC started its existence in 1922. Originated in London, broadcasts then spread to most of the United Kingdom. Different plays, classical music and a great variety of programs were aired on the station at that time.
The newspaper industry though continued to predominate over the new invention. Some changes, however, came in 1926 when there was a big newspaper strike in England. No news was published, so the BBC got a chance to become the main source of the information for the public. In 1927 the station developed to the British Broadcasting Corporation and was even granted a Royal Charter (Cashman, 1989). During the Second World War, when all the television stations were closed, the radio became responsible for covering the war.
Radio broadcasting in the United States had to follow almost the same path as the United Kingdom. The history of broadcasting there began with the Westinghouse Company. One of its engineers, Frank Conrad, was asked to start consistently broadcasting of music, while the others were amenable for selling radios to pay for the service. As a result, Westinghouse got their commercial radio license in 1920 and KDKA, the first formally government licensed radio station, began its existence. Soon after that thousands of radio stations appeared to play a broad variety of broadcasts and reach people all over the country.
The period of sweeping changes in American society is actually associated with the turn of twentieth century. If in 1890 about one if four Americans lived in cities, by 1920 this number has radically changed. In the early twentieth more than half of the population preferred urban areas (Davis& Owen, 1998). Ultimately, widespread migration from Europe and the American heartland modified the nation’s demographic make-up and determined the city the new center of the forthcoming national culture.
All these social changes together with the innovation of new technologies promoted the creation of a mass market for popular music during the early twentieth century. Though sound recording was already contrived by Thomas Edison in the United States and Charles Cros in France in the late nineteenth century, the record industry and then radio managed to transform into the chief means for spreading music only at the beginning of the 1920s. New York City became soon the center of the music publishing industry, particularly a downtown area called Tin Pan Alley. Thousands of young talented composers and marketers started to write and promote their new songs there.
Most of the Tin Pan Alley publishing firms were initiated by Jewish immigrants who could not realize themselves in any other professions. They produced and championed a lot of popular songs like any other manufactured product. Broadway musicals which determine the standard for popular songs throughout the century popularized great amount of Tin Pan Alley songs by the 20s and 30s.
At time when Tin Pan Alley songwriters were trying to please a national taste of its audience with sentimental ballads, slightly different kind of music began to develop in the South. Originated in New Orleans, Jazz is considered to be a unique multiethnic mix of African Americans, Creoles, Native Americans, and people of European, Caribbean and Latin American pedigree (Laird & Hayride, 2005). The first jazz music was characterized by a combination of elements of marching band, ragtime and blues, which was known as African American style provoked by the severe conditions of the Jim Crow South.
American’s increasing industrialization of the first two decades of the twentieth century pushed many workers to leave their native homes and seek better economic opportunities in the cities. African Americans, for example, were obliged to participate in the Great Migration to the North to find some work and elude broad-reaching racism of the South.
Many of these migrants appeared to be gifted musicians who brought jazz to such American cities like Chicago and New York and combined their own southern roots with a new urban tenderness. Gradually, the 1920s became to be called the “Jazz Age”, when all Americans still stunned by the experiences of the First World War, were slowly adopting to the new as they formed a twentieth century identity.
One of the main differences that distinguished jazz from all other earlier styles was the great use of improvisation. The most prominent jazz pioneer ever known was surely Louis Armstrong. The man introduced to this distinctly American musical form his distinguishable timbre, scat singing and relaxed, swinging phrasing (Loviglio, 2002).
The peak of jazz’s greatest popularity began in the swing era and lasted through the Depression and the Second World War. Fletcher Henderson, Count Basie, Duke Ellington and other African American bands succeeded in creating a remarkable rhythmic driving sound for dancing that was able to sweep up millions of people. At the time of greatest economic difficulties in the history that were then worsened by a World War, Americans took a fancy to swing. It became some sort of breathing time from all worry and a primary source of revival and hopefulness.
The Golden Age of American radio as a creative medium lasted from 1930 to 1955, with the peak period in the 1940s. One of radio’s biggest talents, popular writer and producer Norman Corwin even suggested that radio’s most fruitful era managed to become “the shortest golden age in history” (Sterling & Kittross, 2002).
In spite of its brief time of prosperity, radio was violently flourishing and transformed into a significant part of American culture. The vernacular was gradually filling with different commonly used expressions from popular programs. Moreover, people now even used to plan their personal schedules around their favorite radio programs. The radio was believed to be an inalienable familiar household item that was built into a hard piece of wooden furniture and put in the family living room.
The Great Depression has strongly affected the economy of the United States during the 1930s. However, it was exactly that period of the history when radio captured the attention of a mass audience in the country. Much of the nation finally found its main and so comfortable source for news and entertainment. In spite of the Great Depression, American commercial radio broadcasting had increased to almost one hundred million dollars industry by the middle of that decade.
In the 1930s radio ownership across the country began to grow extremely fast. The radio was even more popular that telephones or cars. For example, by the 1940 more families in the United States preferred to have radios than cars, electricity or even plumbing. Members of that vast audience saw radio, and network offerings in particular, as an irreplaceable part of their routine lives during the difficult times of the Great Depression. The new medium was conceived a strong liking by all Americans who could not imagine their lives without listening to each set an average of four to five hours a day. All over the country, millions and millions of listeners were listening to the same programs for hours each day. The popularity of radio was approaching its decline after the 1930s. The impact of the ‘golden age of radio on the American way of life, however, would never be forgotten anyway.
Swing jazz was not the only kind of music that obtained its worldwide fame. Other forms of popular music were also developing together with the history of radio. The music known today as gospel music, advanced by the 1930s from the religious spirituals and blues music of African Americans. It was mainly found in national ministries and storefront churches and was characterized by an unextorted ardor, impulsiveness as well as emotionalism, never heard in music industry before.
Another kind of music that was widely popularized and irradiated through radio and recordings in the first half of the twentieth century was so-called country music. It was firstly made and introduced by the rural working white folks at the beginning of the 1920s. Though gospel and country are definitely two unique genres, they both have some common history.
These two kinds of music originated in the difficult times of rural life, but though are closely connected with the cities. Bluegrass as one of sub-genres of country, for instance, strongly attracted all urban audience. Gospel and country are associated with white and African Americans culture accordingly, though they both evolved in music that crossed the color line (Rhoads, 1996). During the period of the modernization in the early twentieth century, both gospel and country music reflected people’s nostalgic melancholy for the remote past.
After the Second World War the radio became even more recognizable as a musical entertainment. The AM frequency that had already appeared during the First World War continued to be dominant frequency for broadcasting for over three decades. All AM stations had a tendency to play a top-40 time and temperature format. In other words, they just played popular three minute songs in permanent rotation. Most of programming and music focused primarily on the public of ages twelve to thirty five that was known as newly “feeding middle class” (Taylor, 2002).
The development of popular music is often ascribed to the radio. Moreover, the quick progress of the top 40 stations in the early fiftieth has significantly impacted the way all music radios operate even in modern time. Top 40 stations turned into the norm from the very moment radio stations were permitted to run with less equipment, space as well as staff than other full-service stations. Most radio shows were always broadcasted only live in order to get better sound quality. However, in the 1940s this tendency totally changed. The invention of higher-fidelity magnetic recordings made it possible and much easier to broadcast pre-recorded programs did not even worsening the quality.
The real explosion of musical styles came at the second half of the twentieth century. This great development concurred in history with tremendous social and political changes. After the Second World War the United States happened to be at the center of global economic and military power and was politically locked in a cold war. The 1950s in music and radio world was primarily characterized by the arrival of rock and roll, rhythm and blues and at the same time with the returning of many older styles such as country, blues, gospel and pop. Rock appealed to all young listeners of the United States and was spreading little by little around the world to lately obtain even greater significance than jazz.
The music of the 60s and 70s was an integral component of the history of that time when all struggled with the claims of their fellows for full and equal citizenship (Horowitz, 2005). Many of the bands of these eras became internationally famous and their music transformed into classic one. Though the time of their popularity came to an end long ago, their songs had remained in the hearts of millions of people as examples of divinely perfect music. Artists like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Nirvana, Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin and many other very successful bands possessed one extremely important thing. It is surely the real talent that in our modern world is extremely difficult to find.
The sixties and seventies were also famous for the rise of FM radio. The original inventor of the Frequency Modulation (FM) radio broadcasting system is Edwin Armstrong. However, he is not only the inventor of FM but has also greatly contributed to the existence of the Amplitude Modulation (Taylor, 2002). Taking into consideration all the problems that AM had, Armstrong as one of the developers of AM too, succeeded in creating a new type of radio transmission that managed to remove these problems.
The most important development in radio technology were connected with the invention of such devices as the phonograph, the transistor, the tape, the compact disk, the first MP3s and many others. The story of music started with the phonograph that was invented by Thomas Edison. Before his advent in 1877, favorite songs could only be listened to, when someone else was playing them at home or in a concert hall. Transistor, for example, made it feasible to build smaller and portable radios that transformed listening to music into much more comfortable process.
Thus, the history of radio is in fact one of the most fascinating and interesting one. Without the invention of radio, our world would not be as unique as it is now. So, do not underestimate its great importance and just choose one of the varieties of different radio stations to listen to your favorite songs.
References
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