First KDKA radio broadcast sparked a revolution
Photo courtesy of Senator John Heinz History Center
Leo Rosenberg broadcasting the Harding-Cox presidential election returns. Pictured are R.S. McClelland, William Thomas, Rosenberg, and John Frazier. The event represented the nation’s first commercial radio broadcast.
Photo courtesy of Senator John Heinz History Center
A view of Frank Conrad’s garage with radio equipment
The sky was clear as the sun set over Pittsburgh on Nov. 2, 1920, save for the smoke pouring from the mills that churned out steel around the clock.
The city’s voters – who, for the first time, included women – were greeted with a cold drizzle that day as they ventured out to polling places to cast ballots in a presidential race that pitted Republican Warren Harding against Democrat James Cox, two candidates from Ohio running in the wake of World War I and Woodrow Wilson’s turbulent presidency. As they settled into their homes that night, most had to wait for the latest editions of daily newspapers like The Pittsburgh Post, The Pittsburgh Press and The Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph to find out who prevailed.
Except, however, for the hobbyists who owned radio sets. At 6 p.m., they heard something like the following crackling over their receivers: “This is KDKA of the Westinghouse Electric Manufacturing Company in East Pittsburgh, Pa. We shall now broadcast the election returns.”
The broadcast lasted for 18 hours, stretching until noon the next day. Election returns were interspersed with music and pleas that anyone listening contact them, because they wanted to know the reach of their signal.
The exact number of people who were tuned in that night remains unknown. And the broadcast did not merit a mention in the following day’s Pittsburgh Press, or in The New York Times. But that broadcast by itself almost certainly carried more long-lasting importance than the presidential election that was its focus. The first commercial radio broadcast anywhere in the world, it sparked a revolution that changed how Americans received their news, were entertained and how they sized up their political leaders. It also knitted the country together in a way it had never been before.
It’s hard for us to fathom a century later just how extraordinary a radio must have seemed when people were first exposed to it. In the way it brought the world into homes, it might well have seemed like “a magic box,” according to Wally Podrazik, a curator at the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago and an adjunct lecturer in the communication department at the University of Illinois-Chicago.
“That’s a voice, that’s music that’s in my house,” Podrazik said. “People embraced it very quickly. You didn’t have to read. You only had to listen.”
The first commercial broadcast was the end-result of years of experiments stretching back to the creation of the telegraph wire. In 1901, the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi sent the first signals across the Atlantic, from England to the Canadian province of Newfoundland. Five years later, on Dec. 24, 1906, 40-year-old Canadian inventor and former University of Pittsburgh instructor Reginald Fessenden managed to play a recording of “Silent Night” and read the Christmas story from the Gospel of Luke over wireless machines to ships traveling up and down the New England coast.
By 1920, voices could carry over radio waves, but it mostly remained the domain of well-heeled amateurs. Frank Conrad, an engineer with Westinghouse, took it a step further by playing some of his favorite records to people who were listening to his amateur broadcasts. Soon enough, his bosses at Westinghouse had an idea – consumers could be enticed to purchase radios if there was programming they wanted to listen to.
“They wanted to deliver what people wanted,” according to Andy Masich, the president and CEO of the Senator John Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh. “And with the Harding-Cox election, a contest between two Ohioans, the people of Pittsburgh really wanted to know what was going on.”
Their instincts proved correct. After that first broadcast, radio sales escalated as customers proved hungry to hear news before it reached the printed page, to listen to music, or even take in a sermon. Radio broadcasts also presented an array of lucrative opportunities, since slices of airtime could be sold to advertisers eager to peddle their wares. Within months, there was a stampede of entrepreneurs setting up studios and building transmitters to get a piece of the action. By the time the 1924 presidential contest that pitted President Calvin Coolidge against Democrat John Davis rolled around, Americans could hear the results on 600 different commercial radio stations.
Radio’s potential to bring live events to viewers was first showcased five months after KDKA’s debut. On April 11, 1921, KDKA broadcast a boxing match between Johnny Ray and Johnny Dundee at Pittsburgh’s Motor Square Garden (now the East Liberty Market). Then, on Aug. 5, 1921, KDKA ventured to Forbes Field for a play-by-play broadcast of a game between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Philadelphia Phillies (the Pirates won by a score of 8-5).
“Once you had radio, you didn’t have to be there to be there,” Podrazik explained. “You can hear something unfolding that you are nowhere near.”
Radio changed how we related to the world beyond our communities, and it transformed how performers and politicians related to audiences and constituents. Bing Crosby’s relaxed, intimate singing style was tailor-made for the medium and catapulted him to international celebrity. And, after Franklin Roosevelt was elected president in 1932, his “fireside chat” radio addresses allowed him to bypass journalists and speak to millions of Americans as if were sitting next to them in their living rooms.
Roosevelt’s predecessor, Herbert Hoover, actually used radio more than Roosevelt, but Roosevelt adjusted to radio, according to Douglas Craig, an instructor in the history department at Australian National University in Canberra, Australia, and the author of “Fireside Politics: Radio and Political Culture in the United States, 1920-1940.”
{span}”Hoover used radio simply to broadcast his speeches,” Craig said by email. “That is to say, he bolted on a radio microphone onto the speech and his style of delivery that he would’ve used in an old-fashioned hall with a physical audience. FDR, on the other hand, wrote his radio addresses with radio and its needs specifically in mind.”{/span}
{span}The birth of commercial radio helped put the “mass” in the idea of mass media. But the media world has become more and more fragmented, particularly in the last couple of decades, and radio listeners can now listen to stations that cater exclusively to their tastes and interests on satellite radio. Sirius XM offers stations dedicated entirely to the Beatles, the Grateful Dead, Southern gospel, opera, pop hits sung by kids and many more. And many radio stations stream their programming online, which means that a classical station in Germany, an oldies outlet in France or a college station in Virginia can have faithful listeners in any corner of the globe.{/span}
{span}Can broadcast radio as we have known it for all these years survive? Podrazik thinks so.{/span}
{span}”Yes, it is a fractured media world, but that means there are also many more opportunities to ‘catch up,'” he said. “It will be a reflection of the adaptability of corporate owners.”{/span}
{span}The abundance and range of choices could also signal a greater appreciation for what radio has to offer.{/span}
{span}”Yes, you could jog to video streaming,” Podrazik said. “But running through the park, you probably won’t.”{/span}
{span} {/span}