ABSTRACT
In the 1920s and 1930s the radio was undoubtedly a leading source of unmitigated bleat. Radio's early history stages, with some starkness, all the issues facing communication in the time: the longing for an assured delivery and the desire to touch over long distances. The radio signal is surely one of the strangest things we know; little wonder its ability to spirit intelligence through space elicited immediate comparisons to telepathy, seances, and angelic visitations. The remarkable property of the radio signal is its inherent publicity. Like the phonograph, radio technology was first conceived as a means of point-to-point communication. The discovery of radio as an agency of broadcasting is often attributed to David Sarnoff, future head of the National Broadcasting Company. One obstacle, of course, to the development of radio as pure broadcasting was the question of how to make money from a communication circuit that seemed to be a continuous potlatch or gift to the public.
