ABSTRACT
Many countries claim to have been involved in the early days of broad-casting. In the Netherlands, historical records show that an early Dutch radio pioneer, Hanso Schotanus à Steringa Idzerda, was perhaps the first in the world to broadcast programmes on a fixed schedule. Experiments elsewhere had been on a purely ad-hoc basis. On 5 November 1919, Idzerda put an advertisement in the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant (a Dutch newspaper that did not survive on its own and ultimately became part of a larger newspaper, NRC Handelsblad) that advertised a broadcast the following evening. At 8 pm on Thursday, 6 November, he broadcast a programme from his home in The Hague using an am transmitter. From the outset, his broadcasts were commercial, advertising his own brand of radios. He also had a ‘sponsorship’ deal with the Daily Mail newspaper in London, since the signal was clearly propagating across the North Sea. However, early appeals for listeners to send in money to allow expansion were not enough to balance the books, and Holland’s first broadcaster filed for bankruptcy in 1925.
