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UNITED STATES EARLY RADIO HISTORY
THOMAS H. WHITE | |
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The Development of Radio Networks (1919-1926)
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The introduction of vacuum-tube amplification for telephone lines allowed AT&T to experiment with sending speeches to distant audiences that listened over loudspeakers. The next step would be to use the lines to interconnect radio stations, and in December, 1921 a memo written by two AT&T engineers, J. F. Bratney and H. C. Lauderback, outlined the establishment of a national radio network, financially supported by advertising. General Electric, Westinghouse and RCA responded by forming their own radio network, however, unable to match AT&T's progress, in 1926 they bought out AT&T's network operations, which were reorganized to form the National Broadcasting Company. EXPERIMENTAL JOINT TRANSMISSIONS Beginning in early 1919, General Electric began a series of radiotelephone tests using a high-power alternator-transmitter at NFF, the Navy station located at New Brunswick, New Jersey, communicating with a lower-powered vacuum-tube transmitter aboard the U.S.S. George Washington, which was sailing in the Atlantic ocean. An unusual feature of this testing was that, due to the reception configuration, signals received at NFF were automatically retransmitted by that station, thus, everything received from the George Washington was in turn widely heard via NFF's longwave signal. On July 4, 1919 an Independence Day entertainment program was broadcast from the George Washington, which was heard as far inland as North Dakota. Theodore Gaty, noting the remarkable range of this reception, contacted General Electric radio engineer Ernst Alexanderson, and Re Mr. Corum's Letter in January QST from the April, 1920 QST noted that what had been heard in North Dakota was in fact the NFF retransmission. The April, 1920 Electrical Experimenter reviewed an impromptu joint transmission that resulted in Music 400 Miles by Radio, as a concert broadcast from the government station in Chicago, Illinois was picked up and retransmitted by its counterpart in Detroit, Michigan. A more organized effort took place on Memorial Day (also known as Decoration Day), May 30, 1922, when two ceremonies featuring speeches by President Warren G. Harding were broadcast by a pair of Navy stations--NOF in the Anacostia section of Washington, D.C., and NAA in Arlington, Virginia. The first event was the Memorial Day ceremonies at Arlington Cemetery, reported in the May 28, 1922 New York Times article Nation to Hear Harding, followed later that day by the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, reviewed by The President Speaks to the Greatest Radio Audience in the World, from Popular Radio for August, 1922. AT&T INTRODUCES ORGANIZED RADIO NETWORKING Large companies are often slow to innovate. A notable exception occurred when the research and experimentation by the American Telephone & Telegraph Company -- the largest company in the world -- on interconnecting telephone lines, loud speakers, and radio transmitters led in late 1921 to a plan to create a national radio network, supported by advertising, at a time when most people had yet to even hear a radio broadcast. AT&T's intention to set up nationwide broadcasting was formally announced on February 11, 1922 and publicized in articles such as National Radio Broadcast By Bell System, which appeared in the April, 1922 issue of Science & Invention. (Most early references to multi-station connections referred to the setup as a "chain" of stations, although the more complicted interconnections that followed would come to be called a "network" of stations). Most of the network broadcasts originated from WEAF in New York City, thus the network was generally called the "WEAF Chain". However, company circuit charts marked the inter-city telephone links in red pencil, so the chain of stations was also known as "the red network". From 1922 until 1926 AT&T would be the most important company in the programming side of U.S. broadcasting. Its advertising-supported radio network, including flagship station WEAF, set the standard for the entire industry. CONSOLIDATION UNDER THE NATIONAL BROADCASTING COMPANY After AT&T began organizing the first U.S. radio network, the three companies that comprised the "radio group" -- General Electric, Westinghouse, and their jointly-owned subsidiary, the Radio Corporation of America -- responded by creating their own, smaller, radio network, centered on WJZ in New York City. But, blocked by AT&T from using telephone lines to connect their stations, this other network had to find some other way to link up stations. Initially leased telegraph wires were used. However, the telegraph companies hadn't been in the habit of employing acoustics experts or installing lines with more fidelity than what was needed for basic telegraph service, so this often resulted in low fidelity broadcasts accompanied by loud hums. Also tried was connecting the stations using shortwave radio links, but this couldn't meet the reliability or sound quality requirements. Another idea that was investigated was increasing transmitter powers, to create a small number of "superpower" stations of upwards of 50,000 watts. This higher power might have helped some, but still didn't match the reliability and flexibility provided by local stations linked together by high-quality phone lines. At this point, the radio group got a break. After four years of increasing success in the broadcasting arena, AT&T decided that it no longer wanted to run a radio network. In May, 1926, it transferred WEAF and the network operations into a wholly-owned subsidiary, the Broadcasting Company of America. Then came the bombshell announcement -- AT&T was selling WEAF and its network to the radio group companies for $1,000,000. (RCA's David Sarnoff was fond of saying "when life hands you a lemon, make lemonade". In this case, the strategy became "buy the other guy's lemonade stand".) At this point a new company was formed, the National Broadcasting Company, which took over the Broadcasting Company of America assets, and merged them with the radio group's fledgling network operations. AT&T's original WEAF Chain was renamed the NBC-Red network, with WEAF continuing as the flagship station, and the small network that the radio group had organized around WJZ became the NBC-Blue network. In September, 1926 NBC's formation was publicized in full-page ads that appeared in numerous publications: Announcing the National Broadcasting Company, Inc. The new network's debut broadcast followed on November 15, 1926. NBC's first president was Merlin H. Aylesworth, the energetic former director of the National Electric Light Association. Ben Gross, in his 1954 book I Looked and I Listened, included a biographical sketch of Aylesworth, noting that "If there is one man who may be said to have 'put over' broadcasting with both the public and the sponsors, it is this first president of NBC." In the October, 1929 Popular Science Monthly, Frank Parker Stockbridge interviewed Aylesworth about NBC's daily task of Feeding 13,000,000 Radio Sets, with Aylesworth noting that at this stage "The main purpose of broadcasting is not to make money. It is to give the public such increasingly better programs that people will continue to buy and use radio sets and tubes", reflecting the joint ownership of the network by General Electric, Westinghouse and the Radio Corporation of America, all of which sold radio equipment to the general public. |
| "By this time AT&T, RCA's former ally, had cut loose, and was operating a broadcast station of its own--WEAF. It was better on a technical end than we were. The late Raymond Guy sums it up in his reminiscences recorded many years later at Columbia University's Oral History Research Office: 'AT&T did things with a more thorough knowledge of what they were doing.... They just knew more about telephony than we did, as you might expect. They had the best telephone engineers in the world. The entire Bell Laboratories were at their disposal.' Aside from the normal pride which engineers take in their profession, this kept us on our toes; but the technical competition with the telephone company was an uphill fight, as Ray Guy implied, and I would be the last to deny. WEAF, cautiously at first, began to sell time and develop an income. When WJZ-WJY went on the air May 15, 1923, neither we nor WEAF were paying the artists. After a while, WEAF was in a position to do so, and we were not, until the National Broadcasting Company was organized and WJZ became the key station of the Blue Network, later taken over by the American Broadcasting Company".--Carl Dreher, Sarnoff: An American Success, 1977. |