The early uses of the radio were mainly for maintaining contact between ships out a sea. However, this initial radio was unable to transmit speech, and instead sent Morse code messages back and forth between ships and stations on the land. During time of distress, a sinking ship would use a radio messaged nearby vessels and stations on the land to ask for aid. The radio saw a surge of use during the First World War. Both sides used the radio to relay messages to troops and top officials as well as people not on the battle front. At the end of the war, President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points was sent to Germany via use of the radio. After the war’s end, with the growth of radio receivers, broadcasting began in Europe and The United States.
Following the war radio saw its greatest advancements and a turn towards its more modern form. The devastation of Britain made its citizens look for an outlet in radio entertainment. People enjoyed listening to the music, plays and discussion that the BBC played. During the 1960s with the expansion of radio to FM more programs were played and local BBC stations opened up across England. Radio in Europe continued to expand and in the 1990s new radio stations, like Radio 1, 4 and 5 began broadcasting with genres like sports and comedy appealing to new audiences. As the BBC entered into the new millennium its popularity continued to grow. Its broadcasts of “The Century Speaks”, an oral history of the 20th century and a reading of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” helped to gain more listeners. In 2002 the BBC expanded to the digital market and saw its greatest expansion as new stations like 1Xtra, 5 Live, Sports Extra, 6 Music and BBC 7 were launched and World Service were made available to domestic listeners. The history of radio broadcasting in the United States followed a similar path.
Radio broadcasting in the United States started with the Westinghouse Company. The company asked Frank Conrad, one of their engineers, to start regularly broadcasting of music, while they would sell radios to pay for the service. Westinghouse applied for a commercial radio license in 1920, and started their station KDKA, the first officially government licensed radio station. The station’s first broadcast was the election returns of the Harding-Cox presidential race. Westinghouse also took out ads in the newspaper advertising radios for sale to the public. Soon, thousand of radio stations emerged that played a wide variety of broadcasts and reached people across the country that had bought or built their own receivers. The home building of receivers created a problem in the market, since people could simply build their own radios rather than going out to buy them and the government was forced to step in. To curb this a government-sanctioned agreement created the Radio Corporation Agreements, RCA, was formed to manage the patents for the technology of the receiver and transmitter. Companies like General Electric and Westinghouse were allowed to make receivers while Western Electric was allowed to build transmitters. Also in the agreements, AT&T was made the only station that was allowed to engage in toll broadcasting and chain broadcasting. This paved the way for the next step in radio development in America, radio advertising.