1926: The National Broadcasting Company is established. The network would dominate radio during that medium’s Golden Age and become the foundation of a massive media empire that to this day just keeps growing.

During the Radio Days, NBC was the most successful in the game, but it was far from the earliest successful player. That distinction belongs to AT&T, at the time the largest company in the world. AT&T built a station in New York City with the call letters WEAF, but more to the point it had a monopoly on the telephone lines needed to extend the reach of a station with quality audio – the crux of a network.

AT&T's interest in radio was simple. The conglomerate's Western Electric division made radio components. Its Bell System – the phone company – was developing wired and wireless, short-and long-range communications. WEAF was a sandbox, a place to experiment.

But it also proved very popular with the public, proving there was an appetite for this thing which brought news, music, dramatic fare and sketch comedy into the family salon.

By 1925, however, AT&T decided that the telephone was a better fit for its future. Meanwhile, the Radio Corporation of America was itching to get into the business in a big way.

The U.S. Navy had essentially controlled radio technology for years as a matter of national defense during and, for a while, after World War I. In 1919 it turned over to RCA the American Marconi radio stations it had appropriated during the war, making the company an instant radio giant.

RCA had ambitions to tie up its patchwork of local stations into a national network, but it was hamstrung by the relatively poor audio quality available to it, leasing telegraph lines from Western Union. It was the best technology available, because AT&T wouldn’t allow anyone else to use its vastly superior telephone lines.

Such is the cauldron in which deals are cooked. AT&T sold its WEAF station (and another in Washington, D.C.) to RCA for $1 million in a deal that allowed RCA to lease AT&T's phone lines – a huge audio upgrade. RCA's new division, the National Broadcasting Company, was formed on this day in 1926 and officially launched with programming on Nov. 15.

NBC would flourish during the '30s, '40s and '50s when radio was king – partly because it was able to control the cost of talent in a sort of studio-system way, but also because there was a huge appetite for this magical technology that brought the world into your living room.

Everything was live, of course, and most of the entertainers are long forgotten – but for nostalgia buffs they included Al Jolson, Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Fred Allen, Burns and Allen, and Edgar Bergen, a ventriloquist (think about it). Some of the programming simply couldn’t be done anymore, even in the age of South Park and Family Guy. One of NBC’s first hits was Amos ‘n’ Andy, a continuing story of two black guys performed by two white guys using the tone, inflections and patter of minstrel shows to conjure mental images of their characters.

The NBC radio network was so big, it was actually two: NBC Red, the flagship network, with established shows and advertisers, and NBC Blue, which had ‘sustaining shows’ – those without regular sponsors, like news and cultural programs. (In the early years, the NBC Orange Network carried Red Network programming on the West Coast, and the NBC Gold Network carried Blue Network programming there.)

As the network grew the need for individual stations to identify themselves (and eventually cut away to air their own local ads) became more complicated. Initially, an announcer would simply read the call letter of all the affiliates at the end of a program, there being so few. But in due course NBC needed a way to alert everyone simultaneously and instantly when it was time for a station break. This was the birth of the three-tones chime NBC still uses.

Various incarnations were used for the better part of two years. First was a sequence of seven tones– G-C-G-E-G-C-E. Too difficult to execute perfectly, live. This was shortened to four – G-G-G-E. Eventually, NBC settled on the iconic G3, E4 and C4 – though apparently not as an homage to one of NBC’s owners, the General Electric Corporation. It would become the nation's first audio trademark.

Both AT&T and RCA thrived – each of their bets on the future ratified by time. And both were forced to divest as a result of their success. AT&T became seven Baby Bells in 1982. In the early 1940s the FCC forced NBC to drop either its Red or Blue network. RCA tried some fancy footwork – dividing NBC into two companies, NBC (neé Red) and Blue Network Company – but a 1943 Supreme Court decision did not go its way. So RCA sold Blue Network for $8 million, and in 1945 the Blue became the American Broadcasting Company (ABC).

And what of radio? The halcyon days of terrestrial radio are over. Satellite radio's seems so moribund that its biggest star, Howard Stern, is making noises that he'll leave Sirius XM radio when his $500 million contract runs out next year. The action (if not money) in radio today is online, in elegant apps like the one developed by NPR and a click away on the web from nearly every station there is.

Personally, this reporter doesn't think radio (or newspapers) will ever become extinct, because a new medium seldom kills an old one. And these days the opportunities to reinvent are plentiful, and unpredictable. Radio conditioned us for podcasts, and now podcasters are trying to replicate the immediacy – of radio.

And how ironic is it that commercially viable radio – the necessary precursor to the television, the 20th century's defining medium – turned on the need to access a private phone network owned by AT&T?

Source: Various

Image: Wikipedia

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