Speech was first transmitted for reception by the general public
from Washington D.C. in 1915 when Europe was still at war. During
1916 the first 'broadcasting' station in the world began regular
transmissions from a New York suburb.
In 1919 Dr. Frank Conrad, then Assistant Chief Engineer of the
Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company, set up, in his own
garage in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, a 75-watt transmitter (8XK) from
which he broadcast musical entertainment for other radio enthusiasts.
This was the first continued scheduled broadcasting in history. The
Westinghouse Company realised the potential value of Conrad's work and
built KDKA, the first regular commercial broadcasting station in the
world, which began its career by announcing the results of the
Harding-Cox election returns on the November 2nd 1920.
The first broadcasting station in Europe was PCGG which began
transmitting on November 6th 1919 from the Hague in Holland. Hanso
Steringa Idzerda, a 35 year old engineer, obtained the first licence
granted in Europe for the transmission of music and speech for general
reception, as opposed to the wireless telegraphy stations which had
been operating point to point services. From the end of 1919 to 1924
this station transmitted a series of musical programmes three times a
week called 'The Hague Concerts'. The original wavelength of
670 metres was later changed to 1,150 metres.
At that time most of the people who heard these concerts would
have been using headphones and they would not have been very critical
about the quality of the sounds they were hearing compared to the
magical novelty of snatching voices and music apparently out of thin
air. This historic transmitter can be seen in the museum of the Dutch
Postal Services in the Hague.
The first transmissions of speech and music in England were made
from Chelmsford, Essex, when a 15kW transmitter of the Marconi Company
began regular transmissions in February of 1920.
In the summer of 1924 the world's greatest radio companies--British
Marconi, German Telefunken, French Radio Telegraphie and
American R.C.A.--met in London to discuss transatlantic
communications. The learned gentlemen all agreed that the Atlantic
could only be spanned by ultra-long waves of 10,000 to 20,000 metres,
which would require the use of hundreds of kilowatts of power and
receivers as large as a trunk, not to speak of antennas more than a
mile long. Dr. Frank Conrad, who was also present at the conference,
had brought with him a small short wave receiver less than a foot
square. When he connected it to a curtain rod as an antenna the faint
but clear voices of his assistants in the U.S.A. were heard from
nearly four thousand miles away. With this spectacular demonstration
he administered the deathblow to all plans for high power
ultra-long-wavelength transmitters, and from then on the commercial
companies concentrated their efforts on developing equipment for
international communications on the short waves.
With present-day electronic news gathering and world-wide
satellite links, the problems faced by broadcasting organisations
fifty years ago when transmitting programmes which did not originate
in a studio were thought to be very complex. In the B.B.C. Handbook
for 1928 there was an article entitled 'Outside Broadcast
Problems' which said,
"Work outside the studio is often the most difficult that the
broadcast engineer can be asked to undertake; not so much from a
technical as from a practical point of view. Very often he has to
take his apparatus to some place he has never seen before, set up his
amplifiers in most awkward positions, test his lines to the studio,
decide on his microphone placings and run out the wiring in the space
of an hour or so, with little previous experience to guide him. It is
in fairly echoey halls, theatres and churches that the majority of
outside broadcasts take place. For example, a sermon preached in a
church would be intelligible probably to the whole of the congregation.
But to render it intelligibly on a loud-speaker, the microphone would
have to be, say, not more than ten feet from the speaker. In
broadcasting a play from a theatre, when the speakers are moving
about, the only way of dealing with the problem is to use several
microphones and a mixing device which enables the engineer to change
silently from one microphone to another, or to combine them in varying
proportions. Some rapid switching may sometimes be necessary.
"Even with good microphones and amplifiers the engineer in the
field may often experience difficulties with the lines connecting the
outside point to the studio. The majority of such lines do not
transmit the higher frequencies adequately, especially the longer
ones. The problems become immense when European simultaneous
broadcasts are attempted. Experiments on the continental wireless
link have done no more than reveal its unreliability. The undersea
telephone line, however, does not give either good or even intelligible
quality of speech if it is longer than a couple of hundred miles, and
it is quite unusable for the transmission of a musical programme.
"The B.B.C. has been the first in the world to exploit
Simultaneous Broadcasting to its fullest advantage for a national
system, and thanks to the co-operation of the Post Office engineers,
it is possible to pick up a programme wherever it may take place
within the British Isles and radiate it simultaneously from all
distribution centres.
"Looking ahead still further and assuming that the wireless will
supplement the wire line link, there is no reason why a simultaneous
broadcast of something of fundamental importance to the whole
civilised world should not take place some time in the future."
In a book entitled "Radio Goes to War" published by Faber & Faber
in 1943, Charles J. Rolo wrote,
"Radio went to war on five continents shortly after the Nazi
Party came to power in Germany. In nine years it has been streamlined
from a crude propaganda bludgeon into the most powerful single
instrument of political warfare the world has ever known. Spreading
with the speed of light, it carries the human voice seven times round
the globe in one second. When Hitler makes a speech in the Kroll
Opera House in Berlin, listeners in America and the whole world hear
his words by short wave even before his own immediate audience hears
them. Radio speaks in all tongues to all classes. All pervasive, it
penetrates beyond national frontiers, spans the walls of censorship
that bar the way to the written word, and seeps through the fine net
of the Gestapo. It reaches the illiterate and the informed, the young
and the old, the civilian and the soldier in the front line, the
policy makers and the inarticulate masses. So great is the importance
of radio to-day that the seizure of a defeated nation's transmitters
has become one of the primary spoils of war."
In Greece, broadcasting was started in the northern city of
Thessaloniki (Salonica) by the pioneer of Balkan broadcasting Christos
Tsingeridis, in 1928. A museum in that city tells the full story of
the first broadcasting station in the whole of the Balkans.
Broadcasting in the capital, Athens, started on March 25th 1938
when a second-hand 15 kW Telefunken transmitter was put into operation
in the suburb of Liosia. The centre-fed T antenna was supported
between two pylons of 85 metres (279 feet). In 1944 when the German
army was pulling out of Athens they tried to blow the the pylons up
but one of them remained standing at a crazy angle, because one of the
explosive charges had been placed incorrectly.