“He knew manufacturing, and he saw radio as the new hot thing,” says Chuck Howell, head of the University of Maryland’s Special Collections in Mass Media and Culture, which houses recordings, photos, documents, and objects related to WLW.Ĭrosley’s instincts were right-in 1922, there were 60,000 radio sets in use in the United States one year later, there were 1.5 million. Crosley’s company also made furniture, including phonograph cabinets. “Before I knew it,” he later recalled, “I had virtually forgotten my regular business in my intense interest in radio.” He had made several failed attempts to produce a new automobile, but his regular business at the time-a mail-order auto accessories business, for which he designed gadgets-grossed more than $1 million annually. As always, he was thinking about how he could make it better.ĭisappointed with the few, poor-quality program offerings his radio set pulled in, Crosley ordered a twenty-watt transmitter and started an amateur station in the living room of his Cincinnati mansion. Instead, he took the chance to learn about the new radio technology, firsthand. With plenty of money in the bank from his manufacturing business, Crosley-a curious, driven man whose employees alternately described him as aloof and “one of the boys”-could have afforded the $100 radio. The more expensive, preassembled radios used vacuum tubes and required battery power and had better reception. Amateurs at the time used bread boards as a platform for wires, tubes, and other components of low-cost crystal radio sets. He agreed to buy his nine-year-old a radio, but when he discovered that sets ran upward of $100, Crosley said he decided to buy instructions and build his own. “One day my son visited a friend, and came home with glowing descriptions of a new ‘wireless’ outfit,” Crosley told a magazine in 1948. WLW began in 1921 on a wooden bread board. While some local stations offered programming targeted to ethnic groups, occupations, and even political beliefs, black Americans and other minority groups were largely left out of national radio, except as caricatures-usually played by white people-in comedy programs. Programming reinforced presumed middle class values. Of course, for most broadcasters and regulators debating these broad delivery systems, “listeners” meant Americans who were white and middle or working class. Could a few clear-channel stations adequately serve-and acculturate-entire regions of listeners? Or would a national network system with local affiliates better target listener needs and interests? In the early days of broadcast development and regulation, Crosley and WLW sparked debate about what radio should and could be. Farmers reported hearing WLW through their barbed-wire fences. A neon hotel sign near the transmitter never went dark. Now, WLW had the ability to reach most of the country, especially at night, when AM radio waves interact differently with the earth’s ionosphere and become “skywaves.” People living near the transmitter site often got better reception than they wanted some lights would not turn off until WLW engineers helped rewire houses. In 1934, when WLW increased its power from 50 kW to 500 kW, all other clear-channel stations were operating at 50 kW or less. frequently increased the station’s wattage as technology and regulation allowed. The station’s creator and owner, an entrepreneur, inventor, and manufacturer named Powel Crosley Jr. WLW had operated on one of forty designated clear channels since 1928. These stations operated on “cleared” frequencies that the government assigned to only one station to prevent interference. One solution was high-powered, clear-channel stations that could blanket large swaths of the country with a strong signal.
Coast to coast radio program clock how to#
The challenge was how to reach these areas, many of which received few or no radio signals in the mid-1930s. Since radio’s beginnings in the early 1920s, industry and government leaders promoted it as the great homogenizer, a cultural uplift project that could, among other things, help modernize and acculturate rural areas. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY
0 kommentar(er)
