The 1920s – Radio Heritage Foundation (2024)

During the year 1926, a total of five American shortwave broadcasting stations were on the air, though generally with relay programming from the mediumwave parent station, as was the case back then.

At the beginning of the year 1928, there were six international shortwave stations on the air in the United States

According to radio historians, the very first radio broadcasting license in Australia was awarded to Charles Maclurcan due to his regular Sunday evening broadcasts over experimental amateur station 2CM. The program content for each weekly broadcast was published in a radio magazine in advance, and each program was avidly followed by anywhere up to 5,000 listeners each week.

The second lighthouse in the waters of South Australia was constructed on Althorpe Island in 1879, and in 1925, the appointed lighthouse manger took his own informal amateur radio equipment ashore with him. He communicated with mediumwave broadcasting station 5CL in Adelaide, and conveyed his appreciation for the broadcast of their radio programming…

We go back to the year 1908, and that was when the American navy vessel Alabama was taken into service in the Atlantic Ocean as a cruiser. During the following year (1909), a series of wireless tests was conducted, between the Alabama at sea and the well known American naval wireless station NAA at Arlington in Virginia.

On Thursday May 11, 1922, the second radio broadcasting station in England was inaugurated by the Marconi company in London under the official callsign 2LO. Wednesday May 11, 2022 forms the exact one hundredth anniversary of that historic radio event that set a pattern for radio broadcasting in many other countries around the world.

Back in the early days of wireless and radio, station callsigns were applied in several different ways; there was no clear, no regular pattern. Official internationally recognized callsigns were in use to identify a specific transmitter, or a specific transmitter frequency, or a particular programming service, or a particular transmitter usage, such as amateur, experimental, communication or broadcasting.

The Snowy Mountains Scheme involved the hydro-electric generation of electric power and the down stream irrigation of water for use in farming areas. The Barren Jack Hydro-Electric Scheme was a significant part of the over all Snowy Mountains Scheme which was the largest engineering project in the history of Australia. The name Barren Jack was the nearest English pronunciation for the Aboriginal name of the area.

In our program today, we provide an answer to the probing question: What was the first radio wedding; that is, a real time wedding with a new husband and a new wife, that was broadcast live over a radio broadcasting station? As an answer, we examine a claim that was listed in a historic resume for the mediumwave station WSB in Atlanta Georgia.

The 1927 issue of the AWA Radio Guide contained a wealth of collected radio information that was not available anywhere else back then. AWA [Amalgamated Wireless (Australasia) Ltd], was a mega-radio organization in Australia that was founded one hundred years ago and it welded together British, German, American and Australian radio companies, in the same way as RCA [Radio Corporation of America] welded together in the United States similar American and European radio companies.

Two more early Radio Weddings from the 1920s, broadcast over KDKA, Pittsburgh, USA, and 2MT in the UK.

Radio historians in England inform us that the very first radio broadcasting station established anywhere in the British Isles was located at Writtle in England, and the auspicious date for their inaugural broadcast was Tuesday February 14, 1922.

During the year 1925, there were just 5 shortwave stations on the air in the United States with a regular broadcasting schedule. These pioneer stations were operated by 4 different radio companies.

The American radio magazine Radio News for October 1927 presented a list of radio broadcasting stations that were recently monitored on shortwave. We have adjusted that list into a more modern format, and we present this off air monitoring information in frequency order.

The first location for KDKA mediumwave and shortwave was atop the eight story high Building K at the Westinghouse factory at East Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. Building K was the tallest building in this large manufacturing complex and the fledgling KDKA, studio and transmitter, was installed in a wooden shack at the western end of this flat roof.

The interesting story of mediumwave radio broadcasting in the South American country of Brazil can be traced back to its very earliest beginnings, in the year 1922, when a temporary demonstration station was installed in what was back then their national capital city, Rio de Janeiro. The Independence Centenary International Exposition, as it was known in English, was open for a little over half a year and it was staged as a 100th anniversary celebration of Brazilian independence.

A collection of photographs from radio stations of the 1920s.

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