Electric (Wired) and Electronic (Wireless) Communication Towards Broadcasting in the World

Three major revolutions occurred in the world of communications during the 19th century—the telegraph, the telephone and the wireless (radio). We call the first two “wired” and the third, “wireless” communication. Although the telegraph is no longer important for the 21st century, and we cancelled the system in India and other parts of the world in 2013, we should know its history.

Experiments in Europe, particularly by Michael Faraday in England, Alessandro Volta in Italy, and Georg Ohm in Germany, showed that electricity was a natural phenomenon and that it could be produced on a fairly large scale, stored, and transported to different parts of the country of its origin or even beyond its borders. It was also demonstrated by several scientists that electricity could carry information through wired and wireless means—the radio waves.

In 1840, Samuel F. B. Morse (1791–1872), American inventor and artist, patented a telegraphic system by which messages could be sent by electric wire using a code (later called the Morse Code) to distant places. In 1844, he succeeded in sending the first telegraphic message from Baltimore to Washington D. C., namely, “What hath God wrought?” The Morse Code was an alphanumeric system where letters of the alphabet and numbers were represented by short and long patterns, which were conveyed as sounds, signals, flashes of light, or dots and dashes, to distant destinations.

Morse’s invention was of far-reaching consequence in the daily operation of railways and business establishments. But more quick and dependable means of communication reduced dependence on the telegraph system. For example, when telephone was invented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, and the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi, living in England, started using the wireless method of transmitting messages and later on established the Marconi Company, the importance of the telegraph system got reduced in business as well as the public and private spheres. Today, the telegraph system is defunct, but it is of historical importance for all communicators to know that scientists and inventors have always searched for faster methods of transmitting messages (information) across land and sea. And we cannot forget that the telegraph system served in speeding up human communication quite a lot in the 19th and 20th centuries. Allied systems such as the teleprinter (also known as teletype), telex, and fax machines are functioning even now.

Heinrich Hertz of Germany was the first physicist to transmit and receive radio waves. This happened ten years after James C. Maxwell predicted that light was a form of electromagnetic radiation. Although Marconi is generally credited with the pioneering of broadcasting, radio frequencies are measured in hertz (Hz), kilohertz (kHz), and megahertz (MHz).

J. C. Bose (1858–1937) conducted experiments on electric waves. He too worked on the predictions made by Maxwell about the electromagnetic nature of light waves. Unbeknownst to Hertz and Marconi, Bose obtained waves of short length using his own device called the “electric radiator.” In 1885, he succeeded in sending wireless signals, one year before Marconi invented a method for sending wireless signals.

Marconi was 20 years old when he learnt of Hertz’s experiments which had created electromagnetic waves and a receiver for detecting the waves. Before he was hardly 24, Marconi was sending wireless signals over several miles. He showed the world that messages could be sent without Morse’s telegraph lines or Bell’s telephone lines. In 1896, he migrated to England, with his Irish–Scot mother.

Marconi was more a businessman than an inventor because he applied his scientific invention to the setting up of a business firm in 1897: the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company. His wise management and investment genius helped him to earn GBP 15,000 annually at the tender age of 23! His wireless not only had commercial value but great application in the news transmission business. An important newspaper in the United States, the New York Herald was the first to use Marconigram for news dissemination. Marconi himself gave a radio broadcast of the highlights of a football match for the Herald in October 1899. Finally, businessmen, and military and political leaders helped in the establishment of the American Marconi Company. 

 Two scientists—Reginald Fessenden and Lee de Forest—showed keen interest in Marconi’s invention and enterprise. Fessenden succeeded in sending a lady’s song and violin recital from his lab to a merchant ship in Brant Rock, Massachusetts. 

Lee de Forest (1873–1961) invented the “audion,” a glass bulb radio detector that revolutionised broadcasting. This 1907 invention opened the door to commercial broadcasting all over the world. Lee de Forest surprised the world by broadcasting from New York and from the Eiffel Tower in Paris. He even broadcast the U. S. election results of 1916. Many historians consider him as the first real radio broadcaster.

Lee de Forest’s audion, although costlier than Fessenden’s crystal detector, was quite efficient and dependable. All his patents were bought by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT & T).

Two other important men—David Sarnoff and Frank Conrad—have to be remembered when we look at the early history of broadcasting.

Starting his adult life as a humble Marconi set operator in Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, Sarnoff, a Russian immigrant to the United States, became a celebrity as the operator who received and sent out many SOS signals when the legendary Titanic was about to sink (in 1912); he was the one who alerted many ports about it. Sarnoff was 21 when this happened. A talented person, he eventually became a firm believer in the commercial possibilities of the radio and wrote a memorandum to his superiors in the Marconi Wireless Company about how the Company could expand its commercial activity by persuading many citizens to install radio sets at home.

But Sarnoff could realise his dream only when he became the Commercial Manager and later President of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). The RCA was the corporate establishment owning the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), the earliest radio network. Sarnoff pioneered radio broadcasting in America. With the advent of television in the late 1950s, the NBC started a TV network too.

Dr Frank Conrad, an engineer in the Westinghouse Electric Company, made commercial broadcasting a regular activity. In 1920 he started organising the broadcasting of music on a regular basis from Pittsburgh, an industrial city in the state of Pennsylvania, which had a radio station under Conrad’s direction. It was known by its call letters “KDKA”, and it was the first radio station in the world to broadcast music, news, and sports. The station’s broadcasting began with presidential election news on 4 November 1920.

The radio became a great entertainer in due course, although radio in America was developed there as a segmented medium, with narrowcasting (as opposed to broadcasting to a general audience). Some stations were devoted to popular and classical music, some others to news, views, and sports, and a few others were entirely for traffic news, weather, and sports.

Weather is big news in western countries, especially because the clothes that people wear change according to weather patterns. In our country—where most of the time the weather remains the same in most regions—imitating the West is not a healthy practice, but we always report weather as a ritual. For example, in TV news telecast in Kerala, most news bulletins end with a reporting of the temperatures in three cities: “Kozhikode: 33 degrees celsius, Kochi: 32 and Trivandrum: 30 degrees celsius.” “So what?” the wag would ask with a grin! How does it affect the normal life of a citizen?