CHANGES IN RADIO INDUSTRY
Today, radio is a bigger business than it was in the beginning in terms of stations, programs, listeners, and dollars, but it has become a supplemental medium with the introduction of the television. It wasn’t always this way. In the 1930s and 1940s, before there was television, radio was the world’s primary medium of entertainment. The history of radio as a medium of entertainment and information began with a Russian immigrant to America named David Sarnoff. In 1912 while working for American Marconi Company in New York City as a wireless telegraph operator at the age of 21, he heard the faint signal that read “S.S. Titanic ran
into an iceberg. Sinking fast.” For the next 72 hours he was the only link between the Titanic disaster and the rest of the world. Three years later David wrote a memo to the vice-president of his company that read: “I have in mind a plan of development which would make radio a ‘household utility’ in the same sense as the piano or phonograph. The idea is to bring music into the home by wireless.” David Sarnoff’s vision was incredibly accurate and within a decade the radio had become exactly what he had envisioned. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, radio quickly became America’s centerpiece for entertainment and news. In a time of poverty and gloom, the nation sat with the whole family around the radio and listened to President Franklin D. Roosevelt give his fireside chats in their living rooms. Besides being used as a political instrument, radio developed into the country’s most popular medium for entertainment in the 1930s, from comedy shows and drama serials to big band live performances. Comedy stars of the era like Jack Benny and Fred Allen were very popular. Game shows like the “64 Dollar Question,” along with children’s drama serials like “Little Orphan Annie,” and western drama serials such as “The Lone Ranger” were popular programming for evening entertainment. People would wait till their favorite radio program was finished before going out to the theater on the weekends.
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