On July 2, 1921 Harold Warren, a real estate salesman, arrived at the beach in Asbury Park, New Jersey, with a receiver mounted on a roller chair. He had been entertaining passersby on the boardwalk with his radio for about a year, but on this day he attracted a particularly large crowd eager to hear a blow-by-blow “voice description” of a heavyweight championship match—a Frenchman, Georges Carpentier, challenged an American, Jack “Manassa Mauler” Dempsey, fifty miles away at the Boyles Thirty Acres arena in Jersey City. Carpentier lost. After the broadcast, Warren enclosed a photograph together with his letter...

In March 1924, WEAF and its owner AT&T sued WHN and its owners, George Schubel, ofRidgewood Times, and Marcus Loew, of Loew’s theaters, for infringing on the company’s monopoly on transmitters and sponsored programming—the first step toward extracting fees from all “squatter” stations. AT&T had legal grounds but no public legitimacy. William Anders, a twenty-two-year-old typist and son of a German iron worker, submitted a petition to theNew Jersey Evening Journalfrom “several hundred radio fans” protesting the WEAF lawsuit. New York commissioner Grover Whalen accused AT&T of taking “complete control of the air” because it used...

Once the legislative dust had settled over licenses and wavelength, listeners faced an unwieldy network system. If in the 1920s fans addressed their letters to the artist care of their local station, now the growing network broadcasting system and its production process had become much more complex. In 1931, NBC broadcast its blockbusterAmos ’n’ Andyover its Blue Network of affiliated stations. The Lord and Thomas ad agency produced it. Pepsodent sponsored it. Charles Correll and Freeman Gosden wrote and performed. This was only one of many possible combinations of agencies involved. Writers could work out of the ad...

In the Jazz Age, vaudeville actors moving into radio frequently put on minstrel skits—humorous, often derogatory, imitations of Southern black speech and singing. Among all of them, Wendell Hall stood out as the first national radio star. Originally a small-time Chicago vaudeville performer, Hall started in radio in 1921. His popular tours of radio stations, organized by the Ayer ad agency for his sponsor, the National Carbon Company and its Eveready Batteries, made him a national attraction before the network era.¹ By the 1930s, Wendell Hall was no longer popular, his old-fashioned style having been eclipsed by crooners like...

In 1938, philosopher Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno arrived from Germany to assume a half-time position at the Princeton Radio Research Project, funded by a grant from Rockefeller Foundation. The project’s director, Paul Lazarsfeld, invited him to study listener mail to classical music programs, conduct interviews with music industry executives, and in general supervise the music division of the project. “When I was confronted with the demand to ‘measure culture,’ ” Adorno later remembered, “I reflected that culture might be precisely that condition that excludes a mentality capable of measuring it. In general, I resisted the indiscriminate application of the principle ‘science...

In Depression-era Oklahoma, at a remote farmhouse in Comanche County, local sheriffs caught up with two small-time armed robbers, George Sands and Leon Siler. A gunfight ensued, and the owner of the farm died in the crossfire. Three years later, in February of 1939, a popular “true crime” radio program,Gang Busters, reenacted these events over the national CBS network.¹ After the broadcast, producers received a letter from the farmer’s widow, Berniece Medrano, who declaredGang Busters’ rendition of the gunfight a fraud. Medrano insisted that the lawmen deliberately shot her husband: “In the first place, the Bandits did not...

Radio station WANN announced its presence to Annapolis, Maryland, on New Year’s Day of 1947 with the white big band sound of Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, and Perry Como. But this is not how Morris Blum later remembered the birth of his station. For months, his engineer insisted on playing Bing Crosby records and stuck the blues and gospel records in the closet. “He’d say ‘you don’t want to play that, that’s race music.’ Then one day when he was on vacation, the deejay, Joe, and I went in there and got some of those albums,” Blum later recalled. “We...

In 2007,New York Timessoftware reviewer David Pogue gave a speech to five hundred American college students. To demonstrate the importance of copyright, he asked who in the audience thought downloading a movie without paying for it was wrong. Only two hands went up in agreement, prompting him to declare an alarming “generational divide in copyright morality.” In 1924, in another divide, listener petitions lined up behind “squatter” stations that violated radio transmitter patents against the patent owner, AT&T. Such stories render moot the idea, advanced by recent studies, that a sense of fairness is a universal phenomenon. Evolutionary...