Made In America - Bill Bryson [147]
But no product was more successful than the radio. Radio, in the form of radio-receiver, entered the language in 1903. Earlier still there had been such specialized forms as radiophone (1881) and radioconductor (1898). As late as 1921 the New York Times was referring to the exciting new medium as ‘wireless telephony’. Others called it a ‘loud-speaking telephone’ or simply a ‘wireless’. When a leading golf club, the Dixmoor, installed radio speakers around the course so that its members could listen to church services (honestly) while playing their Sunday morning round, it referred to the system simply as a ‘telephone’. Radio in the sense of a means of communication and entertainment for the general public didn’t enter the language until 1922 and it took a decade or so before people could decide whether to pronounce it rādio or rădio.
Until as late as 1920, all radio receivers in America were homemade. A crystal set involved little more than some wire, an oatmeal box, an earphone and a piece of crystal. The earliest commercial sets were bulky, expensive and maddeningly difficult to tune. The big breakthrough for radio was the Dempsey-Carpentier fight of 2 July 1921 – which is a little odd since it didn’t actually involve a radio transmission, though it was supposed to.
It is difficult to conceive now how big an event like a heavyweight boxing fight could be in the 1920s, but the Dempsey-Carpentier fight was huge – so huge that the New York Times devoted virtually the whole of its first thirteen pages to reporting it (though it did find a small space on the front page to note the formal ending of World War I). The day before the fight, under the lead front-page headline ‘Radio Phones to Tell Times Square of Fight’, it noted that an operator at ringside in New Jersey would speak into a ‘wireless telephone transmitter’ and that his words would be transmitted instantly to halls in several cities and to crowds outside the New York Times Building on Times Square. Although the headline used the word radio, the article never did. On the day of the fight, ten thousand people jammed Times Square, but because of technical difficulties the radio transmitter wasn’t used. A ticker-tape was pressed into service instead. Even so, most of the people in the crowd thought they were receiving their eyewitness account live by the miracle of radio from New Jersey.26 The very notion of instant, longdistance verbal communication was so electrifying that soon people everywhere were clamouring to have a radio. (Dempsey knocked Carpentier out in the fourth round, incidentally.)
In just three years, beginning in 1922, over four million radio sets were sold, at an average price of $55 In 1922. only 1 home in 500 had a radio. By 1926, the proportion was 1 in 20, and by the end of the decade saturation was nearly total. Radio sales went from $60 million in 1922 to almost $850 million by 1929.27 Radio buffs pored over specialized magazines and formed clubs where they could swap tips and bandy about terms like regenerative circuits, sodion tubes, Grimes reflex circuits, loop aerials, rotary sparks and neutrodynes. Companies that made radios became monolithic corporations seemingly overnight. In one heady year the stock of Radio Corporation of America went from 85¼ to 549. By 1928 people could even listen to broadcasts in their cars after a little company called Motorola invented the car radio.28
The first broadcasters were ham operators using Morse code, but by the 1910s experimental stations were springing up all over. KDKA of East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which was opened by Westinghouse in 1920, has the distinction of being the first true radio station in America, though the credit is sometimes given to a station without call letters operated by the San Jose College of