Radio for everyone

The story

Invisible waves

In 1895 a young man from Bologna, twenty-one-year-old Guglielmo Marconi, carried out an experiment at the family villa in Pontecchio, in the hills near Bologna. He had built a device that produced electromagnetic waves, which had already been studied by other scientists, such as Heinrich Hertz. He sent a signal more than a kilometre away, beyond a hill, where no wire or cable could carry it: an assistant, to confirm he had received it, fired a rifle shot. Wireless telegraphy was born.

In Italy nobody was interested, so Marconi, with his Irish mother, moved to England. There his invention was an immediate success, above all with the navy, which saw how useful it could be for communicating with ships at sea. In 1901 Marconi wanted to try something the experts thought impossible: sending a signal from one side of the Atlantic to the other. From Cornwall, in England, a signal was sent that repeated the letter “S”, three dots in Morse code. In Newfoundland, in Canada, Marconi, by his own account (some historians doubt it), managed to hear, with his assistants, the three tiny, separate “ticks” in the receiver. It was 12 December 1901. In 1909 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics.

A telegram that saves lives

Wireless communication soon became essential at sea. In April 1912, when the liner Titanic struck an iceberg, the radio operator sent out calls for help, which were picked up by a nearby ship, the Carpathia: she arrived within a few hours and saved more than seven hundred people. After the tragedy, the law required all large ships to have a radio and an operator always on duty.

From telegraphy to the voice

Until then radio waves carried only signals, dots and dashes in Morse code. In the following years, with new inventions, such as the valve called the “triode” by the American Lee de Forest (1906), which made it possible to amplify signals, it became possible to transmit sounds, music and voices as well. During the First World War radio was used to communicate in military operations, and after the war many enthusiasts in America built receivers at home and enjoyed listening to faraway messages.

2 November 1920

One of the first radio stations with regular broadcasts, KDKA in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, began transmitting on 2 November 1920, the evening of the American presidential election. In this way anyone with a radio could listen to the results live: Warren Harding beat James Cox. There were few listeners at first, but the idea proved a winner. Within two years more than five hundred stations had appeared in the United States, and families were buying sets to listen to music, news, baseball games, children's programmes and stories.

Other countries soon followed. In England the BBC was born in 1922. In Italy the first broadcast was on 6 October 1924, from a room in Rome, with an announcement by the announcer Maria Luisa Boncompagni, and a concert was transmitted. The first name of the broadcaster was URI (Unione radiofonica italiana), then EIAR from 1927 and finally RAI from 1944.

A window on the world

At first the sets were expensive and were listened to with headphones, one person at a time; then loudspeakers arrived, and music could fill the whole room. In the 1920s and 1930s radio entered every home and every village, where before only the newspaper arrived, when it arrived at all. Families gathered around the set on winter evenings to listen to programmes, songs, radio plays and news. In 1938 Orson Welles broadcast the novel “The War of the Worlds” as if it were a news bulletin, and some listeners were frightened, thinking that the Martians were landing.