National Radio Day

National Radio Day might not be exactly the same as Christmas but to us here at the WREN, it’s pretty important! It is almost the anniversary of WREN’s first, inauspicious first air date: That was March 14, 2016 when yours truly, Jon Hall, decided to leave a multidisc CD player upon deciding that things were wired up enought to leave it on somewhere around 2 Am, I believe. No major celebration or a great story to tell!

As to National Radio Day, it is a day to celebrate radio from it’s foundation when Heinrich Hertz descovered electromagnetic (radio) waves until today. As to the beginnings, Sir Oliver Lodge is responsible for further developing Professor Hertz discovery and arguabley being the first person who showed radioto be a useful invention but did not see it for the communications behameth that it was to be. That step was for Guglielmo Marconi who understood that Oliver Lodges work need one thing to become a great communications medium. That thing was power! Marconi took the works of others and truly magnified it transmitting the first signal across the Atlantic from the UK to Nova Scotia in Canada. He was not an engineer and, save for home schooling, had no formal education. He never considered himslef ot be an engineer despite his basically seat of your pants, brute force development of radio. He was also an excellent business man with his company still in existence today especially in Europe.

Broadcasting, as what we try to do at WREN, was first pioneered by Charles David “Doc” Herrold of San Jose California. He was not the first to transmit an audio signal. That honor likely belongs to Reginald Fessenden who transmitted a notably distorted audio signal using new technology that he had developed. That test signal covered a distance of one mile from his laboratory to an outbuilding where three potential investors in his technology were listening.

From a technological standpoint the development of the vacuum tube was a major step that allowed radio as we know it to develop. The basic vacuum tube was first invented by Sir John Ambrose Fleming who also developed the transmission facility to broadcast audio across the Atlantic. Where thigs get interesting for radio as in broadcast radio is when…

More to come!