Broadcasting borrowed its name from farmers flinging seed across a field
Long before radio, to broadcast meant sowing seed by scattering it widely by hand. The word later stretched to cover spreading news through print and telegraph, and by 1898 it described a single radio station reaching many listeners at once. Oddly, the first electronic broadcasts did not use radio at all but ordinary telephone lines.
In 1881 the French inventor Clément Ader created the Théâtrophone, which let paying subscribers listen to live opera and theatre over telephone wires. Telephone newspaper services offering news and entertainment followed in the 1890s, mostly in large European cities. Until then electronic communication, whether telegraph, telephone or early radio, had been one-to-one, each message meant for a single recipient.
Radio changed the scale. Guglielmo Marconi began experimenting with radio waves in 1894 and showed by 1901 that they could cross the Atlantic; on 17 December 1902 a message from his station in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, became the first to cross from North America. By 1904 ships could subscribe to nightly news summaries for their onboard newspapers. Commercial AM radio took off around 1920 as vacuum tube equipment spread, and FM later displaced it as the main commercial standard.
Pictures came next. On 25 March 1925 John Logie Baird showed moving images at the Selfridges department store in London using a spinning Nipkow disk, and the BBC based experimental broadcasts on his mechanical system from 1929. For most of the century, though, televisions relied on the cathode-ray tube invented by Karl Braun, and Philo Farnsworth demonstrated a promising version to his family on 7 September 1927. Satellites joined in from the 1960s, and in the 2000s broadcasters moved from analog to digital signals.
The appetite grew enormously. Between 1986 and 2007 the world's capacity to receive one-way broadcast information more than quadrupled, the equivalent of rising from 55 to 175 newspapers per person per day. Under United States rules, broadcasting means transmission intended for the general public, which is why ham and citizens band radio operators may transmit but are not permitted to broadcast.
Source: Broadcasting
