Before radio stations, Europeans heard the news down telephone lines
Long before radio, some European cities had telephone newspapers that piped news and entertainment to paying subscribers. They could bill every listener but reached only one town, since signals could not yet be amplified. Radio solved the distance problem and created a new one: how to charge people who could listen for free.
An 1898 review of early wireless, then called Hertzian telegraphy, put the objection bluntly: nobody would pay to shout to the world on a system where non-subscribers could not be stopped from listening in free. Many countries answered by requiring licences to run a receiver. Nathan Stubblefield was more optimistic, predicting in 1902 that anyone with a telephone receiver and a few feet of wire could hear weather reports sent from Washington and, eventually, news of every kind.
Early stations sent Morse code, which limited audiences. From 1904 the US Navy broadcast daily time signals and weather, and a Marconi station at Camperdown in Nova Scotia added time signals in 1907. A transmitter on the Eiffel Tower sent time signals heard across Europe, including simple beeps for people who could not read Morse, and families in London set their clocks by it. Weather reports even served as entertainment.
Voice broadcasting took longer. Early audio experiments relied on spark, alternator and arc transmitters, and most inventors wanted private radiotelephones rather than programmes for the public; only vacuum-tube transmitters made widespread broadcasting practical. In 1902 Julio Cervera Baviera sent audio from Xàbia to Ibiza. Reginald Fessenden demonstrated alternator-based audio at Brant Rock, Massachusetts, on 21 December 1906, and in a letter decades later said he had then aired music on Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve, heard as far as Norfolk, Virginia, and the West Indies. No contemporary record confirming those broadcasts has ever turned up.
Modern stations reach listeners from land-based transmitters using analogue AM or FM or digital standards such as DAB, HD Radio and Digital Radio Mondiale, and from orbiting satellites. Many produce their own shows, while others take programming from networks through syndication or simultaneous broadcast.
Source: Radio broadcasting
