It's Official: Broadcasting in the US is 90 Years old on Dec.1

[Penthode]

Hi All,

I expect that perhaps the most important date related to the beginning of U.S. broadcasting will pass by with little or no fanfare. It is December 1, 1921, exactly 90 years ago on Thursday. I refer to "broadcasting" in the modern sense: that is, the transmission from a single transmitter to a wide audience of what was then defined by the U.S. Department of Commerce (the radio regulatory body prior to the FRC and later the FCC) as the "broadcasting of news, concerts and such matter" and "broadcasting of crop reports and weather forecasts". It is heartening to know that the head of the Department of Commerce was an "engineer" and avid amateur radio operator, later to aspire to the U.S. Presidency (Herbert Hoover).

December 1, 1921 was also the date that the broadcast station call letter system was formally established eg "W" east of the Mississippi and "K" west of the Mississippi.

I have excepted a paragraph from the early radio history website by Thomas White below, defining this most important historical date to us. It may be a good time to reflect on this event in light of the Congressional TV spectrum reclamation bill that is being debated in Washington this week.

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Adoption of Broadcast Service Regulations

The primary purpose of the original 1912 wireless regulations was the establishment of an open system of international communication, and Land stations which handled commercial messages-for-hire received Public Service licences. But a second commercial licence, Limited Commercial, was also set up, as a catch-all category for stations used for some sort of commercial activity, but "limited" in the sense that they did not accept public messages. Most of the original Limited Commercial stations were used by companies for private communication between their geographically dispersed sites.

It was only effective on December 1, 1921 that the Commerce Department's Bureau of Navigation first formally established standards for a broadcasting service. These new regulations were reported in the January 3, 1922 edition of the Radio Service Bulletin. However, instead of creating a new licence class, broadcasting was set up as a service category within the existing Limited Commercial classification. (Broadcasting would not become a separate licence until radio regulation was transferred to the Federal Radio Commission in 1927).

The new broadcast service was assigned two wavelengths: 360 meters (833 kHz) for "broadcasting news, concerts and such matter", and 485 meters (619 kHz) for "broadcasting crop reports and weather forecasts". Thus, depending on the service offered, a broadcast station could be licenced for 360 meters, 485 meters, or for both wavelengths. Stations using the same wavelength in the same area had to share time in order to avoid interference. Also, a station licenced for both wavelengths had to switch from one wavelength to the other whenever its program fell into another service category. (This dual-wavelength setup was dropped in May, 1923 when the number of broadcast wavelengths was greatly expanded).

The complete article is here:

http://earlyradiohistory.us/pion622.htm

All the best,

Terry