Thanks for that excellent article, Steve. What is the name of the podcast?
Have a good one:
John
On 8/25/2020 10:17 AM, Steve wrote:
Blank--
I thought a lot of people might be interested in this bit of Detroit history that occurred this past Thursday, August 20, in 1920.
Incidentally, Tim Kiska, the author, has a great "Detroit History" podcast that you can catch on all the usual podcast players. It just completed the "third season," and has a ton of episodes archived -- I didn't count, but at least fifty. They all run around a half hour, give or take. They cover everything from the Model T, to some of Detroit's iconic art; and several on Civil Rights and other Detroit cultural developments.
Steve
Class of '72
Iconic WWJ radio started as a Detroit experiment Resulting media revolution impacts 100 years of culture By Tim Kiska Special to Detroit Free Press
The revolution began when an unlikely trio of Detroiters gathered in a Lafayette Boulevard office at the western edge of downtown. It was 8:15 p.m. on Friday Aug. 20, 100 years ago.
One of the three connected an electrical circuit, one spoke a few words and a popular song that had survived World War I was played. And then what many historians regard as America's first commercial radio broadcast ended with a refrain of "Taps.
With that, the birth of radio station 8MK, now WWJ-AM, Newsradio 950, was complete.
The modest experiment represents the leading edge of a media revolution that reached far beyond the Jazz Age and Prohibition, united a wounded nation amid the Great Depression, and has had an impact on 100 years of American history and culture.
By best estimate, perhaps half of Wayne County's 100 or so privately owned receiving sets were tuned to the historic WWJ broadcast. A year later, the station had 10,000 listeners. Exponential, explosive growth continued at incredible speed, for the station and for the infant medium.
Radio had been invented in the late 19th century, but not as something one turned on to hear news or entertainment. It meant that communicating via Morse code no longer required stringing wires across the country or laying cables under the oceans. This was revolutionary for ships at sea, but had nothing to do with what we now think of as turning our radio on.
By 1906, Canadian inventor Reginald Fessenden had figured out how to send not just dots and dashes but speech and music through the air. Until 1920, however, the only programming heard was sporadic broadcasts from ham operators or companies and organizations. The tiny audience comprised citizens who built their own crystal sets or bought the few manufactured receivers that began to appear in shops.
William E. Scripps, son of Detroit News founder James E. Scripps, became almost instantly fascinated by the new technology. His pathfinding if vague idea was to go on the air regularly with a menu of programming, to sell advertising, to make money, to be a force in the community.
It was under the younger Scripps' auspices that Howard Trumbo, Frank Edwards and Elton Plant gathered on the second floor of the Detroit News Building on a Friday evening 100 years ago.
An office boy and an old song
Plant was an office boy at the News, noted for entertaining employees in the newspaper's lunchroom with his excellent singing voice.
Howard Trumbo was a proprietor of the Edison Record Shop on Woodward Avenue across from the David Whitney Building.
Frank Edwards served as their technical expert, the evening's engineer.
Apparently, it was the 19-year-old Plant who spoke the station's first words, a simple: "8MK calling."
The haphazard, on-and-off jumble of radio signals that existed at that time were assigned call letters by the U.S. Commerce Department, which exercised loose oversight of the medium. The "8" stood for a region that included the Lower Peninsula.
And with one number and two randomly assigned letters -- no jingle, no commercial braggadocio of any kind -- the broadcast industry found its voice.
Trumbo dropped a needle on a phonograph record. Plant held a gramophone horn to capture the sound.
The first music heard by those 50 or so listeners in a county where that year Henry Ford alone would build almost 1.5 million cars, heard "Roses of Picardy," a song made popular during World War I.
Young adults today, who did not experience life without the Internet, let alone without television, might have difficulty understanding the importance of that moment. Commercial radio was about to transform the world.
The timeline was breathtakingly rapid. The 1920s brought boom times never before seen, in the country and in Detroit.
The freewheeling lifestyle changes of the decade were influenced in no small way by the burgeoning, almost omnipresent sound of the new medium. It was the wildest of good times. By the end of the decade, three of every five American homes had a radio.
But in 1929, the world's economies were collapsing. Wall Street crashed. In 1933, banks were failing, bread lines were common, Americans had fallen into their greatest distress of the 20th century.
The new president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, needed a way to reach, somehow, almost every citizen and ... talk to them.
So it was that just 13 years after a Detroit News office boy had ad-libbed "8MK calling," FDR used the nationwide grid of commercial radio networks to calm and reassure the nation. FDR's historic fireside chats were perhaps radio's most compelling moment.
During World War II, CBS News correspondent Edward R. Murrow brought the Battle of Britain into American homes by broadcasting from the rooftops of London.
During the 1950's and '60's, radio dictated the musical tastes of teenagers.
In more recent decades, the rise of talk radio and conservative commentators such as Rush Limbaugh altered the political landscape.
TV and the Internet and social media and whatever technology comes next will never obscure commercial radio's 100-year legacy.
Station 8MK became WWJ in March 1922.
Whether William E. Scripps' experiment marks the very instant of commercial radio's creation is not 100% accepted. Pittsburgh's KDKA also claims the honor, and historians debate the matter.
But what happened that night on Lafayette Boulevard holds, at worst, a tie for the honor. It makes fascinating history in any case.
'What's radiophone?'
Young Elton Plant recalled being summoned to Scripps' office. Scripps told Plant he would be assigned to a "radiophone" project.
"What's radiophone? Plant asked.
"A very good question, Elton," Scripps replied. "None of us is really sure yet just how we are going to make use of it."
The radio revolution looked a whole lot like evolution.
Eleven days after sending "Roses of Picardy" to barely enough listeners to fill a football team's roster, station 8MK aired coverage of Michigan's 1920 gubernatorial primaries. An orchestra played between announcements of vote returns. Those who lacked a radio could amble on down to Lafayette Boulevard and, between vote totals, watch movies and cartoons on a screen the News put up across the street.
Two weeks later, with the station broadcasting music, house party attendees at 180 Parker, on Detroit's east side not far from Indian Village, reported the broadcast was a big hit. "The Naughty Waltz" was the evening's sensation.
By November, the Detroit News was urging those who owned radios "to make up parties and get the election news by this novel method. Musical numbers will also be sent by radio between flashes of the returns. This will be the first radiophone returns of a presidential election ever transmitted."
The future WWJ tried anything in those early days. There were no rules, no significant government regulation until 1927 and, for the most part, no money, because advertisers weren't certain what to make of radio.
WWJ engineers stretched a 290-foot wire 140 feet above the ground running half a city block from the News Building to the Fort Shelby Hotel. The newly boosted signal was picked up as far away as France and Germany.
How about placing a microphone at St. Paul's Episcopal Cathedral in Detroit, and airing Sunday sermons live?
Done.
The Reverend Warren Lincoln Rogers, the cathedral's dean, became what some have called the country's first radio minister. Rogers believed his broadcasts were saving souls, and wrote that his pioneering radio ministry "had been instrumental for uniting separated husbands and wives, of bringing thieves and forgers to repentance, of comforting countless shut-ins and persons isolated in lonely places, of reaching many people in hospitals and institutions."
How about broadcasting a Detroit Tigers game or University of Michigan football game live?
Done.
Air a Detroit Symphony Orchestra concert?
Done.
Might listeners enjoy dropping in on a wedding ceremony?
That happened June, 17, 1922, when Miss Kathryn Holmes and Frank W. Hopkins (of Cleveland, Ohio) were betrothed at St. Paul's.
The station held a contest awarding $10 to the person who listened to a speech by a General Electric executive and sent back the most accurate transcription of the talk. Christian Thomson of Toledo won the prize.
Listeners from as far away as Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and Riverside, California, reported hearing the broadcasts.
With only a handful of stations on the air across the nation, WWJ found its evening broadcast schedule printed in The New York Times.
Program start times were more a statement of intent than a contract with listeners. "Talent," whatever it might be, was shuffled in and out. If a program ended early, the next began immediately.
Few people who appeared on early commercial radio knew what to make of it. Ernest R. Ball, who wrote "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling," sang on air in 1921. "I wonder if my son in Cleveland heard me sing those songs," he asked the invisible audience, estimated at 10,000 people. "You know that kid has a wireless set and he pretty near wrecked the roof of the house putting it in."
"Nobody had any stated time on the air," recalled Jefferson Webb, an early program manager. "The studio was thronged from morning until night with wistful aspirants for fame on the air, and every soprano whose accompaniment (pianist) Val Coffey could play -- and he could play 'em all -- had her moment before the mike, often for the first and last time. I went on the air every evening at varying times whenever we ran out of mandolinists or Otto Kruger's flute got too hot to play and I yarned away mostly about nothing at all for 15 minutes to a half an hour."
Meanwhile, the public's appetite for the medium and its sometimes serious, sometimes frivolous content was enormous.
Radio manufacturers couldn't at first meet demand. Building a radio set was not especially tricky, however, and the Detroit News began a column for people who wanted to try.
Historian Erik Barnouw wrote that the News column, which debuted December 19, 1920, just four months after Elton Taylor's "8MK calling," was the first of its kind. Some installments were bylined "Old Man Ohm" or "A Radio Expert."
Advice ranged from the simple to the dauntingly complex, including definitions of such terms as "reflecting galvanometer" and "regenerative circuit."
An Oct. 8, 1922, headline proclaimed: "Every Man A Radio Engineer."
One radio station, four Steinways
As long as many homes lacked a radio, WWJ kept devising new ways for Detroiters to listen.
The station often placed a receiver in a park, boosted the signal with megaphones, and waited for the crowds. WWJ aired the 1922 World Series baseball game between the New York Yankees and the New York Giants, using a 16-foot spruce megaphone to get the signal out to a crowd of 5,000 in Grand Circus Park. Detroit News sportswriter H.G. Salsinger did the play-by-play.
"The great throng hung on every word, groaned at misplays and applauded good ones," according to one account. "It was clear that radio was making the game a living picture in every mind. A number of women remained in the crowd throughout."
When the cornerstone was laid for the Masonic Temple, near the northern edge of downtown, the crowd of 10,000 heard a WWJ broadcast of a concert band playing at Belle Isle.
A few saw the burgeoning medium as a threat to good social order.
Detroit Free Press Editor Malcolm Bingay, in his autobiography, recalled a chance meeting with Bishop Michael J. Gallagher of the Catholic Diocese of Detroit while visiting a bank.
"Bingay, my friend," the bishop said, "what is this new wireless thing down at The News that everybody is so excited about? I warn you, sir, that if all I hear about is true, it is a dangerous mechanism, a device of the devil. The very idea of letting the voices of men unknown and insidiously into the homes of the American people, voices in the night that are heard with their allurements and false promises, and then fade out and no one knows whence they came. I predict that unless this thing is regulated, my dear sir, it will be a great menace."
Just seven years after commercial radio's birth, stations were beginning to dot the map coast to coast and radio signals jamming airways like a freeway rush hour. Congress passed the Radio Act of 1927, and government became serious about regulating the industry.
By 1929, the younger Scripps had taken charge of the company and any belief that radio was a mere novelty was long forgotten. Scripps' vision for commercial radio, which as a medium offering the masses free entertainment was Depression-proof, escalated even during the difficult times.
He proceeded to build two buildings, monuments to his belief that radio was the future and that technology was worth major investment.
The new WWJ building, erected in 1936 across from the News, was five floors of wonder. The first floor featured a 340-seat auditorium for live shows. The third floor included three studios, each with its own control room. The fourth floor housed yet another studio, also with its own control room. The building housed four Steinway grand pianos, two in Studio A and one apiece in Studios B and C, each specially adjusted to produce the perfect tones for broadcasting.
A week of special events to dedicate the building began with Ethel Barrymore and Walter Hampden performing in "The Servant In the House," and ended with a Detroit Symphony Orchestra concert featuring Franz Liszt's "Les Preludés."
The transmitter facility on Eight Mile Road at Meyers, built at the same time, was a similar technological showcase. Engineers from across the country came to inspect it.
Technology aside, inside the building they found a mural featuring baseball players, football players, preachers, musicians, dancers, and others marching in formation.
"In the procession may be seen Music, Drama, Religion and Education being invoked by the spirit to public broadcast," a promotional booklet said.
The building became a tourist attraction.
Dr. Lee De Forest, who had built the little desktop transmitter that on Aug. 20, 1920, sent "Roses of Picardy" booming out to some 50 listeners, came out for a visit. It was three years after FDR's first fireside chat.
De Forest said, in an understated conflation of personal history and national history: "What a difference in 16 years!"
Try 100 years.
Today, the vacant transmitter building is in the process of being repurposed as a restaurant. The name, hearkening back to the station's roots: 8MK.
WWJ has remained an important community force, even as TV, the Internet, and phones so smart you can use them to listen to an orchestra and get election returns, also changed the world. Just as commercial radio did a century ago.
Tim Kiska, a former Free Press staffer, also worked as a producer/reporter at WWJ-AM. He is now an associate professor at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. He can be reached at tkiska@xxxxxxxxx
