KDKA and the Birth of Broadcasting

On the evening of November second, nineteen twenty, a man named Leo Rosenberg sat in a small shed built on the roof of a Westinghouse Electric building in East Pittsburgh. The shed contained a one-hundred-watt transmitter, an antenna, and a microphone. Rosenberg began reading results aloud: Warren G. Harding had won the presidential election over James Cox. He kept reading as the returns came in. Out in the darkness, a few hundred radio hobbyists with homemade receivers listened.

What Rosenberg was doing had never been done before, not in quite this way. KDKA, as it had been licensed six days earlier by the Department of Commerce, was making the first broadcast by a licensed commercial radio station in the United States. The date, the event, and the technology aligned in a way that would change how human beings consumed information for the rest of the century.

Westinghouse had backed the project partly for a practical reason. Its engineer Frank Conrad had been making informal broadcasts of music and sports scores from his garage in Wilkinsburg, and local hardware stores were selling crystal radio sets to people who wanted to hear him. Westinghouse realized that a scheduled, reliable broadcast would create steady demand for its radio equipment. Broadcasting was, from its first night, also a commercial proposition.

By the end of nineteen twenty-one, eight stations were operating across the United States, all of them inspired by KDKA's success. By nineteen twenty-three there were more than five hundred. The network era would follow, and then television, and then everything else. The shed on the Westinghouse rooftop is gone, but the station KDKA is still broadcasting from Pittsburgh today. It is, by its own accurate count, the oldest commercial radio station in continuous operation on Earth.