PHOTO: MCFARLAND AND CO.

Radio didn’t start in the United States, but it wasn’t long before it made the leap across the ocean from Europe. When that happened, at the dawn of the 20th century, the course of the medium split into two great paths. One way led to its growth throughout the world, splitting time and again as it entered new cultures and was fashioned to the purposes of those who controlled its use. The other way led radio to a rambunctious culture that was itself being fashioned by people from around the world—to America. And like the immigrants, radio would never be the same again.

This latter story is the subject of veteran journalist Alfred Balk’s new book, The Rise of Radio: From Marconi Through the Golden Age (McFarland & Co., 2006). In this lively, well-balanced account of radio’s ascent in America, from diverse scientific origins to astonishing media power, Balk carefully picks just the ripest moments for the reader’s enlightenment. This is ground that has been well traveled, after all. Volumes have been written about the halcyon days of radio. The most revered of these is the classic A History of Broadcasting in the United States, by Erik Barnouw, written in the 1960s. Balk in no way attempts to plumb the depths of that masterful project. Instead, he focuses on the human dimension to radio’s influence. Americans were surprised and delighted to recognize themselves in the medium, which shaped them even as they were shaping it. Together they created a wildly growing, symbiotic culture.

In the preface, Balk writes that he attempted the book because he saw a lack in the literature of a “one-volume narrative that portrayed in journalistic form the sweeping drama of radio history.” And what a history it is, altering everything in its wake. As Balk notes: “For the United States, [radio] was the last block needed to forge a modern continental nation: a nationwide assembly hall. It helped meld a polyglot of largely rural, ethnic, and immigrant subcultures into a national sensibility, foster unity through a cataclysmic depression and war, and become a mass-communications entity.”

Balk covers the territory briskly. He moves rapidly from the invention of the technology to its implementation, proceeding from Morse to Maxwell to Marconi and others. Then he plunges into the association of commercial, military, and civilian participants in the emerging story. We are immediately reminded that the evolution of radio was a potluck affair, filled with as many ingredients as the vagaries of history allowed.

For instance, though a subsidiary of Marconi’s successful British firm was the first major enterprise to dominate radio in America, during World War I the U.S. government suspended all domestic radio patents and put the military in charge of all applications. At the war’s end, instead of returning to the status quo ante, the government enabled American Marconi’s competitors, such as General Electric and Westinghouse, to form a special trust to supposedly end any renewed patent squabbles. With little other choice, American Marconi threw in the towel in 1919 and agreed to join the new partnership, called the Radio Corporation of America, or RCA. It was a truce that lasted only months.

In 1920, Balk relates, two Westinghouse employees stumbled upon the idea of using radio transmissions to broadcast programming on a regular basis. The practice had been tinkered with for over a decade, with some operators occasionally sending holiday greetings to any listener tuned in to their frequency. However, the early radio giants made their profits from private point-to-point transmissions, or radiotelephony, not point-to-many. The new Westinghouse effort soon resulted in a station, in Pittsburgh, assigned the call letters KDKA, devoted to reaching the public with a variety of programs on a daily basis. It caused a sensation. In no time, rivals jumped headlong into broadcasting, and the radio craze of the 1920s was on.

The broadcasting boom pitted the radio trust partners against one another and against RCA itself. Now they were competing to reach listeners—and to make money selling radio sets. However, special interest groups, from insurance companies to department stores, quickly were “on the air,” too, all on the strength of a new revenue stream: advertising.

The next twist in radio’s American story yielded two of history’s most striking examples of what not to do in business. The matter in question was broadcasting networks, radio’s next logical step.

First, the trust partners negotiated with AT&T to use its landlines across the country to broadcast programs over a national network of affiliates, an RCA subsidiary called the National Broadcasting Company, or NBC. AT&T concluded that it would make so much money from radiotelephony and from NBC that it could dispense with its own broadcasting initiative. It thus opted out of a revolution.

Second, when NBC’s young leader was informed that a new programming company wanted to provide the network with talent, he scoffed at it. When told that the organization would launch its own network service anyway, he laughed at it. In 1929, the new company’s principals formed the Columbia Broadcasting System, or CBS.

These juicy details are only a sample of the business history that Balk provides. He devotes even more space, however, to what Americans did with their bounteous new industry: they entertained and informed themselves just as if they were all in the same place together. Radio’s “assembly hall” became its living room, content became king, and the country was hypnotized.