First Radio Station: 8MK Launches the Broadcast Era

Station 8MK began broadcasting from the second floor of the Detroit News building on August 20, 1920, transmitting election returns from Michigan's primary races to an audience that numbered in the dozens. The broadcast, organized by the newspaper's technology editor William Scripps, used a De Forest transmitter with a range of roughly 100 miles. Most listeners heard it on homemade crystal sets. Commercial radio had arrived, and within five years, it would fundamentally alter how human beings consumed information, entertainment, and advertising. The claim to being the first commercial radio station has been disputed for a century. KDKA in Pittsburgh, which broadcast the Harding-Cox presidential election results on November 2, 1920, has traditionally received more credit, partly because Westinghouse's corporate resources amplified the claim. Station 8MK, which became WBL and then WWJ, was operated by a newspaper rather than an electronics manufacturer and lacked the same promotional machinery. The distinction depends on how one defines "commercial" and "station," terms that had no fixed meaning in 1920. What is beyond dispute is that radio's emergence in the early 1920s created a mass medium with no historical precedent. For the first time, a single voice could reach thousands or millions of people simultaneously, in real time, without requiring literacy. The implications for politics, entertainment, and commerce were immediate. Warren Harding used radio in the 1920 presidential campaign. The first radio advertisement aired on WEAF in New York in 1922. By 1930, more than 12 million American households owned a radio receiver, and the networks NBC and CBS had created a national broadcasting infrastructure. The cultural impact was transformative. Radio created the first truly national celebrities, made professional sports into mass spectator entertainment, and gave Franklin Roosevelt a direct channel to the American people through his Fireside Chats. Detroit's 8MK, whatever its precise ranking in the chronology of firsts, stood at the beginning of an era in which information moved at the speed of electromagnetic waves and the relationship between speaker and audience was changed forever.