KDKA Goes Live: America's First Commercial Radio Station

Radio station KDKA broadcast the returns of the 1920 presidential election from a makeshift studio in a shack atop the Westinghouse Electric factory in East Pittsburgh on November 2, and American mass media was never the same. A handful of listeners with homemade crystal sets heard Warren G. Harding's landslide victory over James Cox relayed from a telephone line to the Pittsburgh Post newsroom. KDKA's claim to being the first commercial radio station is debated by historians who point to earlier experimental broadcasts in Detroit, San Jose, and elsewhere. What made KDKA's launch distinctive was its commercial license, its regular programming schedule, and the backing of Westinghouse, which saw broadcasting as a way to sell the radio receivers it manufactured. The station began daily broadcasts the following day and never stopped. The timing was fortunate. By 1920, the technology for voice transmission had matured enough to make broadcasting practical, and thousands of amateur radio hobbyists had developed skills during World War I, when the military trained operators in large numbers. Westinghouse engineer Frank Conrad had been running experimental broadcasts from his garage, playing phonograph records and reading scores, and the enthusiastic response convinced the company to formalize the operation. Radio's growth was explosive. Within two years, over 500 stations were broadcasting across the United States, and manufacturers could not build receivers fast enough to meet demand. By the decade's end, national networks like NBC and CBS were delivering news, entertainment, and advertising to tens of millions of homes simultaneously. The medium transformed American culture, creating shared national experiences from presidential addresses to the War of the Worlds panic of 1938. KDKA still broadcasts today from Pittsburgh, a century into the experiment it helped launch.