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Wednesday 12 June 2013

Broadcasting

The word ‘broadcasting’, referring to radio transmissions, was originally an agricultural word for the wide scattering of seeds.

Reginald Fessenden transmitted the first radio broadcast in 1906. It consisted of a poetry reading, a violin solo, and a speech.

In April 1909 Charles David Herrold, an electronics instructor in San Jose, California, constructed an early radio station. He coined the terms "narrowcasting" and "broadcasting" respectively to identify transmissions destined for a single receiver such as that on board a ship, and those transmissions destined for a general audience.

Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi's Writtle, near Chelmsford research center was the location of the first officially publicised sound broadcasts in the UK. One of them featured Dame Nellie Melba.

The first radio broadcast license by the U.S. Commerce Department was given in 1920 to Westinghouse for station KDKA in Pittsburgh. On November 2, 1920, KDKA broadcast the US presidential election returns from a shack on the roof of the K Building of the Westinghouse Electric Company "East Pittsburgh Works" in Turtle Creek, Pennsylvania. The original broadcast was said to be heard as far away as Canada.

Through the next month semi-weekly broadcasts were made, until December 21, 1920 when KDKA embarked on an ambitious daily schedule, initially for about an hour each evening.

c 1921 photograph of the 9th floor KDKA transmission room.

When broadcasting began, directors had to communicate with people on the air without making noise, so they developed hand signals. Time is always a key element in live broadcasts. The person at the microphone needed to know if the program was on schedule. If things were "just right," the director signaled with a finger to the side of his or her nose.

In 1936, England became the first country in the world to provide regular public broadcasting on television.

In 1943 RCA sold the NBC Blue radio network to Edward Noble for $8-million. Noble renamed the network the American Broadcasting Company, ABC

The first "networked" television broadcasts took place in 1949 when KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania went on the air connecting the east coast and mid-west programming.

The BBC's first live television transmission across the English Channel took place on 27 August 1950. The program, titled Television Crosses the Channel, was broadcast from Calais, France, and was hosted by Richard Dimbleby. The program featured a variety of events, including a torchlight procession, speeches, and performances by local musicians and dancers. The broadcast was a major milestone in the development of television technology, and it helped to pave the way for the future of international broadcasting.

The transmission was made possible by a new experimental television link that had been installed between Calais and London. The link used a microwave beam to transmit the television signals across the Channel. The quality of the pictures was not very good, but it was a significant improvement over previous attempts to transmit television signals over long distances.

NBC made the first coast-to-coast NTSC color broadcast in 1954 when it telecast the Tournament of Roses Parade, with public demonstrations given across the United States on prototype color receivers.


The North Korean third broadcast network is a network of speakers that are wired into people's homes and relays local news and instructions. There are rumors that the system can't be turned off, but the volume can be lowered.

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