National Radio Day: How Radio Changed News, Music & American Life

Long before television filled living rooms, smartphones filled pockets and streaming services offered almost any song on demand, Americans gathered around a radio.

They listened for news from distant cities, baseball games unfolding hundreds of miles away, comedians performing before studio audiences and orchestras broadcasting live from ballrooms. Children followed adventure serials. Families scheduled evenings around favorite programs. Advertisers learned that a voice coming through a loudspeaker could sell soap, cereal and automobiles to households across the country at the same moment.

Radio changed more than entertainment. It changed how quickly news traveled, how music became popular, how sports acquired national audiences and how millions of people experienced major events together. It introduced voices that listeners came to recognize almost as members of the family and created a shared culture in which people separated by thousands of miles could laugh at the same joke or hear the same song simultaneously.

National Radio Day, observed each year on August 20, offers a chance to remember just how revolutionary that once seemed. Radio is no longer the newest medium in the room, but it may be one of the reasons the room became connected in the first place.

📻 National Radio Day Is Celebrated on August 20

National Radio Day is observed in the United States on August 20. The precise origins of the observance are surprisingly difficult to document. It appears to have been celebrated since at least the early 1990s, but there is no widely accepted authoritative account identifying one organization or individual as its creator.

That uncertainty feels strangely appropriate for radio itself. Broadcasting did not emerge from one dramatic moment in which a single person suddenly invented modern radio. It developed through decades of experiments in wireless telegraphy, voice transmission, electronic amplification, station building and programming.

National Radio Day is therefore best treated not as the anniversary of one invention but as a celebration of a medium that gradually transformed everyday life. Smithsonian Institution Archives has marked August 20 as National Radio Day while using the occasion to explore broadcasting history in its collections.

There is plenty to explore.

⚡ Radio Began as a Technological Experiment

Before radio became entertainment, wireless communication was largely about sending signals. Inventors and engineers developed ways to transmit information without physical wires, initially using coded signals rather than spoken voices or music.

The possibility of sending sound through the air opened a much bigger idea. A message no longer had to travel from one specific sender to one specific receiver. One transmitter could reach many listeners at once.

That distinction created broadcasting.

Experimental voice and music transmissions took place before regular commercial radio emerged, which is why claims about the absolute “first radio broadcast” depend heavily on how the word broadcast is defined. Was it the first transmission of speech? The first music? The first scheduled program? The first transmission intended for a general public audience? The first commercial station?

Radio history contains different answers to each of those questions.

What matters more is what happened once broadcasting became regular enough for ordinary people to build it into their lives. That transformation accelerated rapidly after 1920.

📡 KDKA Became an Early Symbol of Commercial Broadcasting

Pittsburgh station KDKA occupies an important place in American radio history. Its regular broadcasting in late 1920 became a milestone in the transition from experimental wireless transmission to organized public broadcasting.

The Library of Congress describes KDKA’s November 1920 activity as a landmark in commercial radio, although other experimental and scheduled broadcasts had occurred earlier.

The distinction matters because radio did not simply appear fully formed on one November evening. Other stations were developing at roughly the same time. Experimenters had already transmitted voices and music, and amateur radio operators had spent years exploring the possibilities of wireless communication.

By the early 1920s, however, something had clearly changed. Radio was becoming a medium for everybody.

Manufacturers began selling more receivers. Businesses established stations. Newspapers experimented with broadcasting. Universities went on the air. Churches, musicians, educators and entertainers discovered that a microphone could reach listeners they would never meet.

A new industry was forming almost in real time.

🏠 The Radio Moved into the American Living Room

Early radio receivers could require a certain amount of enthusiasm and technical skill. Some listeners used crystal sets and headphones. Antennas had to be arranged. Reception could be temperamental.

As commercial receivers improved, radio became increasingly domestic.

The radio set moved into the home.

By the end of the 1920s and into the 1930s, manufacturers were producing handsome cabinets intended to look like furniture. Large console radios occupied living rooms, while smaller tabletop models appeared in kitchens and bedrooms.

Families no longer had to leave home to hear professional performers. A singer could perform in New York while listeners in cities hundreds of miles away sat beside the same program.

That ability to collapse distance was radio’s great magic.

The voice seemed to be right there.

🌎 Radio Created a National Audience

Newspapers could reach large audiences, but their circulation remained tied to printing and physical distribution. Radio worked differently.

A broadcast moved through the air.

Once powerful stations and national networks developed, programs could reach enormous audiences almost simultaneously. This created something profoundly new: a mass audience experiencing an event together in real time.

People could hear the same singer, comedian, news report or sporting event while sitting in completely different parts of the country.

That simultaneity helped create a shared popular culture. Catchphrases spread. Performers became national celebrities. Songs became hits. Sports heroes became familiar to people who had never seen them play.

Radio did not eliminate regional culture, but it connected local communities to something larger.

🌐 NBC Helped Build the Network Era

A crucial step came with the creation of radio networks.

The National Broadcasting Company, or NBC, was formed in 1926 and began broadcasting over its new network on November 15 of that year. Twenty-five stations in twenty-one cities carried the inaugural program.

Instead of every station producing all of its programming independently, networks could distribute the same programs to affiliated stations across large geographic areas.

That changed the economics and ambitions of radio. A comedy program could become a national attraction. A major orchestra could perform for listeners far beyond the concert hall. Advertisers could sponsor programs reaching millions of potential customers. News organizations could distribute reports across the network.

The scale of broadcasting grew dramatically.

By 1939, the Library of Congress notes that NBC was supplying approximately sixteen hours of daily programming to 171 stations.

Radio had become an industry.

It had also become part of the rhythm of American life.

🎭 The Golden Age of Radio Filled the Air with Stories

The period extending roughly from the 1930s into the early television era is often remembered as the Golden Age of Radio.

For listeners, radio offered almost every form of entertainment imaginable. Comedy programs brought vaudeville-style performers into the home. Dramatic anthologies presented mysteries, romances and literary adaptations. Detective series created entire cities through dialogue and sound effects.

Western adventures unfolded without showing a single horse. Science-fiction programs traveled to other planets without building a spaceship. Soap operas followed characters through years of family drama. Quiz shows invited listeners to play along. Variety programs combined jokes, music and celebrity appearances.

Radio could create enormous worlds using remarkably little physical equipment.

A microphone, a script, music and sound effects could be enough.

The listener’s imagination supplied everything else.

🧠 Radio Made the Listener Part of the Production

Television shows you the room. Radio asks you to build it.

A door slams. Footsteps approach. Rain hits a window. A train whistle sounds in the distance.

From those fragments, the listener constructs an entire scene.

This made radio drama unusually intimate. Every listener’s version could be slightly different. The detective might have the voice of a particular actor, but the office existed inside the listener’s imagination. The haunted house looked however the listener imagined a haunted house should look.

That relationship between sound and imagination helped make radio especially effective for suspense, mystery and horror.

Writers learned how long a silence could last. Sound-effects artists learned how to create convincing storms, horses, gunshots, telephones, doors and footsteps inside a studio. Actors learned how much expression a voice could carry without the help of facial expressions or costumes.

Radio became an art form built almost entirely from things the audience could not see.

👽 The War of the Worlds Became Radio’s Most Famous Legend

Perhaps no broadcast demonstrates radio’s power, and the mythology surrounding that power, better than Orson Welles’s 1938 adaptation of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds.

The program used simulated news bulletins and eyewitness reports to dramatize a fictional Martian invasion.

Some people who tuned in after the program had begun misunderstood what they were hearing and believed parts of the broadcast were genuine.

That much is well documented.

The famous story that followed is less reliable.

For decades, popular accounts claimed that the broadcast produced nationwide mass panic, with enormous numbers of terrified Americans fleeing their homes or preparing for an alien attack.

Later research has made that picture considerably less dramatic.

The program did alarm some listeners, but the enormous nationwide panic described in later retellings was exaggerated. Competing programs had much larger audiences that evening, and many people who heard Welles’s broadcast understood that it was fiction.

The legend nevertheless became almost as influential as the program itself.

It demonstrated how easily a memorable media story could grow larger each time it was repeated.

😂 Comedy Flourished on Radio

Comedy became one of radio’s great strengths.

Performers such as Jack Benny, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Fred Allen, Bob Hope and many others developed styles designed specifically for listeners.

Recurring characters and running jokes rewarded people who tuned in every week.

Timing became everything.

Without facial expressions to sell a joke, performers relied on rhythm, voice and silence. Jack Benny famously turned pauses into punch lines.

A studio audience also became part of the performance. Listeners at home heard other people laughing, creating a sense of sharing the experience with an invisible crowd.

Many radio comedians eventually moved successfully into television. Others discovered that comedy designed for radio did not translate quite so easily once audiences could see everything.

Every medium creates its own kind of performer.

Radio made voices into stars.

🎼 Radio Changed the Way America Heard Music

Before broadcasting, hearing professional music often required being physically present where musicians performed or purchasing recordings for a phonograph.

Radio introduced another possibility.

Turn the dial.

Music arrived.

Orchestras broadcast from hotels and ballrooms. Classical concerts entered homes. Country performers reached new audiences. Jazz traveled far beyond the clubs where it was played.

Local stations introduced regional musicians to nearby listeners while national networks could turn performers into household names.

This had enormous consequences for popular music.

A song could spread rapidly from city to city. Listeners could discover genres that might never have appeared in their local venues. Musicians who had once depended on touring and record sales gained another route into American homes.

Radio became one of the most important engines of music discovery in the twentieth century.

🎷 Jazz Found New Listeners over the Air

Radio’s rise overlapped with one of the most important periods in American music.

Jazz was developing rapidly during the 1920s and 1930s, and broadcasting helped its sounds travel far beyond the cities and venues associated with the music’s growth.

Listeners who might never visit a jazz club could hear dance bands and orchestras from their living rooms. Live remote broadcasts from hotels, ballrooms and clubs made nighttime entertainment available to anyone with a radio.

The relationship between broadcasters, musicians, record companies and audiences was not always simple or equitable, and the history of American broadcasting also reflects the racial barriers and inequalities of the eras in which it developed.

Yet radio helped music cross geographic boundaries that would previously have been difficult to overcome.

Sound traveled farther than the performers themselves.

🤠 Radio Helped Country Music Become a National Genre

Country music’s development was also closely connected to broadcasting.

Early rural and regional stations featured musicians performing styles rooted in folk traditions, string-band music, gospel and other regional forms.

Programs such as Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry demonstrated how a local radio show could develop a cultural reach far beyond its home city.

Radio allowed audiences to hear performers repeatedly, and that repetition mattered.

Listeners formed relationships with voices. Performers developed recognizable identities. Sponsors learned that loyal audiences could be valuable.

A regional musical culture could become part of national popular entertainment without completely losing its local roots.

Decades before music streaming algorithms, radio was already helping listeners discover what they liked.

🎙️ The Disc Jockey Changed Music Again

As radio evolved after World War II, the disc jockey became increasingly important.

Instead of networks filling much of the schedule with centrally produced dramas and variety programs, local stations could build programming around recorded music.

DJs selected records, introduced songs, talked between tracks and developed personalities of their own.

For young listeners, the DJ could seem like a knowledgeable friend who always knew the next record worth hearing.

This relationship became especially important during the rise of rhythm and blues and rock and roll.

A new record played repeatedly on influential stations could become a hit. Radio airplay could create demand. Listeners called stations to request songs. Charts tracked popularity. Record labels courted DJs and programmers.

The relationship between radio and the music business became extraordinarily powerful.

🎸 Rock and Roll Became Personal with the Transistor Radio

Then radio became portable.

The development of the transistor after World War II allowed manufacturers to build receivers that were dramatically smaller and more energy-efficient than older vacuum-tube models.

The Regency TR-1, introduced in 1954, became the first commercially marketed pocket transistor radio in the United States.

The technology quickly improved and prices fell.

For teenagers, this changed radio completely.

The family radio in the living room had belonged to everyone.

A transistor radio could belong to you.

It could go outside, to the beach, beside the bed or into another room. An earphone could make listening even more private.

Rock and roll could now travel with its audience.

The Smithsonian National Museum of American History describes the transistor radio as helping transform listening into a much more personal experience for teenagers in the late 1950s.

The device did more than make radio portable.

It gave young listeners control of the dial.

⚾ Radio Turned Sports into Theater

Sports and radio discovered each other almost immediately.

A person no longer had to sit in the stadium to experience a game as it happened.

An announcer could reconstruct the action in words.

The best broadcasters did far more than report a score.

They created a picture.

A baseball announcer described the placement of fielders, the motion of a pitcher, the crack of the bat and the flight of the ball. Boxing announcers transformed a fight into rapid-fire verbal drama. Horse-race callers made a few seconds of movement feel enormous.

Radio sports announcing became its own art form because listeners depended entirely on language to understand what was happening.

The Library of Congress preserves thousands of historic sports broadcasts, including baseball, football, basketball, hockey, horse racing, boxing and major international competitions.

For generations of fans, some of the most famous moments in sports were first experienced not visually but through a voice coming from a radio.

📰 Radio Changed the Speed of News

Radio transformed journalism because events could be reported while they were still unfolding.

A newspaper could provide deeper reporting the following morning.

Radio could interrupt the evening.

That immediacy became particularly important during major disasters, wars and other rapidly developing events.

Reporters could describe scenes directly. Networks could connect listeners with correspondents far away. News bulletins could interrupt scheduled entertainment.

The sound of a familiar program suddenly stopping for an urgent announcement became one of broadcasting’s most distinctive experiences.

Radio also introduced another layer unavailable to print.

Listeners could hear voices connected to the event itself.

Tone, hesitation, background noise and emotion became part of the historical record.

News no longer arrived solely as words on a page.

It arrived as sound.

🌍 Radio Brought Distant Events into Ordinary Homes

Before electronic broadcasting, distance created a substantial delay between an event and the experience of learning about it.

Radio steadily narrowed that distance.

A family sitting around a kitchen table could hear reports from another state or another continent.

This gave twentieth-century history an audio dimension that earlier generations had not experienced in the same way.

The Library of Congress’s extensive NBC Radio Collection preserves thousands of hours of news, public affairs, entertainment, music and historical broadcasts from the network era.

These recordings reveal something that written history sometimes misses.

What did an event sound like as people experienced it?

What information did listeners receive first?

What did broadcasters know, and what did they not yet know?

Radio captured history before anyone had time to decide what the final story would be.

📢 Advertising Helped Pay for the Golden Age

Commercial American radio developed a close relationship with advertising.

Sponsors did not simply purchase thirty-second commercials between programs.

Companies frequently sponsored entire programs, sometimes placing their names directly into show titles.

Advertising agencies helped develop radio programs themselves. Characters mentioned products. Announcers read extended advertisements. Jingles turned brand names into melodies that listeners could remember without trying.

The system helped finance expensive entertainment that audiences could hear without paying a subscription fee.

It also demonstrated something businesses would use in every later mass medium: popular entertainment could gather an audience, and that audience could then be sold to advertisers.

Television inherited the model.

So did much of the commercial internet.

🧼 Soap Operas Really Were Connected to Soap

One of radio’s most durable contributions to popular culture even survives in its name.

Daytime serialized dramas became known as soap operas partly because soap and household-product companies were prominent sponsors of programming aimed at daytime audiences.

The stories could continue for years.

Characters married, separated, disappeared, returned and encountered one crisis after another.

Listeners who tuned in daily developed long relationships with fictional families.

When television expanded, the serialized daytime drama migrated easily to the new medium.

The phrase “soap opera” came with it.

Millions of people later used the term without necessarily realizing that its origins were tied to radio advertising.

🧪 Radio Educated as Well as Entertained

Broadcasting was never only about selling products and telling stories.

Schools, universities, museums and public institutions recognized radio’s educational possibilities early.

The Smithsonian itself entered broadcasting during radio’s formative years and later produced educational programs for broad audiences.

Its The World Is Yours, which began in 1936, used dramatized stories to teach listeners about subjects ranging from science and history to public health.

Educational broadcasting could reach people who would never visit a museum or university classroom.

That possibility helped establish another important idea: public airwaves could serve educational and cultural purposes as well as commercial ones.

The debate over what broadcasters owed the public would continue throughout radio history.

📻 AM and FM Offered Different Possibilities

For much of radio’s early history, AM broadcasting dominated.

FM, or frequency modulation, developed later and offered important technical advantages, including improved resistance to certain forms of static and higher-quality sound under appropriate conditions.

FM took time to establish itself commercially.

Eventually, however, its sound quality made it particularly attractive for music.

By the later twentieth century, FM stations had become central to rock, pop, classical, jazz and other music formats, while AM increasingly became associated with talk, news and sports, although local patterns varied considerably.

The existence of multiple bands helped radio diversify.

Turn the dial far enough and one receiver could offer completely different worlds.

📺 Television Was Supposed to Kill Radio

When television began spreading rapidly into American homes after World War II, radio faced an obvious problem.

Why listen to a comedy show when you could watch one?

Why imagine the performers when they could appear in the living room?

Many of radio’s biggest stars and programs migrated to television.

Network radio drama and variety entertainment declined.

The old family ritual of gathering around a large console radio largely disappeared.

Radio did not.

Instead, it changed.

Stations emphasized the things radio could do especially well: music, news, talk, sports, local information, traffic, weather and personality-driven programming.

They also leaned into something television could not provide nearly as easily: mobility.

Radio moved into cars, workshops, kitchens, bedrooms and pockets.

Television changed radio by forcing it to discover what it was best at.

🚗 The Car Became One of Radio’s Most Important Homes

The automobile gave radio another remarkably durable role.

Drivers could not watch television, read newspapers or browse record collections while moving down the highway.

They could listen.

Car radios turned commuting and road trips into listening time.

Morning and afternoon programming developed around rush-hour audiences. Traffic reports became part of daily routines. Local stations offered weather, news and conversation tied directly to the community through which the listener was driving.

Music stations became companions on long stretches of road.

Even as home entertainment technology repeatedly changed, the relationship between radio and driving remained remarkably resilient.

The dashboard became another kind of living room.

📍 Local Radio Could Be Truly Local

National networks helped create mass culture, but radio retained a powerful local identity.

A hometown station could announce school closings, local sports scores, community events, weather warnings and neighborhood news unlikely to appear on a national network.

Listeners recognized local personalities.

Advertisers were businesses they actually drove past.

Callers might know the streets or restaurants being discussed.

That local connection has always been one of broadcasting’s greatest strengths.

A national service can tell you what is happening in the country.

A local radio station may tell you why traffic has stopped three blocks from your house.

That difference still matters.

🚨 Radio Remains Useful in Emergencies

Radio’s relative simplicity can become particularly valuable when ordinary communication systems are disrupted.

Battery-powered and hand-crank radios can receive information without depending on household internet service or cellular data.

That is why emergency-preparedness guidance often includes a battery-powered radio or NOAA Weather Radio among recommended supplies.

During severe weather, widespread power outages or other emergencies, broadcasting can provide warnings and instructions even when other communications become unreliable.

The technology may seem old compared with a smartphone.

Old technology can be extremely useful when it has fewer requirements for functioning.

A receiver needs a signal and enough power to operate.

It does not need your Wi-Fi password.

🎧 Podcasts Are Related to Radio—but They Aren’t the Same Thing

Modern podcasts clearly inherit many traditions from radio.

Both rely on voices, music, interviews, narration and sound design.

Radio documentaries helped establish techniques later used in podcast storytelling.

Talk programs anticipated conversational podcasts.

Serialized audio drama has found new life through on-demand listening.

But podcasting and radio are not interchangeable.

Traditional broadcast radio sends programming outward on a schedule. Listeners tune in to whatever is being transmitted at that moment.

A podcast is generally distributed as an on-demand digital file or stream. Listeners decide when to start, stop, download or resume it.

That distinction changes the experience.

Radio creates simultaneity.

Podcasting creates control.

Both can produce intimate audio storytelling, but they reach the listener differently.

🌐 Internet Streaming Changed What “Radio” Can Mean

The internet complicated the definition even further.

Traditional AM and FM stations can now stream their broadcasts online.

Other services operate like radio stations without owning terrestrial transmitters.

Satellite radio distributes programming across enormous geographic areas.

Smart speakers can play a hometown station from the other side of the world.

A listener no longer necessarily needs to be within range of an antenna to hear a particular station.

Yet traditional broadcasting continues alongside all of this.

The medium did not move neatly from radio to television to internet, with each new invention eliminating the previous one.

Instead, the technologies accumulated.

People watch television while holding phones. They stream podcasts produced by public-radio organizations. They listen to FM in the car and then continue the same station through an app.

Media history is usually messier than replacement.

🎙️ The Human Voice Is Still Radio’s Greatest Strength

Technology explains how radio works.

It does not completely explain why people keep listening.

The human voice does.

A voice creates unusual intimacy when there is no image competing with it.

The broadcaster can seem to be speaking directly to one person, even when thousands or millions are listening.

This is why great radio personalities develop such loyal audiences.

Listeners learn their rhythms, their humor, their pauses and their habits of speech.

After years of listening, a broadcaster can feel strangely familiar despite the relationship being entirely one-sided.

Alistair Cooke demonstrated this power for nearly six decades with Letter from America. His broadcasts required little more than a thoughtful script, a microphone and the ability to make carefully written language sound like conversation.

The technology was almost invisible.

The voice carried everything.

📼 Old Radio Is Now a Time Machine

Historic broadcasts survive in archives, libraries and online collections, allowing modern listeners to hear something close to the original experience.

The effect can be surprisingly immediate.

A newspaper from 1939 clearly looks old.

A voice recorded in 1939 can suddenly sound alive.

The microphones may have limitations. The pacing may be different. Advertisements may sound strange. Language and social attitudes may reveal the era’s prejudices and assumptions.

But once someone speaks, historical distance briefly collapses.

That is one reason broadcast archives are so valuable.

They preserve not just information but sound.

Accents, music, commercials, audience laughter, news interruptions, sports crowds and even silence become part of the historical record.

A radio recording preserves time moving forward at exactly the speed it originally happened.

🏛️ The Library of Congress Preserves Radio History

The Library of Congress holds enormous collections documenting American broadcasting.

Its NBC Radio Collection alone includes approximately 150,000 transcription discs containing more than 80,000 hours of programming.

The collection encompasses entertainment, music, news, sports, public affairs and major historical events.

Other collections preserve individual programs, local broadcasting, sports recordings and historically significant audio selected for the National Recording Registry.

This preservation matters because early broadcasting was often ephemeral.

Programs went out over the air and disappeared.

Many were never recorded at all.

Others survived only on fragile discs or tapes.

Preserving radio is therefore partly an attempt to save a medium that was originally designed to vanish the moment it was heard.

📱 Radio Survived Every Prediction of Its Death

Television did not kill radio.

Neither did records.

Cassettes did not.

Compact discs did not.

The iPod did not.

Streaming did not.

Podcasts did not.

Each new medium changed listening habits, and radio repeatedly adapted around those changes.

Its dominance is no longer what it was during the 1930s and 1940s, when a handful of networks could command enormous portions of the country’s attention.

That loss of dominance is not the same thing as disappearance.

Broadcast stations still deliver music, talk, sports, weather, emergency information and local programming.

More importantly, the basic idea radio introduced has become almost impossible to escape.

Send sound through a communications network.

Create a distant audience.

Speak to people you cannot see.

Build a relationship through a voice.

Podcasting, streaming audio and countless other formats still work with that inheritance.

🎉 How to Celebrate National Radio Day

National Radio Day can be as simple as turning on a radio and listening to whatever someone else has chosen to put on the air.

Try a station you normally ignore. Listen to AM. Find a local public station or college station. Catch a baseball game without watching the screen.

You can also seek out an old radio drama, comedy program or historic news broadcast through a legitimate archive and notice how quickly your imagination begins supplying the missing pictures.

The radios themselves are worth exploring too.

Cathedral radios, streamlined Art Deco sets, massive wooden consoles, brightly colored transistor radios, portable boomboxes and tiny pocket receivers tell a parallel history of industrial design.

A century of radio produced some wonderfully strange objects.

The Smithsonian’s collections make it possible to trace that transformation visually, from furniture-like receivers to radios designed to disappear into a pocket.

❤️ Why Radio Still Matters

Radio changed American life because it changed distance.

A performance no longer belonged only to the people in the theater.

A baseball game no longer belonged only to spectators in the stands.

A news event could reach millions while it was happening.

A local musician could suddenly have an audience far beyond the room where the song was played.

A teenager could carry music into a bedroom, backyard or car.

A lonely listener could hear another human voice speaking through the darkness.

The technology became ordinary so quickly that it is easy to forget how extraordinary the idea once was.

Sound could travel invisibly through the air.

Turn a knob and voices appeared.

The world arrived in the living room.

On National Radio Day, August 20, that history is worth remembering not simply because radio was once important, but because so much of modern media still carries its DNA.

Every podcast host speaking intimately into a microphone, every live sports commentator describing action we cannot see, every emergency alert sent to a distant audience and every music service promising to introduce us to something new belongs, in some way, to a story radio helped begin.

The cabinet sets may have disappeared from most living rooms.

The broadcast never really ended.