Chapter 4: Popular Radio

This chapter is about the origins of the radio and its development into what it is today in our country. I originally knew that Guglielmo Marconi had a hand in inventing the radio and that other people were involved, but I never researched the details any further. It was interesting to read about De Forest and Sarnoff. "The radio was to the printing press what the telephone was to the telephone" analogy was helpful to me in illustrating the importance of the radio at the time. The reading also explained how advertisements were first broadcasted on the radio around 1922 caused an uproar among audiences throughout the nation. This came to me as surprising because commercials on the radio are so common nowadays. I feel that the radio has changed significantly from what it used to be back when it first became popular, and I understand the concern raised about this issue in the first part of the chapter regarding the train wreck in North Dakota.