Marconi and the birth of Radio News in the UK and USA

Heinrich Hertz was a leading pioneer in the invention of Radio. Hertz had laid the foundations for the groundbreaking work which Marconi would go on to do. Unfortunately, Hertz died 1894 before he could finish his work resulting in his research being published. Marconi was driven by this and so was given permission to study the works of Marconi. Marconi, still only nineteen, began his research and made great progress where others had failed. Many had tried to create a radio telegraph system before Marconi but with these past efforts, he was able to combine them and in 1896 he had a working model. However this was still not a viable commercially as Marconi had not yet given it a long enough range. Marconi however slowly increased the range of his apparatus and in 1899 he sent a transmission 75.9514 miles from a ship, the SS St Paul, to the English coast. This then further increased to 2200 miles as Marconi transmitted a message from Wexford to Canada. Marconi immediately set about establishing a commercial radio telegraph system. In 1904 a system was then set up to send news to ships. This was done at night as Marconi discovered that radio waves travelled further at night. Although Marconi had previously reported on other subject, this was the first official commercial news broadcast. Even this broadcast had its problems however due to variance in signal strength.  The most memorable moment Marconi’s radio has seen is probably his participation in the Titanic disaster. Marconi had set up a communication radio on most ships and so when the Titanic crashed, the crew were able to put out an emergency broadcast. The Titanic crashed into an iceberg and so sent out a distress call on one of Marconi’s systems. The Carpathia received this via a weaker Marconi system. Marconi states in his testimony that the Carpathia radio system was able to transmit “200 miles but on very rare occasions” and the Titanic could transmit “Almost every night 1000 miles”.  The fact is this; without Marconi’s devices there would have been more deaths and more injuries. Marconi’s device helped get an immediate response for the distress call issued by the Titanic, saving many lives. Moving back to the news side of this blog, the first USA news broadcast was transmitted on the 31^st August 1920. This was done from Detroit Michigan by a station named 8MK. To clarify what I mean by news broadcast, I mean a program devoted totally to news. In 1922 news programs had spread and had become a regular fixture on public radio. Many of the public had access to these programs due to the wide spread availability of crystal sets. These were the most common set and the easiest to get. Some people even constructed their own. This was encourages by the USA government. As such news was available regularly on a new media without daily cost. Newspapers were still crucial to the communication of news but radio had created a new revolutionary way to communicate it.

All Marconi quotes from his testimony taken from : http://www.titanicinquiry.org/USInq/AmInq01Marconi02.php