Beginnings.

The development of radio and radio broadcasting caught the public fancy. During the Titanic disaster in 1912, the radios on the sinking ship and the various rescue boats played such a significant role in communicating events that David Sarnoff, a young New York telegraph operator handling the incoming signals, as well as other listeners, had visions of commercial radio being used for information and entertainment. In 1920 KDKA in Pittsburgh became the first radio station to enter commercial broadcasting; Sarnoff would, in the 1920s, give form to the Radio Corporation of America, which would become a star performer on the New York Stock Exchange.

Costs.

Like the auto and the airplane, early radio was a crude affair, expensive and thought to be a toy of the rich; yet one of the attractions of the radio-broadcasting industry was that it could, in fact, be...