The history of radio in ten stations

A hundred years of radio is too much to tell as one story, so here is a different approach: ten stations, in order, each of which did something nobody had done before. Between them they explain how a laboratory curiosity became the most widely used communication technology on earth, and why it has outlived every medium that was supposed to replace it.

1. KDKA, Pittsburgh — 1920

On 2 November 1920, KDKA broadcast the results of the American presidential election. Experimental transmissions had existed for years, but this was the first regularly scheduled service aimed at a general audience, and it established the basic idea: a signal sent to no one in particular, and to everyone at once. Within two years there were hundreds of stations in the United States.

2. 2LO and the BBC, London — 1922

Britain went the other way. Rather than let the dial fill with competing commercial stations, it created a single licence-funded broadcaster with an explicit mandate to inform, educate and entertain. The public service model spread across Europe, Asia and Africa, and it is the reason a listener in Rabat, Delhi or Nairobi grew up with a state broadcaster rather than an advertising market.

3. Radio Luxembourg — 1933

A tiny country with an enormous transmitter started beaming commercial English-language programming across the Channel, directly at an audience the BBC had decided did not need entertaining on Sundays. It was the first demonstration that broadcasting does not respect borders, and that if a public broadcaster refuses to play popular music, someone outside the country will.

4. Voice of America — 1942

Launched in the middle of a war, VOA turned shortwave into an instrument of foreign policy. Every major power followed with its own external service, and for the next fifty years the shortwave bands were a contested space where governments argued with each other over the heads of their populations.

5. Sawt al-Arab, Cairo — 1953

No station has ever shaped a region's politics as directly. Broadcasting from Cairo to the entire Arab world, it carried Nasser's message of unity and anti-colonialism into households from Morocco to Iraq, at a time when radio was the only mass medium that crossed those distances. It also carried Umm Kulthum, which may have mattered just as much.

6. Radio Rebelde, Sierra Maestra — 1958

Set up by Che Guevara in the mountains during the Cuban revolution, Rebelde proved that a transmitter could be a weapon available to the side without an army. The model was copied by insurgencies and liberation movements across three continents for the next forty years.

7. Radio Caroline — 1964

A ship anchored in international waters off the English coast, playing pop records the BBC would not, because offshore it was outside British broadcasting law. Within months it had millions of listeners. It was shut down by legislation, but it had already won the argument.

8. BBC Radio 1 — 1967

The institutional answer to the pirates. The BBC launched a pop station and hired many of the offshore presenters to run it, which is as clear an admission of defeat as broadcasting has produced. It also gave the world the figure of the DJ as curator rather than announcer — someone whose taste, not their voice, was the product.

9. Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines, Rwanda — 1993

Any honest history of radio has to include this. In 1994 RTLM broadcast the names and locations of people to be killed, and is recognised as having played a direct role in the Rwandan genocide. Its executives were later convicted at the international tribunal. The same quality that makes radio powerful in a liberation movement — cheap, immediate, trusted, reaching people who cannot read — makes it equally effective as an instrument of mass violence.

10. The first internet stations — around the turn of the millennium

When streaming arrived, the barrier to entry collapsed from a transmitter licence to a server bill. Stations appeared that could never have existed on FM: a channel playing only ambient music, another only Ethiopian jazz, another only music recorded in one city in one decade. The audience for each was tiny by broadcast standards and global in reach, which is a combination that had simply not been possible before.

What the list shows

Two patterns run through all ten. The first is that every time an institution decided what people should be allowed to hear, somebody built a transmitter outside its reach — in Luxembourg, in the mountains, on a ship, on a server. The second is that radio has never been replaced because nothing else does what it does: it reaches you while your hands and eyes are busy, it costs the listener nothing, and it works when the power grid and the internet do not.

Radio keeps being declared dead by people who are looking at the wrong number. It was never about how many people own a radio. It was about what happens when the other systems fail.