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Broadcast Radio Turns 100
GraWil writes "On Christmas eve 1906, a Canadian physicist named Reginald Fessenden presented the world's first wireless radio broadcast from his transmitter at Brant Rock, MA. The transmission included Christmas music and was heard by radio operators on board US Navy and United Fruit Company ships equipped with Fessenden's wireless receivers at various distances over the South and North Atlantic, and in the West Indies. Fessenden was a key rival of Marconi in the early 1900s who, using morse-code, succeeded in passing signals across the Atlantic in 1901. Fessenden's work was the first real departure from Marconi's damped-wave-coherer system for telegraphy and represent the first pioneering steps toward radio communications and radio broadcasting. He later became embroiled in a long-running legal dispute over the control of his radio-related patents, which were eventually acquired by RCA."
KDKA started broadcasting on November 2, 1920 as the first commercial radio station in the United States. It also claims to be the first radio station broadcasting on a regular schedule. That claim is complicated by the fact that radio prior to 1920 was mostly experimental and good records are not kept for all "experimental" signals of contesting stations. Further, another radio station in North America, XWA-AM in Montréal, Québec, Canada (renamed CFCF-AM on November 4, 1920), began its commercial, regular broadcast programming schedule on May 20, 1920 -- nearly six months before KDKA aired its first regularly scheduled broadcast.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDKA_(AM)
I remember listening to school closings and football/baseball games on there growing up. On a good night, 600 miles away, I can still listen to them.