Radio and television were both developed as commercial media in the era after World War I. Radio was the first truly mass medium of communication, reaching millions of people instantly and altering social attitudes, family relationships, and how people related to their environment. Television would have an even greater impact once it was commercially viable. Television was invented in the late 1920s, and various experiments were conducted into the 1930s. What delayed the development of television as a product for a mass audience was World War II, and within a few years of the end of that war, television would start to become a feature in the American home. The shift from radio to television was not really a shift from one to the other but the creation of a new atmosphere which accommodate both. Radio did not disappear as was predicted by some. Instead, the way people related to radio changed, but this happened in a way that gave radio its own important media niche, one that was even bigger than it had occupied before.
The existence of electromagnetic radiation was demonstrated by Heinrich Hertz in an experiment designed to confirm a prediction made earlier in the nineteenth century by James Clark Maxwell. Hertz made this discovery in 1888. Guglielmo Marconi was the man who foresaw and developed the use of radio as a means of communication, where Hertz did not (MessadiT 178).
Radio was at first known as "wireless," and it became an important worldwide means of communication after it played a role in the reporting of the news of the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 (Weaver 18). American radio as a commercial medium came into being in 1920 with the first broadcast of KDKA in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The first scheduled, non-experimental, public program broadcast on radio was an evening program of the results from the presidential election between Warren G. Harding and James M. Cox. As a result of this broadcast, tech...