Radio At 100: ‘KDKA: The Morning After’

The evening of Tuesday, Nov. 2, 1920, had come and gone. KDKA, 8MK, and perhaps others had taken to the airwaves that evening to report returns in the election that put Warren G. Harding in the White House. A few hundred, perhaps a few thousand people — there were no rating services then — managed to gain proximity to a primitive radio receiver of some sort and listened as the results were tallied and read into equally primitive microphones.

In retrospect, one can’t help but wonder what went through the minds of those individuals who stayed up late to present election results via “radiophone.” A radio broadcast is at best an intangible — something highly ephemeral, perhaps even a bit ethereal.

Had their voices really gone out into space to reach invisible ears? Had anything happened at all? There had to have been at least a slight sense of unreality in those first moments, a feeling perhaps best captured by Garrison Keillor in his description of the inaugural broadcast of mythical station WLT in St. Paul, Minn.

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