Radio is dead-Long live the Radio.pdf - Universidad del País Vasco

Welcome to the third age of radio: understanding radio's present from radio's past
ca. He was reaching out to people while they were having their suppers. And
very quickly he became a national name.
1927-29 on WHN
As Ellington fans will be well aware, on the 4th December 1927, Ellington’s band,
the Washingtonians, opened at the Cotton Club in Harlem, New York City (Haskins,
1985: 47). They were soon featured in the broadcasts of the local Manhattan-based
radio station, WHN. While it might have only been possible to hear Ellington’s WHN
Cotton Club remotes for about a year, it is still significant that they started on that
station. WHN features prominently in early radio histories, mainly for controversies
around its on-air style, and around its compliance with patents. WHN’s owner saw a
way to combine the wired and wireless technology that were at the base of the new
forms of communication: the telephone and the wireless (Doerksen, 1999).
In fact it was the wired telephone which had been imagines as the technology that
we now think of as radio. The idea was that households would pay a subscription to access
transmissions of cultural events from remote locations. Radio, as an extension of
wireless telegraphy [telegrafía], was imagined as a technology of point-to-point communication
we now think of as the telephone [teléfono]. It is interesting to note that in
the twenty-first century this idea came to fruition and the cell system of broadcasting
allowed radio to become the basis of point-to-point communication and the cable systems
in our cities to be the basis for the internet and its radio services and more.
In 1927 WHN’s experiments with remote broadcasting were then a novel use
of both wired point-to-point technology (to relay the performance from club to the
station transmitter) and wireless broadcast technology (to get the performance from
the station to listeners). The point at which Ellington’s band were broadcasting was
a transitional period, where radio broadcasts were dominated by small independent
stations but the right to exploit the potential of these broadcasts was controlled by the
Radio Corporation of America (RCA). This corporation was made up of all the technology
patent holders including The American Telephone & Telegraph Company
(AT&T) which dominated land-based radio as they licensed transmitter technology
and had to approve the commercial exploitation of both wired and wireless broadcasting
(Barnouw, 1966).
Ellington had been involved in broadcasts on WHN before he moved to the Cotton
Club. It’s likely that his band at first went into the radio studio in the early evening
to broadcast some of the music that they would play at a club later. The WHN
programmer was also the publicist for the down-market Loew vaudeville theatre
group, and he developed ‘cabaret broadcasting’ in order to promote Loew late night
The Radio is dead. Long live the Radio!
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