Amateurs at the time used bread boards as a platform for wires, tubes, and other components of low-cost crystal radio sets. He agreed to buy his nine-year-old a radio, but when he discovered that sets ran upward of $100, Crosley said he decided to buy instructions and build his own. “One day my son visited a friend, and came home with glowing descriptions of a new ‘wireless’ outfit,” Crosley told a magazine in 1948. WLW began in 1921 on a wooden bread board. While some local stations offered programming targeted to ethnic groups, occupations, and even political beliefs, black Americans and other minority groups were largely left out of national radio, except as caricatures-usually played by white people-in comedy programs. Programming reinforced presumed middle class values. Of course, for most broadcasters and regulators debating these broad delivery systems, “listeners” meant Americans who were white and middle or working class. Could a few clear-channel stations adequately serve-and acculturate-entire regions of listeners? Or would a national network system with local affiliates better target listener needs and interests?
In the early days of broadcast development and regulation, Crosley and WLW sparked debate about what radio should and could be. Farmers reported hearing WLW through their barbed-wire fences. A neon hotel sign near the transmitter never went dark. Now, WLW had the ability to reach most of the country, especially at night, when AM radio waves interact differently with the earth’s ionosphere and become “skywaves.” People living near the transmitter site often got better reception than they wanted some lights would not turn off until WLW engineers helped rewire houses. In 1934, when WLW increased its power from 50 kW to 500 kW, all other clear-channel stations were operating at 50 kW or less. frequently increased the station’s wattage as technology and regulation allowed. The station’s creator and owner, an entrepreneur, inventor, and manufacturer named Powel Crosley Jr. WLW had operated on one of forty designated clear channels since 1928. These stations operated on “cleared” frequencies that the government assigned to only one station to prevent interference. One solution was high-powered, clear-channel stations that could blanket large swaths of the country with a strong signal.
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The challenge was how to reach these areas, many of which received few or no radio signals in the mid-1930s. Since radio’s beginnings in the early 1920s, industry and government leaders promoted it as the great homogenizer, a cultural uplift project that could, among other things, help modernize and acculturate rural areas.
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