By many, but not all historians’ thinking, this could have been dubbed America’s Radio Day more than a century ago! That’s when the sound medium began finding its way from the assorted cobwebs of a laboratory eventually to what we can call Main Street, USA!

It was precisely 104 years ago that KDKA, Pittsburgh (November 2, 1920) was issued the first broadcast license by the predecessor of the Federal Communications Commission.

KDKA’s logo from the 1920s. Already they were known as broadcast pioneers.

Now all of these years later, that station at 1020 on the AM dial with a power output of the maximum-allowed 50-thousand watts, is very much alive and well! For that matter, so is Detroit’s WWJ which is reported to have first put out a signal a year earlier in 1919. Like KDKA, that Detroit all-news station is still in business, and like its Pittsburgh counterpart, is part of the radio company known as Audacy. Yes, radio preceded television, but don’t try to convince a true radio broadcaster that TV is better or more important than its sister medium!

Article contributed by Bob Gibson

Editor’s Note: Among Bob’s many prestigious credits, he was a news anchor for KDKA-AM during the late 60’s and early 70’s.