Radio broadcasting enjoys a long and varied history in Argentina, tracing its origins to a 1910 stay in the southside Buenos Aires suburb of
Bernal by
Guglielmo Marconi, inventor of the
wireless telegraph. There, he achieved a rudimentary radio transmission with a kite-mounted antenna connected to earphones. Argentine publisher
José C. Paz later sponsored Marconi's radio transmission from Italy to Buenos Aires, the first transatlantic broadcast into South America. tunes in around 1930. Three local medical students, led by
Enrique Susini, began their own radio experiments in 1917 and, installing transmission equipment in Buenos Aires' Coliseo Theatre, they broadcast, on August 27, 1920,
Parsifal, the first opera on radio and only the second radio broadcast in the World. These installations became
LOR Radio Argentina, the World's first formal radio station. The number of receivers in the city at the time: around 20. This station was joined in 1922 by LOX, whose ad for the Los Andes Restaurant is probably the World's first on radio. Several more stations opened in Buenos Aires during Argentina's prosperous 1920s and growing numbers of artists signed contracts for live performances on the growing variety of
radio dramas. Leading stations at the time began broadcasting from the numerous, ornate
theatre stages in Buenos Aires, including LR5
Radio Splendid (so named for the venue where its shows were produced, the
Grand Splendid Theatre). Among the notable events broadcast live at the time was President
Marcelo Torcuato de Alvear's inaugural, in 1922, and the 1923 "bout of the century" in
Polo Grounds,
New York City, between
Jack Dempsey and
Luis Ángel Firpo for the World Heavyweight title. The medium's boom and the lucrative local
ad market allowed Susini to sell his station in 1930 to U.S. telecom giant
ITT for US$200 million, a record at the time. The visionary entrepreneur invested a part of the funds into
Lumiton Studios, among the first to produce sound movies in the world. Argentine radio embraced
tango in the early 1930s, airing the work of orchestras such as
Francisco Canaro's and
Julio de Caro's; LR1-Mundo (referred to as LR1 for its being the first on the dial) became the standard for tango broadcasts. The decade saw the rise of
Jaime Yankelevich, a former radio valve distributor, as the dominant force in the medium, thorough
Radio El Mundo (inaugurated in 1935), and
Radio Belgrano, which became the first in Argentina to broadcast through a chain of repeater stations, and the first to expand into late-night broadcasting. Buenos Aires was by then home to 25 stations (as many as in New York, a city, at the time, almost three times larger).
Luis Sandrini's
Felipe and other
comedy shows became ratings leaders during the 1940s, and as most Argentines were still either
immigrants or first and second generation Argentines, many revolved around the use of thickly accented
ethnic humor. Some of the most popular were
Niní Marshall's characters, particularly
Catita and
Cándida (1939 film). The trend was not without its detractors, however, and in 1943, the newly installed dictatorship of General
Pedro Ramírez banned humor which "deformed the language," leading to exile for Marshall and numerous other radio stars. Programming focused on
Argentine folk music and
Peronist propaganda during the populist administration of President
Juan Perón, who met his influential wife,
Evita, when the latter was a radio
matinée star; among Perón's most compelling voices in support on the radio was Tango composer
Enrique Santos Discépolo, who also hosted political commentary shows. The public sector became increasingly involved in Argentine radio during Perón's 1946–55 presidency, and afterwards. All broadcast chains were
nationalized, and state radio extended overseas in 1958 with the inaugural of the
Argentine Foreign Broadcasting Service. The station became only the third in the Western Hemisphere (after the
Voice of America and
Radio Canada International) to broadcast internationally and in several languages. The ownership structure of both radio and television broadcasting became increasingly concentrated after the 1980 Media Law, however, and many of the most popular radio stations are owned by conglomerates, including
Radio Continental (
Telefe),
Radio Mitre (
Grupo Clarín),
Radio Rivadavia (
Grupo Uno), and
Radio 10 (
Daniel Hadad). The contentious
Audiovisual Communication Services Law, signed by President
Cristina Kirchner in 2009 and upheld by the
Argentine Supreme Court in 2013, would restrict the number of media licences per proprietor and limit the influence of the principal media conglomerates by allocating a greater share of these to the state and
NGOs. ==Stations==