The original inventors of
radio, from
Guglielmo Marconi's time on, expected it to be used for one-on-one
wireless communication tasks where
telephones and
telegraphs could not be used because of the problems involved in stringing
copper wires from one point to another, such as in ship-to-shore communications. Those inventors had no expectations whatever that radio would become a major
mass media entertainment and information medium earning many millions of dollars in revenues annually through
radio advertising commercials or
sponsorship. These latter uses were brought about after 1920 by business entrepreneurs such as
David Sarnoff, who created the
National Broadcasting Company (NBC), and
William S. Paley, who built
Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS). These broadcasting (as opposed to
narrowcasting) business organizations began to be called
network affiliates, because they consisted of loose chains of individual stations located in various cities, all transmitting the standard overall-system supplied fare, often at synchronised agreed-upon times. Some of these
radio network stations were
owned and operated by the networks, while others were
independent radio owned by entrepreneurs allied with the respective networks. By selling blocks of time to advertisers, the medium was able to quickly become profitable and offer its products to listeners for free, provided they invested in a radio receiver set. The new medium had grown rapidly through the 1930s, vastly increasing both the size of its
audience and its profits. In those early days, it was customary for a corporation to sponsor an entire half-hour radio program, placing its commercials at the beginning and the end. This is in contrast to the pattern which developed late in the 20th century in both television and radio, where small slices of time were sold to many sponsors and no corporation claimed or wanted sponsorship of the entire show, except in rare cases. These later
commercials also filled a much larger portion of the total program time than they had in the earlier days. In the early radio age, content typically included a balance of
comedy,
drama, news, music and sports reporting. Variety radio programs included the most famous
Hollywood talent of the day. During the 1920s, radio focused on musical entertainment. Radio
soap operas began in the U.S. in 1930 with
Painted Dreams.
Lørdagsbarnetimen, a Norwegian children's show, with its premiere in 1924 interrupted only by the Second World War, was the longest running radio show in the world until it ceased production in 2010. As World War II unfolded during the 1940s, radio also played a central role in utilizing
soft power to support
cultural diplomacy through a collaboration of the United States Department of State's
Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs and
CBS's
La Cadena de las Americas network. This nonprofit collaboration resulted in programming which showcased the cultural heritage shared throughout the Americas and included informative news programs such as
Calling Pan America and popular musical shows such as
Viva America In the early 1950s,
television programming eroded the popularity of radio comedy, drama and variety shows. By the late 1950s, radio broadcasting took on much the form it has today strongly focused on music, talk, news and sports, though drama can still be heard, especially on the
BBC. ==References==