![]() On July 2, 1921, the Jack Dempsey-George Carpentier boxing match was the first broadcast live on radio. 1921: A Year of Firsts in Radio Broadcasting “Was he nervous? How much preparation did he do? How detailed was his description of the game, if at all? How often did he give the score? Did he even consider things like personality, humor, or style? Probably not.” No tape of the first broadcast exists, so no one knows. “Let’s think about Harold Arlin and that first broadcast,” wrote Pat Hughes, longtime play-by-play man for the Chicago Cubs and a student of broadcast history. He had no commercials to break up the action. He couldn’t banter with some wisecracking color commentator. With mystified fans sitting around him in the stands, Arlin delivered a description of the game into his mushiphone.Īrlin had never listened to a baseball game on the radio. The game that day was between the host Pittsburgh Pirates and the visiting Philadelphia Phillies. KDKA distributed radios to employees’ friends and families, simply to create a potential audience. ![]() Technicians concocted a microphone from a telephone–the “mushiphone” looked like a mushroom or a tomato can with a felt lining. Nevertheless, the station decided to give it a try, a “one-off” broadcast just to see how it would go. By 1924, there were more than 500.īut for a time, Arlin and KDKA had the field largely to themselves, and they attempted to plough as much of it as they could. Harding had defeated James Cox. There were five licensed radio stations in the United States in 1921. About five hundred listeners, a Pittsburgh newspaper later reported, learned that Warren G. KDKA-Westinghouse’s in-house station-made history by broadcasting results from the 1920 presidential election. The years after the end of World War I in 1918 unleashed a flood of talent and innovation onto the public airwaves. In 1920, KDKA in Pittsburgh was the first radio station to broadcast presidential election results. KDKA Broadcasts 1920 Presidential Election Results With that kind of audience potential, the station needed to get creative with its programming. Within a few years, Arlin was described by the Times of London as the “best-known American voice in England.” KDKA’s signal reached all the way across the Atlantic. His audience was a small group of shortwave radio enthusiasts who tuned into the Westinghouse Company's KDKA in Pittsburgh-the first commercial radio station in the United States.Ī 25-year-old electrical engineer for Westinghouse, Arlin checked out the new radio setup out of curiosity, he told the Mansfield (Ohio) News-Journal in an interview in 1981. After hearing Arlin’s rich voice, the powers that be talked him into going on air. His Kitty Hawk was a box seat behind home plate at Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field. With no Orville doing color commentary, he sat behind a makeshift mic in the summer of 1921 and delivered the first radio play-by-play. Louis Cardinals).īut Arlin was the Wilbur Wright of baseball broadcasting. Every big-league city has had its own play-by-play icon, with some becoming national figures: Vin Scully (Los Angeles Dodgers), Red Barber (Cincinnati Reds, Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Yankees), Mel Allen (New York Yankees), Harry Caray (Chicago Cubs), Harry Kalas (Philadelphia Phillies), and Jack and Joe Buck (St. Legends have sat behind microphones and developed a rich tradition of baseball broadcasting ever since. The only way to follow scores was to look up at a wooden scoreboard to see them changed manually. Before Harold Arlin voiced the first Major League Baseball broadcast on August 5, 1921, the only way to experience a game was to go to the ballpark.
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