Overview
Charles David Herrold (1875–1948) ran regular scheduled voice and music transmissions from San Jose, California from around 1912, to an audience of local listeners who knew when to tune in. He coined the term "broadcasting" for it, borrowing from the agricultural sense of scattering seed widely.
What You Need
- Lived: 1875–1948, United States
- Anchor year: 1912 — scheduled transmissions begin
- Strand: overlooked — the idea, not the apparatus
Steps
The problem as it stood
Radio was understood as point-to-point communication: a message from one party to another, ideally private. The idea that you might transmit to no one in particular, on a schedule, and that this would be valuable, did not follow from the technology.
What he actually did
Herrold, who ran a radio school, began transmitting music and talk on a regular timetable, building an audience among local listeners and set-builders. He used students as announcers, including his wife Sybil, who is often described as the first woman disc jockey.
How it worked
Technically it was arc-transmitter working with a microphone, which was awkward and inefficient. The innovation was structural rather than technical: a published schedule, consistent programming, and an audience cultivated over time. Everything that later defines a station is present.
What it made possible
The station as an institution. When broadcasting became a mass phenomenon after the First World War, the format Herrold had been running for years was what it became. His station eventually became KCBS.
What happened to him
Wartime restrictions closed amateur stations, and afterwards he lacked the capital to compete with corporate broadcasters. He lost the station, worked in other trades, and died in 1948 in obscurity.
Where the credit landed
Priority in broadcasting is usually awarded to KDKA in 1920, which had corporate backing and made a publicised event of the presidential election returns. Herrold had been doing essentially the same thing for eight years without the publicity apparatus. His case shows that being first matters less than being first with a press department.
Pro Tips
- A schedule and a known audience is what makes broadcasting different from radio.
- He coined "broadcasting" from the agricultural sense of scattering seed.
- KDKA gets the credit; Herrold was eight years earlier without the publicity.
Knowledge Base
What You'll Learn
The invention here is a business model and a habit, not a circuit.
Why nobody expected broadcasting
Wireless was funded and developed as a substitute for the telegraph cable — point to point, private, billable per message. Transmitting to anyone who cared to listen looked like a defect, not a product, because there was no obvious way to charge for it. Advertising and licence fees were both invented afterwards to solve a problem the technology had created.
Where This Fits
This guide covers one specific part of the history of media technology. The wider picture — how each link in the chain from capture through transmission to display was actually built, who built it, and why the credit so often landed somewhere else — is in A History of Broadcast Technology: The Chain From Capture to Screen, which frames the discipline as a whole and links out to the detailed guides underneath it, including this one. If you are starting from scratch rather than solving a specific problem, read that first and come back here.
FAQ
Q: Who made the first radio broadcast?
A: It depends on the definition. Fessenden transmitted voice in 1906, though the famous Christmas Eve broadcast is undocumented. Herrold ran scheduled programming to a known audience from around 1912. KDKA in 1920 is usually credited, having had corporate backing and publicity.
Q: Where does the word "broadcasting" come from?
A: From agriculture — scattering seed broadly by hand. Herrold applied it to transmitting to a dispersed audience rather than to a single recipient.