Coloff Media Celebrates World Radio Day
Coloff Media is a local, Iowa-owned media company that owns and operates 14 local radio stations, community websites and video streaming services throughout Northcentral and Eastern Iowa. Coloff Digital is our digital media division that produces websites, video and graphic design projects for small and medium sized businesses and organizations throughout the Midwest.
Radio continues to have an impressive audience despite the competition from all fronts. In America, according to Nielsen, over two hundred and seventy two million people (6+) listen to the radio every week. Therefore, it remains to be the top reach medium that touches more individuals than any other device.
As we celebrate World Radio Day, and our heritage of providing great local radio to our listeners, we present the interesting facts about the resilient media of Radio:
1. Clerk Maxwell was the first to foresee that radio waves existed. His theory is known as Maxwell’s equations, and it described light and radio waves as electromagnetic waves traveling through space. Other types of electromagnetic waves include Bluetooth, radar, x-rays, infrared, ultraviolet, and microwaves.
2. Heinrich Hertz demonstrated radio waves in his lab in 1887. The unit of frequency of a radio wave — one cycle per second — is named the hertz, in honor of Heinrich Hertz. Radio is broadcasted in different frequencies, including the FM radio waves that range between 88 MHz and 108 MHz (FM stands for frequency modulation, which produces a wave of constant amplitude but varying frequency.) AM radio waves posted between 550 kHz and 1600 kHz.
3. The most powerful radio station ever was WLW (station licensed to Cincinnati, Ohio.) which broadcasted at 700KHz, and at some point, in the 1930s, the radio wave was 500Kw radiated power. Those in the vicinity of the transmitter could hear the audio in their pans, pots, and mattresses.
4. Guglielmo Marconi was able to send and receive his first radio signal in Italy in 1895, and in 1899 he sent a wireless signal transversely to the English Channel. In 1902 he received a letter ‘S’ telegraphed from England marking the first transatlantic radiotelegraph message.
5. In 1900, the Canadian inventor Reginald Fessenden managed to transmit the world’s first voice message. In 1906, on Christmas eve, he made the radio broadcast.
6. In the 1980s, people were able to download video games from a radio broadcast. They would record the sounds onto a cassette tape, and then they could play later on their computers.
7. The first public radio broadcasts were done on top of the Eiffel tower by radio scientists. Lee de Forest, together with his peers, is viewed as the father of radio broadcasting. Being an opportunist, he took a break on his honeymoon in 1908 and climbed France’s most famous landmark. He broadcasted a selection of music to the Parisian suburbs and became the first radio DJ.
8. The Eiffel Tower was meant to be brought down after twenty years. However, it survived because the military began to use it as a radio tower to intercept crucial military transmissions during World War I.
9. UVB-76 is a secretive Russian radio signal that has been continuously transmitting since 1982. Although no one knows who makes the signal, it is located near Moscow and makes a buzzing sound twenty-five times a minute. The station was originally identified as UVB-76 and then MDZhB but is commonly known as The Buzzer.
10. The first incident of telephone hold music was a mistake caused by a loose wire touching a metal girder at a factory. It turned the entire building into a mega radio antenna that would play the music from a next-door radio station when people were on hold.
11. The radio stations located on the East of River Mississippi use ‘W’ as the first letter in the call signs, and those to the West use ‘K’ for their call signs. An example of an East radio station call sign is WIHB.
12. In World War II, they censored weather reports to avert the enemy submarines from knowing the conditions. At that time, a football match in Chicago was covered in fog, but the radio announcer never used the name ‘fog’ or mentioned the weather.
13. David Sarnoff, who is the founder of RCA (Radio Corporation of America), fought very hard to avert FM radio from succeeding. Eventually, Edwin Howard Armstrong, the inventor of the FM radio, committed suicide due to emotional and financial distress that he suffered from RCA lawsuits.
14. It is believed that radio waves will continue to travel forever unless something absorbs them. If that is the case, and if there are more life forms in other parts of the universe, then other planets may have heard the radio waves.
15. In 1932, experts revealed that astronomical objects emit radio waves. A system has been established that makes it possible to produce pictures from radio waves. Thus, astronomers are using radio telescopes to study radio waves emitted from specks of dust, planets, gas clouds, stars, comets, and other galaxies.