Thrilling Days of Yesteryear...continued

Old time radio is a part of our pop culture history which, where it has been preserved at all, has been preserved largely accidentally. No one working in the medium intended that it be preserved, any more than actors in any live show expect that performance to last beyond the curtain call. Despite radio being the most disposable form of entertainment of it's time, a large body of radio performances have survived. The reason requires a little understanding of radio history.

Most radio programming for the United States originated on the east coast, primarily in New York City. There was an abundance of talent in New York theater to draw upon. Getting programming out to the rest of the country was a bit of a problem in the 1920's, however. Without satellites or elaborate cable systems for competitors to transmit signals cross country, AT&T enjoyed a technological edge as an early radio network pioneer. Using their monopoly on phone lines (did I mention there used to be just one phone company, kids?) they were able to shut out rivals from transmitting programs to affiliates via telephone. Competitors like RCA (Radio Corporation of America--formed by radio manufacturers GE and Westinghouse to promote radio ownership) had to make do with telegraph wires, shortwave or relay transmissions, all of which resulted in poor sound quality for network programming.

In 1926, AT&T got bored with the network radio biz and sold their interest to rival RCA, putting them in charge of two networks under the new NBC banner, the Red and the Blue (later split off as ABC.) AT&T phone lines were leased by the new company, opening up "transcription by wire" to affiliates across the nation. Soon CBS and the Midwest based Mutual Network would join the transcription parade.

So how did it work? Programs were performed live in recording studios, frequently in front of an audience. The performance would go our over phone lines to the members of the network, with regional commercial programming often performed live during the show in multiple recording booths off the main sound-stage. On the receiving end of these phone lines, transcription discs would be recorded--typically on 16" aluminum platters. These records would then be played back at the appropriate time by the local station. It is these platters, intended originally for one time use, that would give birth to the rerun, and allow radio programs to survive to the present time...in some cases.

I recently worked on cataloging the early episodes of the Adventures of Superman, which ran every weekday for much of it's history. From its premier in February 1940 to August of 1942, we have an unbroken run of 325 episodes of this program. But there are less than 100 episodes scattered throughout the rest of the War years (1944 yields only four disconnected fragments). Aluminum became a valuable wartime commodity and radio programs began to be transcribed on glass--with predictable results for posterity. We are lucky to have the unbroken chain of early episodes, as scrap drives started to claim existing aluminum discs from 1942 onward.

Making sense of what's left can be challenge in it's own right--but that's another blog.