On the Right Wavelength

Dorothy Parker, in a 1927 New Year’s review of a book about etiquette for The New Yorker, expressed a fashionable sentiment about an upstart medium: ‘There is no force great enough ever to make me say “I’m thinking of buying a radio’’.’ Yet she soon changed her mind, as did millions of Americans. A few statistics illustrate this enormous change. In 1924, Americans owned 2 million radio sets; in 1936, 33 million; in 1940, 50 million. In 1929 the annual gross network revenues for Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and National Broadcasting Company (NBC) totalled $19 million. Six years later NBC reported revenues of $31.4 million and CBS $17.6 million. By 1940, CBS sales had increased to $41 million; NBC to $51.6 million. The same year the Mutual Broadcasting System, founded in 1934, reported nearly $5 million in gross revenues. Within eleven years network gross sales had increased from $19 million to nearly $100 million. And this in the midst of the worst depression in American history and despite the refusal, even in 1940, of thirty of America’s leading advertisers – including General Motors – to buy time on radio.