News traveled fast, even in the early twentieth century, and it wasn't long before the new technology began to stir in the Pacific Northwest. The stage for commercial voice and music broadcasts was set" ("The Development of Radio"). "His signal was received as far away as Norfolk, Virginia. In 1906, Canadian-born physicist Reginald Fessenden (1866-1932) sent the first long-distance transmission of human voice and music from his station in Brant Rock, Massachusetts. These initial broadcasts were crude, limited to coded dots and dashes, but change came quickly. By the end of 1901, Marconi had founded his own commercial wireless company and broadcast the first transatlantic signal" ("The Development of Radio").
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But in September 1899 "he astounded the world by telegraphing the results of the America's Cup yacht races from a ship at sea to a land-based station in New York.
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Marconi started small, tinkering with short-distance broadcasts in his backyard. Influential to Marconi's invention was Heinrich Hertz (1857-1894), a German physicist who in the 1880s had demonstrated that electromagnetic currents (discovered in 1820) could be perceived at a distance, and that such waves traveled at the speed of light. In 1899, Bologna-born electrical engineer Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937), piggybacking on theories developed by physicists in England and Germany, "brought electromagnetic waves out of the laboratory and into the world" ("The Development of Radio"). Like espresso, pianos, and parachutes, radio was very much an Italian invention. By 2022 there were 383 licensed stations in Washington, offering programming running the gamut from Christian Contemporary to Regional Mexican to News Talk and Classic Rock. When music fans gravitated to the FM band and its superior sound quality in the 1970s, AM pivoted to news and talk. The advent of television after the war rocked the radio industry, which rallied with the introduction of Top 40 formats in the 1950s.
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Listeners flocked to their receivers during radio's Golden Age for entertainment and sports, and during World War II for news reports from the front lines. Radio broadcasting came to Washington in the early 1920s, and by the end of the Roaring Twenties radio stations had been launched in every major city in the state.