Tuesday 18 October 2022

the beeb (10. 234)

Just over two years after the first live public broadcast, sponsored by the Daily Mail and hosted by Marconi’s Wireless Telegraph Company and featuring a performance by Australian soprano Dame Nellie Melba (of toast fame) captured the public imagination with the possibilities of this new technology—despite a distinct disdain for such frivolities and the potential to impede other more official or newsworthy communication on the part of the government, the General Post Office, the licensing authority, was overwhelmed with over a hundred requests to establish radio stations. Eager to not follow the same career into chaos as with the largely unregulated expansion of the radio network in the United States, officials proposed the issuance of a single license jointly owned by the leading wireless receiver manufacturers. The British Broadcasting Company Ltd was founded on this day in 1922, its centenary, by John Reith as its general manager, with the abiding directive to “inform, educate and entertain.” On New Year’s Eve 1926, the commercial enterprise was dissolved and reconstituted as the crown-chartered British Broadcasting Corporation.