100 Years of Radio: Part 1
b'This episode begins shortly after 9 am on the Saturday I turned 6\\u2026for reasons that will forever remain mysterious, the present from my grandmother was a Lloyds portable transistor radio\\u2026model tr-62\\u2026made in Taiwan\\u2026built with 6 transistors\\u2026\\n\\nThis thing revealed a wider world to me\\u2026I grew up in a small town with three tv stations (one of which was in French) and the only radio I heard was what mom and dad listened in the kitchen or in the car\\u2026\\n\\nBut now that I had my own radio, I discovered that there were many, many, many other stations out there\\u2026and in the wintertime, when the atmosphere turned into a giant reflector for distant am signals, I started to listen to stations from Minneapolis, Denver, Chicago, Louisville, and many others\\u2026\\n\\nAt some point, I decided that I wanted to be part of this world of news and information and entertainment and music\\u2026and to make a long story short, here I am\\u2026.\\n\\n\\u2018course, you may be listening to this as an internet stream or a podcast\\u2026but the original construction of the program was for traditional, terrestrial over-the-air FM radio\\u2026\\n\\nRadio is everywhere:\\xa0 the clock radio, the kitchen, the stereo in the living room, the car, the office, the gym, the store\\u2026in fact, there are so many radios that they outnumber people in North America\\u2026there are thousands of FM stations and thousands of am stations\\u2026.\\n\\nBut because radio is so ubiquitous, most people don\\u2019t give it much thought\\u2026it\\u2019s always been there, and it\\u2019s always been free and it\\u2019s so easy to use\\u2026radio has become so tightly integrated in our lives that we don\\u2019t notice it perhaps as much as we should\\u2026\\n\\nAnd then there are those who maintain that radio is dead and that no one listens anymore\\u2026that\\u2019s rubbish, of course\\u2026I could cite you all kinds of all kinds of statistics to prove that radio is still very popular, powerful, and profitable\\u2014like almost 90% of the population listens to radio over the course of a week\\u2014but just take my word for it\\u2026\\n\\nBut radio is in a period of transition as new technologies come into play\\u2026however, the radio industry is very aware of what\\u2019s going on\\u2026\\n\\nThese are all reasons why I want to talk about radio\\u2026.plus this will give me an excuse to play some great songs about the medium\\u2026\\n\\nOh\\u2014did I mention that radio has now officially been around for 100 years?....yes\\u2026yes, it has\\u2014and here\\u2019s its story\\u2026\\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices'