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The Radio Wars: The 500,000W Ghost Station, WLW & America's Loudest Secret | Sleep Story · Sleepless History: Sleep Documentaries

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Welcome back to Sleepless History, the show where we wander into the quiet corners of the past and let the strange slow true stories carry you off to sleep.
• 0:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tonight we are going somewhere unusual.
• 0:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: We are going to the corn fields of Indiana.
• 0:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the quiet hill country outside a small ohio town called Mason sometime in the year 1934.
• 0:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: And we are going to talk about a radio station.
• 0:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Except this one was so powerful, so strange, so almost impossibly loud in a way that had nothing to do with volume and everything to do with
• 0:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: It bent the rules of what anyone thought a single broadcaster could do.
• 0:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: People called it the nation station.
• 0:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Engineers called it a triumph.
• 0:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Frightened competitors called it a monster.
• 0:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: And tonight we are going to take it apart piece by piece.
• 1:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: So get comfortable.
• 1:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's drift back together to a time when radio itself was still young enough to be dangerous.
• 1:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: chapter one, the humming mattress and the monster on the air.
• 1:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Picture a farmhouse in rural Indiana, somewhere in the dark, flat distance west of Cincinnati.
• 1:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is late at night in the autumn of 1934.
• 1:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: The farmer who lives here has gone to bed the way he has gone to bed every night of his life.
• 1:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: in a metal-framed bed with a coiled wire mattress underneath the cotton ticking.
• 1:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: He blows out the lamp.
• 1:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: The house creaks the way old farmhouse is creak, settling into the cold.
• 1:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then, just as he is drifting off, he hears something that should not be possible.
• 1:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Music.
• 1:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: faint ghostly, but unmistakably music, an orchestra playing somewhere that is nowhere at all, somewhere underneath him, inside the bed itself.
• 2:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: He sits up.
• 2:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: He puts his ear down against the mattress, against the cold metal coils, and there it is again, a dance band, horns and strings.
• 2:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Drifting up out of the wire springs like something escaping from a music box buried in the earth.
• 2:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: He is not losing his mind.
• 2:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: He has not had too much to drink.
• 2:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: What is happening to him is, in its own way, is perfectly explainable and we will get to the explanation very soon.
• 2:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: But try to imagine the feeling of it.
• 2:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: lying alone in the dark in a farmhouse with no radio anywhere in the room and hearing an orchestra rise up out of your own bed.
• 2:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now travel east with me out of Indiana.
• 2:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: across the Ohio State Line into the gentle hills around the small town of Mason, Ohio, just north of Cincinnati.
• 3:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is roughly the same period, the middle 1930s.
• 3:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: A man steps out into his backyard in the evening to do some small chore.
• 3:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Maybe to hang up laundry.
• 3:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Maybe just to get a breath of air before turning in.
• 3:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: He happens to be carrying a light bulb.
• 3:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: an ordinary light bulb that he has unscrewed from a lamp socket inside the house, meaning to replace it or test it.
• 3:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: And as he lifts it up, simply holding it in the open air of his backyard, with no wire attached to it, no socket, no plug, nothing at all connecting it to any source of electricity that he can see, the bulb begins to glow.
• 3:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Faintly at first, then more steadily, a soft, ghostly light, humming in his open hand, fed by something invisible passing right through the evening air around him.
• 3:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: These are not campfire stories invented decades later to make a podcast sound more exciting.
• 4:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: These are the kinds of things that residents around Mason, Ohio, and farms across southwestern Ohio, eastern Indiana, and northern Kentucky, genuinely reported experiencing during this period.
• 4:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lights that would not turn off.
• 4:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Metal objects that buzzed and hummed and occasionally spoke, neon signs that stayed lit through the night with no plug, no switch, and no power bill attached to them.
• 4:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: We will spend a great deal of time later tonight on these strange, true, almost folkloric stories.
• 4:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: But for now, I want you to hold on to that feeling of impossibility, that sense of something enormous and invisible, pressing in on ordinary daily life.
• 4:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: because that feeling was the entire point of what we are discussing tonight.
• 4:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: The source of all of it was a radio station with the call letters WLW, broadcasting out of Cincinnati, Ohio.
• 5:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: And during a brief extraordinary window in American history, WLW was without exaggeration
• 5:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: the most powerful broadcasting station that had ever existed on American soil, and arguably the most powerful that has ever existed anywhere in the world.
• 5:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: To understand why a single radio station could make light bulbs glow in someone's hand half a mile away.
• 5:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: and why an orchestra could rise up through a farmer's bed springs.
• 5:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: We first need to understand just how young, wild, and utterly unregulated American radio still was in the early 1930s.
• 5:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is easy, sitting here in the present, to think of radio or really any broadcast medium as something orderly, frequencies assigned by careful committees.
• 5:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: power levels set by sober engineers in government offices, everyone behaving themselves more or less inside tidy boundaries.
• 6:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: None of that existed yet.
• 6:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: not really, not in any form we would recognize.
• 6:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Radio Broadcasting, as something the general public could actually own and listen to in their own homes, was barely a decade old by the time our story begins.
• 6:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: The very first commercial broadcasting license in the United States had only been issued around 1920,
• 6:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: to a station out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
• 6:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Within just a few years, the idea had exploded across the country.
• 6:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thousands of amateur operators, hobbyists, tinkerers, and small businessmen with a bit of electrical know-how.
• 6:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: started slapping together transmitters in addicts, garages and spare bedrooms and broadcasting whatever they felt like broadcasting.
• 6:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: On whatever frequency happened to be open, at whatever power their equipment could manage.
• 7:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was, in the true sense, the wild west of the air waves.
• 7:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were no clean lanes.
• 7:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was no traffic cops standing in the middle of the intersection.
• 7:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Signals would collide and garble into static.
• 7:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: A listener trying to tune in to their favourite programmes some evenings would find three different stations all howling over each other in an electronic shouting match, because nobody, least of all the government, had yet figured out how to keep order.
• 7:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: The federal government tried more than once to get a handle on the chaos.
• 7:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: An agency called the Federal Radio Commission was created in 1927, specifically to sort out this mess.
• 7:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: To hand out frequencies and power limits, the way a parent might hand out chores to squabbling children in the hope that everyone would finally play nicely.
• 8:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: And for a while, it sort of worked.
• 8:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: A system emerged of what were called clear channels, a small number of privileged frequencies, around 40 of them.
• 8:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: reserved for a handful of powerful stations that were allowed to broadcast at higher power without interference precisely so that listeners in rural areas, the farmers and small-town families who had no other stations nearby could actually receive a strong, clean signal at night.
• 8:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was, in its way, a reasonable and even generous idea.
• 8:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Bring radio to the people who had the least access to it by giving a select few stations in enough electrical muscle to reach far out into the darkness.
• 8:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: But reasonable ideas, once they meet ambition, do not always stay reasonable for long.
• 8:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the man who would push the boundaries of that clear channel system further than anyone else who would turn a modest, well-meaning piece of federal policy into a five-year electrical spectacle that rattled gutters lit unplugged bulbs and started a genuine political crisis in Washington.
• 9:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: was an eccentric, restless, endlessly inventive, Cincinnati industrialist by the name of Powell Crosley, Jr. We will properly meet him soon, in full, because his story deserves its own slow, unwinding.
• 9:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: But before we can even get to Powell Crosley and his 500,000 watt creation, there is another battle we need to walk through first.
• 9:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: A quieter, more bureaucratic, but in its own way, just as vicious a conflict, because while radio stations were busy growing louder and more powerful out in the technical world, an entirely different kind of war was breaking out in the world of business and journalism, a war between two old, proud, deeply entrenched American institutions, the newspaper and the radio.
• 10:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Historians somewhat dryly call this conflict the press radio war.
• 10:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: It does not sound on the surface, like the most thrilling chapter in American history.
• 10:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: No tanks, no soldiers, no explosions.
• 10:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Just publishers and broadcast executives arguing in hotel conference rooms about who got to tell people the news first and through what means.
• 10:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: But stick with me here.
• 10:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: is a genuinely fascinating story about fear, about the death grip and old form of media tried to hold on a new one.
• 10:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: and about exactly the kind of anxiety that, frankly, sounds eerily familiar if you have paid any attention at all to fight over the internet, social media, or streaming services in our own time.
• 11:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: The names and technologies change.
• 11:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: The fear of losing control over how people get their information does not change nearly as much.
• 11:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, let's dive into that story now, into the smoky boardrooms and the newspaper-composing rooms of the early 1930s, where men in suits decided that a box that played music and talks in your living room had suddenly become public enemy number one.
• 11:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 2, The Radio Walk
• 11:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the early 1930s, the United States was sliding deeper into the great depression and almost every business in the country was hurting, including the newspaper business.
• 11:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Advertising revenue, the lifeblood of any newspaper was drying up.
• 11:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Circulation numbers were wobbling, and right in the middle of this financial squeeze.
• 11:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Newspaper publishers looked up from their ledges and noticed something deeply alarming.
• 12:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: More and more of the advertising dollars that used to flow automatically toward newsprint were instead flowing toward radio.
• 12:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is worth pausing here to really feel how new and how threatening radio must have seemed to a newspaper publisher in say 1932.
• 12:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: For roughly a century newspapers had been the primary, dominant, almost unchallenged way that ordinary Americans learned what was happening in the world.
• 12:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you wanted to know the news, you bought a paper or a few papers, sometimes more than one edition of the same paper in a single day.
• 12:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Publishers had built enormous profitable empires on this simple fact.
• 12:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: People needed newspapers to know what was going on.
• 12:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: and then almost overnight in historical terms, a wooden box with a glowing dial appeared in millions of American living rooms, and that box could tell you the news instantly, as it happened for free.
• 13:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Without you ever needing to walk down to the corner new stand, or wait for the evening addition to come off the present.
• 13:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're still from a newspaper publishes
• 13:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: A newspaper had to be written, set in type, printed, bundled, and physically delivered.
• 13:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: A radio announcer simply had to walk into a studio and start talking.
• 13:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was no possible way for ink and paper to win a foot race against electricity.
• 13:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the newspaper publishes through their powerful trade organisation
• 13:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: the American newspaper publishes association decided to fight back, and the way they chose to fight back reveals just how much leverage they still held over the news business as a whole, even as radio was eating into their audience.
• 14:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: You see, in the early 1930s, radio stations and radio networks did not yet have large
• 14:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Building an independent newsgathering operation with correspondence stationed around the country and the world cost an enormous amount of money.
• 14:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: And most radio executives had never needed to spend it because there was an easier path.
• 14:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Radio stations simply subscribe to the existing wire services.
• 14:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Organizations like the Associated Press and United Press, the same services that fed news stories to newspapers all across the country.
• 14:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: and radio announces would read those wire service bulletins allowed, essentially repackaging the very same reporting that newspapers had paid good money together and handing it to listeners for free, often hours before the newspaper even hit the stands.
• 15:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: From the newspaper publishes perspective, this was outrageous.
• 15:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were, in effect,
• 15:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: their subscription dollars to the wire services were paying for reporters and correspondence.
• 15:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: And those same wire service reports were then being handed over to radio stations.
• 15:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: which turned around and broadcast the news for free, undercutting the very newspapers that had paid for the reporting in the first place.
• 15:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, beginning around 1933, the newspaper publishes began applying serious pressure on the wire services.
• 15:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: The message was blunt, stop selling your news bulletins to radio stations, or risk losing your newspaper subscribers,
• 15:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: with a wire service is largest and most important customers by far.
• 15:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Faced with that kind of financial threat, the wire service is largely cave.
• 15:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Associated Press, United Press, and a third major service called the International New Service, all moved in stages to cut off or sharply restrict the flow of news bulletins going out to radio broadcasters.
• 16:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: You might think this would have crushed radio news entirely.
• 16:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: And for a brief moment, it nearly did create a real crisis for the radio networks.
• 16:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: But here is where the story gets interesting.
• 16:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because the radio networks did not simply roll over and accept defeat.
• 16:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Instead, the two biggest networks in the country, the Columbia Broadcasting System and the National Broadcasting Company, decided to do something the newspapers had never anticipated.
• 16:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Build their own independent news gathering operations from scratch.
• 16:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Columbia Broadcasting System, in particular, moved quickly, establishing its own full-fledged news division by the fall of 1933, hiring reporters, setting up its own correspondence, and proving that radio did not actually need the newspaper's wire services at all, if it was willing to invest in gathering the news itself.
• 17:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: The National Broadcasting Company followed along on a smaller scale, not quite as aggressively, but moving in the same direction.
• 17:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: This terrified the newspaper publishes even more than the original problem had.
• 17:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: If radio networks built fully independent newsrooms, complete with their own reporters chasing their own scoops, then radio would no longer merely be repeating newspaper content for free.
• 17:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: It would become a genuine, fully formed, competing news organization in its own right.
• 17:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: One with the unbeatable advantage of instant transmission.
• 17:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the newspaper publishes escalated.
• 17:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Their campaign against radio took three distinct forms, which, if you squint just slightly, look remarkably similar to fights we still see today between old and new media, political lobbying, attempting to pressure lawmakers and regulators into restricting radio's news activities, economic boycott, threatening to simply stop printing radio program schedules in their
• 18:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: was one of the major ways listeners in the 1930s, found out what was even playing on the radio that evening.
• 18:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: And legal action, exploring where the courts might be persuaded that radio stations re-broadcasting wire service content even paraphrased content, amounted to a kind of unauthorized use of the newspaper's property.
• 18:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: faced with this three-pronged assault and worried about a drawn-out, expensive, and possibly damaging public fight with the newspaper industry, network executives decided it was time to negotiate.
• 19:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The pivotal meeting took place at the Biltmore Hotel in New York City.
• 19:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: in December of 1933.
• 19:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Representatives from the major newspaper publishes association, the wire services, and the broadcasting networks, including the Presidents of the Columbia Broadcasting System, and the National Broadcasting Company's parent company sat down together to hammer out a truce.
• 19:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: What emerged from those meetings became known fittingly as the built more agreement.
• 19:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: and it stands as one of the strangest, most lopsided peace treaties in the history of American media.
• 19:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Under the terms of the built-in agreement, the radio networks agreed to dramatically restrict their own news broadcasting.
• 19:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Stations could air no more than two news broadcasts a day.
• 19:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Each limited to a mere five minutes.
• 19:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: And these were not even allowed at convenient hours.
• 20:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well after the morning papers had already reached readers' doorsteps and breakfast tables, and the other was permitted only after nine o'clock in the evening, again, conveniently time to avoid stepping on the toes of the daily papers' primary selling hours.
• 20:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: The agreement went even further.
• 20:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: No single news item could run longer than 30 words.
• 20:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: No advertising or sponsorship was allowed to accompany these tiny five-minute newscasts, which conveniently meant radio could not even make meaningful money from the news it was permitted to broadcast.
• 20:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the bulletins themselves were not even allowed to be original.
• 20:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: fresh hot off the wire reporting.
• 20:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: They had to be drawn from material already supplied by newspapers.
• 20:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Through a new organization created specifically for this purpose, called the Press Radio Bureau, which functioned almost like a shaperone, carefully rewriting wire service copy into
• 21:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then, there was perhaps the most almost comically self-defeating detail of the entire arrangement.
• 21:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Radio stations were required as part of every single one of these tiny five-minute broadcasts.
• 21:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: To tell their own listeners to stop listening to them and go by a newspaper instead, the standard announcement
• 21:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: repeated beautifully across the country, when something along the lines of, quote, see your daily newspaper for further details, end quote.
• 21:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Imagine being a radio announcer, reading a thin little summary of the day's events, and then being contractually obligated to end your broadcast by telling your audience in essence.
• 21:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: None of what I just told you is enough.
• 22:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Go by the printed competition if you actually want to know what's happening.
• 22:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is hard to overstate just how desperate and one sided this agreement really was.
• 22:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: The newspapers had used their financial leverage over the wire services as a weapon, forced the radio networks into a corner and then extracted what amounted to a humiliating surrender.
• 22:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Two, five minute newscasts a day.
• 22:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: No sponsorship, no original reporting, and a built-in advertisement for the newspaper industry, baked directly into every single radio news broadcast.
• 22:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: and this is the part of the story that I find genuinely delightful.
• 22:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: The built-more agreement turned out to be almost impossible to actually enforce.
• 22:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: The two biggest national networks, the Columbia Broadcasting System and the National Broadcasting Company, did largely comply at least on paper, dismantling some of their independent news ambitions and folding their broadcasts into the new restricted press radio bureau format.
• 23:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: But here is the catch.
• 23:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: The built more agreement had only been signed by the major networks and the national newspaper association.
• 23:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: It did not, and really could not, bind the hundreds of smaller, independent, local radio stations scattered across the country.
• 23:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Stations that had never been part of the negotiation and felt no particular obligation to honour an agreement they never agreed to in the first place.
• 23:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this is exactly where stations like WLW come roaring back into our story.
• 23:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Independent and quasi-independent broadcasters quickly discovered that there were other sources of news available to them.
• 23:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Services that had never signed on to the newspaper publishes Blockade.
• 23:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: A scrappy alternative news gathering operation called Trans Radio Press Service sprang up specifically to serve these unaffiliated stations, offering the Mastedi stream of news bulletins often with far fewer restrictions than the official Press Radio Bureau imposed on the major networks.
• 24:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Independent stations leaned into this loophole eagerly, broadcasting fuller, more frequent newscasts.
• 24:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes even carrying advertising alongside them, openly defying the spirit.
• 24:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: If not always the precise letter of the agreement the big networks had signed.
• 24:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some local stations effectively ran their own small bootleg press operations, gathering tips by telephone, monitoring competing broadcasts,
• 24:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Building relationships with local sources, anything to fill the gaps.
• 24:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: that the official wire services had left behind.
• 24:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: The newspapers were furious.
• 24:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: They accused independent radio stations of what they called newspilvering, essentially intellectual theft, lifting facts and angles from printed stories and repackaging them for broadcast without proper compensation.
• 25:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were disputes, complaints, and the occasional lawsuit.
• 25:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the simple truth was that once listeners had experienced the immediacy of radio news, even in its weakened, restricted, built more agreement form.
• 25:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was no putting that particular genie back into its bottle.
• 25:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: The press radio bureau itself, lacking any real legal authority to compel obedience from broadcasters who had never signed its rules.
• 25:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: relied mostly on goodwill, monitoring, and the threat of occasional lawsuits, which proved to be a remarkably weak foundation for trying to hold back an entire emerging medium.
• 25:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Slowly, over the following few years, the restrictions of the built-more agreement simply eroded away, station by station, networked by network, until by the later 1930s, full,
• 26:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Independent radio news had essentially become the norm rather than the exception.
• 26:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: The newspapers had won a battle, perhaps, in convincing the major networks to sign a humiliating restrictive truth.
• 26:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: But they had not won and could never truly have won the larger war.
• 26:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: because the appetite that listeners had developed for instant, spoken news could not be legislated or negotiated away.
• 26:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: It could only be temporarily inconvenienced.
• 26:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: I want you to sit with that for just a moment.
• 26:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: because I think it tells us something quietly important about how new technologies displace old ones.
• 26:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is rarely a clean knockout.
• 26:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is usually this slower, messier, more bureaucratic process.
• 26:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Full of temporary truces, restrictive agreements, lawsuits, loop holes, and stubborn, independent operators who simply refuse to play by the old rules.
• 27:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: the big, established players signed their careful treaties and the smaller, hungrier players quietly route to round them until the treaty becomes a historical footnote rather than a binding law of nature.
• 27:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it was precisely this atmosphere.
• 27:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: This sense that radio was an unstoppable, rule-breaking, rapidly growing force that older institutions could only slow down rather than
• 27:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: that allowed a man like Powell, Crosley, Jr, sitting in Cincinnati, Ohio to dream up something as audacious as a 500,000-watt radio transmitter.
• 27:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: If the old rules of media dominance were already crumbling around the edges, why not build something so big, so powerful, that it simply made the
• 28:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's meet the man, and the monster, properly.
• 28:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter three, Powell, Crosley, Junior, and the birth of a giant.
• 28:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Every larger than life invention seems to need a larger than life inventor standing behind it, and the story of WLW is no exception.
• 28:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: The man at the centre of it all was named Powell Crosley Junior, born in 1886.
• 28:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: And by the time our story really gets going in the early 1930s, he had already lived several lifetimes worth of restless, relentless ambition.
• 28:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Crosley was, above almost everything else, a manufacturer and a salesman at heart.
• 28:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Long before he became a broadcasting pioneer, he had built a thriving mail order business selling automobile accessories.
• 29:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: The kinds of small gadgets and parts that early car owners needed, but could not always find easily.
• 29:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: That business alone was grossing more than $1 million a year.
• 29:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: which in the early decades of the 20th century was a genuinely staggering sum of money.
• 29:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: He also dabbled with mixed success in trying to build and sell his own automobiles, an ambition that never quite took off the way he hoped, though it would, decades later, lead to the small, quirky little Crosley cars, that some listeners might remember as historical curiosities in their own right.
• 29:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: His company's also made furniture and phonograph cabinets, the wooden housings that held record players in early 20th century parlours.
• 29:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it was radio, almost by accident, that captured Crossley's full and complete obsession.
• 30:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: As the story goes, some time around 1921.
• 30:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Crosley wanted to buy his son a radio set, only to discover that even a basic crystal radio receiver was shockingly, almost prohibitively expensive for an ordinary family budget.
• 30:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Crossley, ever the manufacturer, looked at that expensive little radio and thought, in essence, I could build this cheap in myself.
• 30:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: He acquired a small transmitter, only about 20 watts of power, barely enough to be heard reliably across a single neighborhood, and began broadcasting amateur programming from a setup in his own home.
• 30:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: largely just so that he would have something interesting to listen to on the radios he was beginning to manufacture and sell.
• 30:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: He later recalled in an oft quoted line that before he quite realized what was happening to him, he had virtually forgotten his regular business in his intense sudden interest in radio.
• 31:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: That single sentence tells you almost everything you
• 31:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: He fell into them completely, and once he was in, he was all the way in.
• 31:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: In March of 1922, Krosley's company received an official commercial broadcasting license from the federal government, and was assigned the call letters WLW, almost entirely at random, the way call letters were typically assigned in that era.
• 31:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: The station made its very first official broadcast on the evening of March 22nd, 1922.
• 31:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Transmitting at a modest 50 watts of power from a small studio inside Crosley's manufacturing plant in Cincinnati.
• 31:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Even then, in that tiny 50 watt infancy, the company's own publicity materials boasted.
• 32:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: with a confidence that boarded on the absurd given the actual power involved.
• 32:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: that the broadcasts would be heard as far away as Canada, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Rocky Mountains.
• 32:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was wishful thinking dressed up as marketing copy, but it tells you something important, even from the very beginning, ambition far outpaced the actual hardware.
• 32:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Crosley wanted his station to be enormous before it had any real ability to be enormous.
• 32:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: He simply had to wait for the technology and the regulatory environment to catch up with his appetite and catch up it did.
• 32:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: again and again in a series of dramatic leaps.
• 32:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: From 50 watts the station grew to 100 watts and then after a contest in November of 1922 that drew letters from listeners in 42 different states proving there was a genuinely massive audience.
• 33:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: hungry for stronger, farther reaching signals, cruzzly kept pushing.
• 33:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: By 1923, the station was broadcasting at 500 watts, already roughly 10 times more powerful than most of its competitors at the time.
• 33:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: By January of 1925,
• 33:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: The station had left again to 5,000 watts.
• 33:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: And by 1928, Crosley had pushed his station to 50,000 watts, becoming by the company's own account.
• 33:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: The very first American commercial station to operate at that power level on a regular broadcasting schedule.
• 33:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: At 50,000 watts, WLW could already be heard, clearly and reliably, across an enormous stretch of the country, from New York in the east to Florida in the south.
• 34:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: The station had genuinely earned its self-given nickname by this point, the nation's station.
• 34:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: A broadcaster that, thanks entirely to raw electrical power, could reach a meaningful fraction of the entire American population from a single transmitter in southwestern Ohio.
• 34:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: You might think, 50,000 watts, already 10 times the typical power of most stations, would have been enough to satisfy even the most restless industrialist.
• 34:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was not nearly enough for Powell, Crosley, Jr.
• 34:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Even as the Great Depression settled in across the country in the early 1930s, crushing businesses left and right, throwing millions of Americans out of work and making nearly every company in the nation more cautious and conservative with their spending, Crosley kept dreaming bigger.
• 35:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was announced that the radio equipment giant RCA had been awarded a contract to design and build what was being called, without much exaggeration, the largest broadcasting transmitter in the world intended specifically for installation at Crosley's WLW transmitter site near the small town of Mason, Ohio.
• 35:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let that number sit with you for a moment, especially against the backdrop we have already established.
• 35:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Federal Maximum Power Limit
• 35:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: for ordinary American Broadcast stations at the time was 50,000 watts.
• 35:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Crosley was building something exactly 10 times more powerful than the legal ceiling that applied to every other station in the entire country.
• 35:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was, in effect, asking the government's permission to operate an electrical cannon in a landscape where everyone else was still using rifles.
• 36:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: though only on an experimental temporary basis.
• 36:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: The newly created Federal Communications Commission established in 1934, specifically to take over and modernise the old Federal Radio Commission's regulatory duties.
• 36:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Issued Crosley a special experimental license, allowing him to operate his new 500,000 watt transmitter.
• 36:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Initially, only during the overnight hours between one in the morning and six in the morning.
• 36:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: ostensibly so that engineers could carefully study its effects, without disrupting the regular daytime broadcasting landscape too dramatically.
• 36:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: The stated purpose of the experiment, at least on paper, was genuinely scientific.
• 36:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: To determine just how much additional radio service a power boost of this magnitude might bring to listeners in underserved rural areas, weighed against how much interference it might cause to smaller, weaker stations, operating on nearby frequencies.
• 37:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was meant to be a careful, contained, temporary scientific trial.
• 37:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: What it became,
• 37:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: very quickly was something closer to a spectacle.
• 37:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Building a transmitter capable of producing 500,000 watts was not simply a matter of turning a dial higher on existing equipment.
• 37:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: It required essentially, building an entirely new category of industrial machine.
• 37:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: one that had never existed before, at this scale, for ordinary domestic broadcasting.
• 37:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's walk through what that actually meant, physically, on the ground near Masonohio in 1933 and 1934.
• 37:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: The transmitter itself was a genuinely massive piece of equipment, built with the direct involvement of engineering teams from RCA, General Electric and Westinghouse, three of the largest electrical companies in the entire country.
• 38:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: all contributing expertise to this single-ordacious project.
• 38:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: The main transmitter structure alone measured roughly 54 feet wide, about 13 feet tall and around 7 feet deep, an entire small buildings worth of vacuum tubes, transformers, and wiring dedicated to a single broadcasting station.
• 38:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Inside, rows of enormous water cooled vacuum tubes, each one standing roughly five feet tall.
• 38:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Generated the raw electrical power needed to drive the signal.
• 38:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: 20 of these tubes.
• 38:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: a particular model known by the designation UV862 did the heavy lifting in the final amplification stage and each individual tube reportedly cost over 1,600 dollars and enormous sum for a single component in that era.
• 39:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Here is where the engineering gets genuinely fascinated.
• 39:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: and where you start to understand why this transmitter needed almost industrial scale supporting infrastructure rather than simply a bigger radio.
• 39:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Vacuum tubes operating at this kind of power generate an extraordinary amount of waste heat, left unchecked, that heat would have melted the internal components within minutes.
• 39:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the engineers built an elaborate water cooling system.
• 39:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Circulating distilled water around and through the tubes at a rate of more than 600 gallons per minute, constantly carrying heat away from the delicate internal elements before it could cause catastrophic damage.
• 40:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: To support this cooling system, Crosley's engineers had to construct dedicated cooling ponds near the transmitter site.
• 40:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Essentially, small artificial lakes, whose entire purpose was managing the heat generated by a single radio station.
• 40:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: The electrical demands were just as staggering, an entirely new dedicated substation had to be built specifically to feed power to the WLW transmitter,
• 40:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: from the local utility company, Cincinnati gas and electric, just to supply the raw electrical appetite of the new equipment.
• 40:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Two enormous modulation transformers, each weighing 37,000 pounds, sat at the heart of the system.
• 40:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: helping shape the powerful radio frequency signal that would eventually be sent rushing up into the antenna tower.
• 41:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: And what a tower it was.
• 41:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rather than building an ordinary radio mast, the kind of simple vertical pole you might picture when you imagine an old-fashioned radio tower.
• 41:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Croslie's engineers commissioned something far more distinctive from a specialized engineering firm called the Blor Nox Tower Company.
• 41:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: The result was a striking diamond shaped tower, wider in the middle and tapering toward both the top and the bottom.
• 41:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: rising to a height of 831 feet into the Ohio sky.
• 41:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: This unusual diamond shape was not simply an aesthetic flourish.
• 41:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a carefully engineered structural solution, designed to support the tower's own enormous weight and wind load, using less overall steel than a conventional
• 41:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: while also serving the specific electrical requirements of broadcasting at such extraordinary power.
• 42:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: The entire tower rested on a single base insulator, with a total weight pressing down on that insulator of roughly 450 tons.
• 42:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: To put the towers height into perspective for a moment,
• 42:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: 831 feet is taller than most skyscrapers that existed anywhere in the world at that time, all rising up out of an open field outside a small town that most Americans had never heard of.
• 42:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: This distinctive diamond shape, by the way, would go on to become something of a local icon.
• 42:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was only the second tower of its particular type ever built.
• 42:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: The first having gone up a station called WSM in Nashville, Tennessee, and the Mason, Ohio version, proved so recognizable, so woven into local identity over the following decades.
• 43:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: that the town of Mason eventually incorporated the tower's silhouette, directly into its own official town seal, a radio antenna immortalized in municipal heraldry.
• 43:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Few pieces of broadcasting equipment in American history have ever achieved quite that level of civic embrace.
• 43:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Finally, after roughly a year of construction, after the substations and cooling ponds and the diamond tower had all been completed,
• 43:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: The great machine was ready for its ceremonial unveiling and the unveiling itself carried a flourish entirely fitting for a project of this scale.
• 43:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the second of May, 1934, President Franklin Roosevelt, sitting at his desk in the White House in Washington, reached out and pressed a ceremonial telegraph key, the very same key, according to some accounts.
• 43:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: that had once been used decades earlier to symbolically open the Panama Canal.
• 44:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: With that single press of a button, hundreds of miles away in a field outside Cincinnati, the great transmitter stirred fully to life.
• 44:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Engineers in white shirts and ties, flipped switches and lit filaments.
• 44:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: water began circulating through the cooling system at full capacity and up through 831 feet of diamond-shaped steel, 500,000 watts of raw electrical power began pouring out into the American night, enough electricity by some estimates to supply the needs of an entire town
• 44:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: of 100,000 people dedicated instead to a single radio broadcast.
• 44:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was, by any measure, an almost unbelievable feat of engineering ambition, achieved in the deaths of the Great Depression, when most American businesses were cutting back, laying off workers, and simply trying to survive.
• 45:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Powell, Crosley, Jr. had built, quite literally
• 45:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: the most powerful broadcasting station that had ever existed, a machine so strong that it would soon make light bulbs glow in people's bare hands, half a mile or more from the transmitter, with no wires attached at all, and that is where our story turns toward its strangest, most magical, most genuinely unbelievable chapter.
• 45:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because once that 500,000-watt signal began pouring out of the diamond tower near Masono Hio, 24 hours a day, something began happening to the landscape around it that nobody, not even the engineers who had built the thing, had fully anticipated.
• 45:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 4.
• 45:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Megawatt Siege
• 46:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's settle in now, because this is the part of the story where things get genuinely strange.
• 46:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: The part where you start to understand why people, decades later, would look back on this brief five-year window and describe it almost as a kind of electrical siege.
• 46:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: A period when an entire region of southwestern Ohio, eastern Indiana, and northern Kentucky found itself living.
• 46:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: quite literally, inside the broadcast signal of a single radio station.
• 46:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: To understand why these strange phenomena happened at all, it helps to think about radio waves not as some abstract, invisible mathematical concept, but as a genuine physical force, a wave of electromagnetic energy radiating outward from that diamond-shaped tower
• 46:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Most of the time, when a radio wave passes through your house, it is far too weak to do anything except gently nudge the tiny antenna inside your radio receiver.
• 47:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Just enough to produce a signal that your radio's internal circuitry can amplify into sound.
• 47:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: But when the broadcasting power climbs into the hundreds of thousands of watts, and you happen to live close enough to the transmitter, the radio waves passing through your property are no longer just a gentle, polite nudge.
• 47:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: They become strong enough to induce real, measurable, electrical currents directly into ordinary metal objects, objects that were never designed to be antennas at all, but which simply by being made of metal, and being roughly the right length and shape, end up acting like antennas anyway, whether anyone wanted them to or not.
• 47:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is the key to understanding nearly every strange story that came out of the area around Masonohio, during the years that WLW operated at full half million watt power.
• 48:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Metal fences, bed springs, rain gutters, plumbing pipes, even the metal frames of certain kinds of furniture.
• 48:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: could all under the right conditions, pick up enough induced electrical current from the powerful radio signal passing through them to actually demodulate a faint scratchy, but genuinely audible version of whatever WLW happened to be broadcasting at that moment.
• 48:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: The farmer we met at the very beginning of tonight's story, lying in his bed in rural Indiana.
• 48:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hearing an orchestra rising up out of his own coiled wire mattress springs was experiencing exactly this phenomenon.
• 48:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: His mattress had, without his permission, or his understanding, become a radio antenna and receiver all at once, simply by being made of the right material of roughly the right shape.
• 48:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sitting within range of an extraordinarily powerful signal, and once you understand that basic principle, the rest of the stories from this era start to make a strange kind of sense, even as they remain almost impossible to believe.
• 49:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: take the story of the unplugged neon sign.
• 49:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: According to multiple accounts from residents living near the transmitter site, there was a neon sign, reportedly at a hotel near Mason, Ohio, that simply never went dark.
• 49:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Regardless of whether anyone had switched it on or off, regardless of whether it was even properly connected to the electrical grid at all.
• 49:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: The signs neon gas tubing, it turned out.
• 49:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: was perfectly capable of picking up enough stray radio-frequency energy from the nearby 500,000 watt transmitter to glow softly on its own, fed not by the building's wiring, but by the invisible electromagnetic field saturating the air all around it.
• 50:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Imagine walking past that hotel at three in the morning, long after the front desk clock had switched off every light he could find, and seeing that sign still glowing there in the darkness.
• 50:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Humming faintly with light that, as far as any ordinary explanation was concerned, should not have existed at all.
• 50:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then there were the metal rain gutters.
• 50:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Holmes near the transmitter site reported that their gutters were simple metal channels that run along the edges of a roof to carry away rainwater, would sometimes rattled buzz.
• 50:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in some reported cases, actually produce a faint, distorted version of whatever program WLW happened to be airing at that moment.
• 50:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: The metal gutters running in long straight lines along the edges of a roof happen to form almost ideal makeshift antennas for picking up the powerful signal and where two pieces of gutter met at a loose or slightly corroded joint
• 51:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The radio frequency energy passing through the metal could actually arc faintly across the gap.
• 51:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: In essence, detecting and demodulating the signal, the same way a crude crystal radio receiver might, except completely by accident.
• 51:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: using nothing but the homeowner's own rain gutters.
• 51:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some residents reportedly found this happening so persistently that the gutters would loosen and rattle right off their mounting brackets from the sheer accumulated vibration of the effect over time.
• 51:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lights presented their own peculiar problems.
• 51:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: We have already talked about the light bulb glowing in a man's bare hand out in his backyard, fed entirely by ambient radio frequency energy with no wire or socket required at all.
• 51:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: But there were other related complaints.
• 51:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some residents living closest to the transmitter found that certain lights in their homes simply would not turn off properly, glowing with a faint, persistent residual light, even after the switch had been firmly clicked to the off position.
• 52:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: because the lamps own wiring, however briefly, was acting as an unintended antenna, picking up just enough stray energy from the nearby transmitter to keep a faint current flowing through the filament, according to some historical accounts.
• 52:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: WLW actually had to send our engineers to personally help rewire certain especially affected homes, adjusting grounding and shielding to reduce the unwanted interference.
• 52:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Essentially providing house calls to fix problems that the station's own enormous broadcasting power had created in the first place.
• 52:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then there are the stories, perhaps the most evocative of all, of farmers hearing WLW's broadcasts through their own barbed wire fences.
• 53:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Picture mile after mile of ordinary agricultural fencing, strung between wooden posts across the flat farmland of southwestern Ohio and eastern Indiana.
• 53:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Fencing whose entire purpose was simply to keep livestock contained,
• 53:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: never designed with broad casting in mind at all.
• 53:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yet that same fencing, running for long, unbroken stretches across open fields, happened to form an almost perfect long wire antenna.
• 53:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Exactly the kind of design that radio engineers might deliberately build if they were trying to capture a distant, weak signal.
• 53:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Except this signal was not weak at all.
• 53:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: depending on how close the farm sat to the Mason transmitter, extraordinarily strong.
• 53:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Strong enough that multiple farmers reported being able to walk out to their fence line on a quiet evening, and actually hear faint, tiny radio programming humming along the wire itself.
• 54:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ordeal if you press your air close enough, or in some reported cases, Ordeal even at a slight distance, carried by some combination of vibration and ambient noise from the electrically charged wire.
• 54:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: I want you to take a moment here, in the quiet of wherever you are listening to this, and really imagine that scene.
• 54:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: A farmer walking the perimeter of his land at dusk, checking his fences the way farmers have checked fences for generations, and hearing, faintly, impossibly, a dance orchestra, or an announcer's voice drifting along the strand of barbed wire under his hand.
• 54:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is one of those details from history that sounds almost too poetic.
• 54:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: too perfectly strange to be true, and yet it was reported repeatedly by people who had no particular reason to make up such a specific and oddly mundane kind of magic.
• 55:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: The station's reach, of course, extended far beyond these close-in oddities of induced current in fences and gutters.
• 55:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Once WLW moved into regular night time operation at full power, it's actual broadcast signal, travelling the normal way through the air, bouncing off the upper layers of the atmosphere in what radio engineers call Skywave propagation, began reaching listeners at truly extraordinary distances, according to contemporary reporting from the period.
• 55:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: When the station first began operating at full power on a daily basis in May of 1934, it was already being heard with strong, clear signal quality across 13 different states and into parts of Canada.
• 55:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: an enormous footprint for what had started out just a decade earlier.
• 55:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: As a 50-watt hobby station, broadcasting from inside a Cincinnati manufacturing plant.
• 56:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the stories of its reach, only grew more dramatic from there.
• 56:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Listeners and radio enthusiasts of the era, the people who today we would call radio hobbyists or in more technical language,
• 56:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: reported picking up the station's powerful signal at night from extraordinary distances.
• 56:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well beyond the borders of the United States entirely.
• 56:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were accounts of the station being heard clearly in parts of the Caribbean and reports somewhat more difficult to verify with full certainty but persistent in the folklore surrounding the station nonetheless.
• 56:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: of listeners as far away as parts of South America and even across the Atlantic Ocean in Europe, occasionally catching fragments of the powerful Cincinnati signal during ideal night time atmospheric conditions.
• 57:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: When the Skywave propagation effect was at its absolute strongest.
• 57:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sailors and radio officers aboard ships at sea, scanning the AM broadcast bands during long
• 57:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: reportedly sometimes stumbled across the unmistakable programming of the self-proclaimed nation's station, a strange little touch of Cincinnati radio drifting across the dark water hundreds or even thousands of miles from where it had originated.
• 57:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Whether every single one of these more extreme, distanced listening stories holds up to perfectly rigorous modern scrutiny.
• 57:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: is, frankly, a question better suited for a different kind of show than this one.
• 57:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some of these accounts come down to us through newspaper articles, station promotional materials, and the recollections of listeners themselves.
• 57:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: The kind of sources that do not always come with airtight documentation attached, but what is beyond serious dispute, confirmed by contemporary government records, court filings, and competing broadcasts as own complaints, is that the station's signal was overwhelmingly undeniably.
• 58:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes almost comically powerful within its broader regional footprint, strong enough to create real, well documented interference problems for other stations operating on nearby frequencies, in multiple different states and even across an international border.
• 58:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: The most famous and best documented case of this interference involved a station in Toronto,
• 58:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Canada called CFRB.
• 58:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Almost as soon as WLW began operating at full power.
• 58:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission launched a formal complaint.
• 58:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Reporting that the overwhelming strength of the Cincinnati signal was bleeding directly into a wavelength assigned to the Toronto station, garbling and overpowering CFRB's own broadcasts for listeners across a wide stretch of Ontario.
• 59:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: This was not a minor technical footnote.
• 59:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: It became, in fairly short order, an actual diplomatic irritant between the United States and Canada.
• 59:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Two friendly neighbouring countries, finding themselves in a minor cross-border dispute, over the simple fact that one American radio station was quite literally too loud for its own continent.
• 59:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Inside the United States, similar complaints poured in from other stations, particularly those operating on frequencies near WLW's own assigned spot on the dial.
• 59:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: A station based in New Jersey, with the call letters, were, eventually filed a formal complaint, alleging that WLW's powerful signal was interfering with its own ability to reach listeners along parts of the eastern seaboard.
• 1:00:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Croslie's engineers determined to defend their station's reputation and its experimental license, actually sent teams driving up and down the eastern coast of the United States, from as far north as main down to Florida, equipped with cars fitted with rooftop antennas and recording equipment, specifically to measure signal strength
• 1:00:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: at various points along the way, and gather hard evidence about exactly how far WLW's interference actually extended, and whether the competing stations complaints held up under careful measurement.
• 1:00:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: According to surviving accounts from engineers who participated in these road trips, conducted mostly at night when the atmospheric sky wave effects were strongest, the data they gathered
• 1:01:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: suggested that the rival stations' claims of interference were largely overstated, and that in some specific instances.
• 1:01:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: it was actually the other station's own signal causing problems for WLW rather than the other way around.
• 1:01:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: All of this paints a picture of a radio station that had become something genuinely unprecedented in American broadcasting.
• 1:01:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: A single transmitter, so powerful.
• 1:01:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: that it created interference disputes spanning multiple states and crossing an international border.
• 1:01:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Generated formal complaints from government regulators in two different countries and produced a steady stream of strange, almost folkloric stories about glowing, unplugged light bulbs, buzzing rain gutters, humming, barbed wire fences,
• 1:01:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: and orchestras rising up out of bed springs in the middle of the night.
• 1:02:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: And remember, all of this was happening to a region of the country that, in most other respects, was living through the depths of the Great Depression, an era defined by economic hardship, bank failures, and widespread unemployment.
• 1:02:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yet here, in the fields and small towns around Masono,
• 1:02:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ordinary families were experiencing something that felt almost like living inside a strange piece of science fiction, surrounded by an invisible electrical force.
• 1:02:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: So strong, it could reach directly into their homes, their fences and even on occasion, their own bed frames, without ever asking permission.
• 1:02:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Simply because Powell, Crosley, Jr., had decided to build the most powerful radio transmitter that country had ever seen, and the government had, for a few brief years, allowed him to keep it running.
• 1:03:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is worth sitting just for a moment, with the sheer strangeness of that situation.
• 1:03:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: A private businessman
• 1:03:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: operating under a temporary experimental license had effectively created a localized electromagnetic environment so powerful that it altered the basic physical experience of daily life for thousands of people living nearby, whether they had ever listened to a single minute of WLW's actual programming or not.
• 1:03:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: you did not need to own a radio to be touched quite literally by the station's broadcasting power.
• 1:03:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: You simply needed to own a metal bed frame or a rain gutter or a stretch of fence and the signal would find its way to you regardless.
• 1:03:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is precisely this combination of staggering ambition, genuine technical achievement and
• 1:04:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: tangible disruption to the everyday lives of ordinary people that eventually drew the attention of forces far more powerful than a single hotel sign that refused to turn off.
• 1:04:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Competing broadcasters increasingly worried about losing advertising revenue and audience share to a station that could blanket an enormous swath of the continent from one single location.
• 1:04:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: began organizing in earnest, and government regulators charged with overseeing this delicate balance between technical innovation and fair competition.
• 1:04:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: began asking harder and harder questions about whether any single broadcaster should ever be allowed to wield quite this much electrical and by extension cultural power.
• 1:04:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: That fight, the slow grinding, political and regulatory battle that would eventually bring the great experiment to an end, is where we turn next.
• 1:05:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 5, the backlash, the siege is end and the legacy.
• 1:05:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Every great electrical empire it seems eventually runs into the much slower, much less glamorous, but ultimately far more decisive force of organised political and economic opposition.
• 1:05:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: And for WLW,
• 1:05:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: That opposition began building almost as soon as the 500,000 watt transmitter roared to life near Masonohio in the spring of 1934.
• 1:05:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: To understand why so many other radio stations across the country grew so alarmed, you have to think for a moment about how radio stations actually made their money in this era.
• 1:05:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then, as now,
• 1:05:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: The business model rested almost entirely on advertising.
• 1:05:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: A local department store, a regional automobile dealer, a national soap manufacturer, all of them paid radio stations to air commercials, hoping to reach potential customers.
• 1:06:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: within whatever geographic area that particular station's signal could cover.
• 1:06:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: For most of the roughly 600 radio stations operating across the United States at the time, this meant a fairly modest, fairly local business arrangement.
• 1:06:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: A small station in, say, central Florida might sell advertising time to local Florida businesses, because that station signal at standard power levels simply did not reach much further than the surrounding region, but WLW changed the entire economic calculation for advertisers almost overnight.
• 1:06:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: if a business in Florida or for that matter a business up in Canada could simply buy advertising time on WLW and have its message broadcast with enough power.
• 1:07:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: to reach the overwhelming majority of the entire North American continent from one single transmission.
• 1:07:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Why would that business ever bother purchasing smaller, more expensive, less efficient advertising packages, from a whole patchwork of individual local stations scattered across different states and regions?
• 1:07:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: It would be roughly equivalent in a much later era.
• 1:07:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: to a single retailer realizing they could buy one enormous billboard visible from every highway in the country rather than purchasing hundreds of smaller individual billboards in hundreds of different towns.
• 1:07:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: The economic simply favored going big, going to the one station with the power to reach essentially everyone at once.
• 1:07:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: and Crosley.
• 1:07:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ever the Shrewd businessman beneath his inventors' enthusiasm, absolutely capitalised on this advantage.
• 1:07:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: He raised WLW's advertising rate substantially, to levels that, according to contemporary reporting from the period, was surpassed by only a single other station in the entire country, a powerful Columbia Broadcasting System affiliate
• 1:08:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: both national broadcasting company stations also based in New York, the most populous metropolitan area in the nation.
• 1:08:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Think about what that means for a moment.
• 1:08:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: A Cincinnati station, broadcasting out of a relatively modest Midwestern city, had managed to charge advertising rates.
• 1:08:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Essentially on par with the most powerful, most prestigious stations in the largest city in the entire country, purely on the strength of its extraordinary broadcasting power and the unprecedented reach that power provided.
• 1:08:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: This was unsurprisingly, exactly the kind of competitive threat that got noticed and got noticed quickly by every other broadcaster in the country who suddenly found themselves competing against a station that could simply outshout them across an entire continent.
• 1:09:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Two distinct camps of frightened competitors emerged, each with their own particular grievance, and each pushing in a slightly different direction.
• 1:09:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: The first camp consisted of other large, powerful stations and networks, the kind of well-capitalized broadcasters who looked at WLW's extraordinary 500,000 watt advantage and thought.
• 1:09:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: quite reasonably from a competitive business standpoint that if one company was going to be allowed to operate at 10 times the legal standard power limit, then surely they too should be permitted to build similarly powerful transmitters of their own.
• 1:09:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Why should power cruiserly alone
• 1:09:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: If superpower broadcasting was going to be allowed at all, these competitors argued it should be made available more broadly, so that the playing field.
• 1:10:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: even if elevated to a much higher and more expensive level would at least remain level.
• 1:10:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: The second camp generally made up of smaller, less wealthy local stations took an entirely different position and in some ways a much more existentially anxious one.
• 1:10:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: These smaller broadcasters could not realistically afford to build and maintain a 500,000
• 1:10:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: The cost alone, hundreds of thousands of dollars in 1930's money, simply put, that kind of equipment permanently out of reach for the vast majority of local stations operating modest 50, 100, or perhaps a few thousand watt transmitters, in towns and small cities across the country, for these smaller broadcasters.
• 1:11:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: The danger was not that they might be denied an equal opportunity to build their own super power station.
• 1:11:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: The danger was that a handful of super power stations
• 1:11:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Regardless of who operated them, would simply steam roll over every smaller local station within their enormous reach, stealing local advertisers, stealing local audiences, and effectively making smaller, community-rooted broadcasting financially unsustainable.
• 1:11:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: These smaller stations did not want a more level playing field elevated to super power status.
• 1:11:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: They wanted super power broadcasting eliminated entirely, banned outright, so that the existing, more modest power limits that had allowed thousands of smaller local stations to survive, and compete reasonably fairly, would remain firmly in place.
• 1:11:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Court directly between these two camps of frightened lobbying broadcasters, was the newly formed Federal Communications Commission.
• 1:12:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: an agency that had itself only come into existence in 1934.
• 1:12:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Created by an act of congress, specifically to consolidate and modernise the federal government's oversight of both radio broadcasting and telephone communications under a single more powerful regulatory body.
• 1:12:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: The timing here is worth pausing on for a moment, because it means the Federal Communications Commission was essentially a brand new agency, still finding its footing, still establishing its own internal procedures and precedence, right at the exact moment that it found itself having to referee one of the most contentious and high stakes broadcasting disputes in the country's young radio history.
• 1:12:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Commission opened formal hearings on what came to be known in regulatory language of the period, as the superpower question, examining broader policy issues about whether any station should ever be permitted to operate above the standard 50,000 watt limit.
• 1:13:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: These broader hearings began in earnest around the middle of the decade.
• 1:13:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: and not long afterward, the commission also took up the specific, individual case of WLW's continued experimental license, hearing detailed testimony from competing stations about exactly how much business, audience, and advertising revenue they believe they had lost directly because of Crosley's super power advantage.
• 1:13:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: The political dimension of this fight extended well beyond the regulatory hearing room, reaching all the way into the United States Senate.
• 1:13:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: A senator from Montana, Burton Kendall Wheeler, a prominent and often outspoken figure in depression era American politics, succeeded in getting a resolution adopted in the Senate stating, in essence, that any broadcasting power in excess of 50,000 watts for any American
• 1:14:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: was definitively against the public interest.
• 1:14:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: This was a remarkable statement for an elected legislative body to make about a private company's broadcasting equipment, and it reveals just how seriously Washington had come to view the issue.
• 1:14:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: not merely as a narrow dispute between competing businesses, but as a genuine question of public policy and democratic principle, and underneath all of the purely economic competitive grievances we have just walked through, there was a deeper, more philosophical concern, quietly animating much of this political opposition, a concern that, frankly, sounds remarkably modern, if you think
• 1:14:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: lawmakers and regulators in Washington had begun to genuinely worry about what it might mean for American democracy itself to allow a single private individual to control a broadcasting instrument powerful enough to reach the overwhelming majority of the country's population simultaneously with no meaningful competition able to challenge that reach.
• 1:15:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Radio by the middle of the 1930s had become an enormously influential force in shaping public opinion, delivering news, entertainment, political speeches,
• 1:15:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: and advertising directly into millions of American homes every single day.
• 1:15:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: The idea that one single transmitter controlled by one single businessman, however brilliant and however well-intentioned that particular businessman happened to be, could function as what some commentators of the era only half jokingly began calling a mega-watt mega-phone.
• 1:16:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: a device capable of shaping the opinions, purchasing habits, and political views of a meaningful fraction of the entire American population from one location made a great many people in positions of power, deeply uncomfortable.
• 1:16:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: This was not really at its core, an argument about Powell-Crosley Junior's personal character,
• 1:16:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: or his particular political views.
• 1:16:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Crosley himself was, by most contemporary accounts, primarily a businessman and an inventor, fascinated by engineering challenges and eager to sell radios and reach the largest possible audience, rather than any kind of aspiring political propagandist.
• 1:16:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the regulators and legislators worrying about this issue were thinking less about the
• 1:16:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: currently holding the keys to this particular transmitter, and more about the dangerous precedent that allowing this kind of concentrated broadcasting power to exist at all might set for the future.
• 1:17:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: If one experimental license for one station could grow into a permanent fixture, what would stop other ambitious broadcasters?
• 1:17:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: perhaps ones with far less benign intentions than an eccentric Cincinnati radio manufacturer from seeking similar super power privileges down the road.
• 1:17:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Better yet, many in Washington concluded to draw a firm, clear, defensible line now, while the precedent was still fresh and singular.
• 1:17:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rather than wait until a whole crowded field of super power broadcasters had
• 1:17:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: each one wielding its own outsized influence over public opinion.
• 1:17:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Federal Communications Commission's hearings on the matter dragged on for years through the middle and later portions of the 1930s.
• 1:18:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: As commissioners worked through volumes of testimony, technical interference data, economic arguments from competing broadcasters, and the broader political pressure radiating out from Congress.
• 1:18:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: WLW's experimental license was renewed more than once during this lengthy process.
• 1:18:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Allowing the station to continue operating at its full 500,000 watt power for several more years, even as the underlying policy debate remained unresolved.
• 1:18:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: At one point, the station's license was extended on an experimental basis all the way through February of 1939, with the explicit understanding that this renewal remains subject
• 1:18:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: from the broader superpower hearings still grinding along in Washington.
• 1:18:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was, in fact, a notable interruption to the station's continuous operation that occurred even before the final resolution.
• 1:19:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: By December of 1934,
• 1:19:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Only about seven months after the Grand ceremonial launch with President Roosevelt's telegraph key, the commission had already required WLW to scale back its overnight broadcasting power to the standard 50,000 watt limit.
• 1:19:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: specifically in response to the ongoing interference complaints from the Toronto Station we discussed earlier.
• 1:19:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Crosslies Engineering Team spent the following months working to solve the interference problem more permanently, eventually constructing new directional antenna arrays, designed to shape the station's radiation pattern more carefully, feeding the signal out of phase in particular directions,
• 1:19:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: specifically to reduce the amount of power being being toward Canada, while preserving the station's full strength in other directions.
• 1:20:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: These engineering modifications proved successful enough that by some time in 1935, WLW was permitted to resume full around the clock, 500,000 watt operation once again.
• 1:20:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Continuing the experiment for several more years,
• 1:20:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: even as the larger political battle in Washington continued without any final resolution in sight.
• 1:20:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: But all temporary arrangements, however successful, however electrically impressive, eventually meet their conclusion, and WLW's extraordinary five-year run at full superpower,
• 1:20:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: came to its definitive end in 1939.
• 1:20:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: After years of accumulated hearings, testimony, political pressure and the steady drum beat of complaints from competing broadcasts across the country, the Federal Communications Commission finally made its determination.
• 1:20:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: The experiment, the commission concluded, had run its course.
• 1:21:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Going forward, the maximum power for any American broadcasting station, including the once mighty WLW, would be capped firmly at 50,000 watts, the same standard limit that applied to every other major station in the country.
• 1:21:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: There would be no broader expansion of superpower, broadcasting privileges to other stations.
• 1:21:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: as some of the larger competing networks had hoped, and there would be no continued special exception carved out for Crosley's pioneering Cincinnati operation either.
• 1:21:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Everyone going forward would play by the same rules, the same power ceiling, the same competitive landscape that had existed before Crosley's grand experiment had ever begun.
• 1:21:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: For Powell Crosley Jr., this must have been
• 1:21:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: a genuinely bitter disappointment.
• 1:21:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: By most accounts, he had never actually been satisfied with even 500,000 watts as a final destination.
• 1:22:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Engineering plans and ambitions reportedly existed within his organisation to push the station's power even further.
• 1:22:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: potentially as high as 750,000 watts, an almost unimaginable figure that would have made WLW's existing capabilities look modest by comparison.
• 1:22:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Indeed, on certain occasions during the experimental years.
• 1:22:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: The station's actual broadcasting power had reportedly been pushed in formally as high as 700,000 watts during particular tests or special circumstances.
• 1:22:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hinting at just how much additional capacity the underlying equipment may have been capable of producing had the regulatory environment ever permitted it.
• 1:22:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: All of those grander ambitions came to an abrupt and permanent end, with the commission's 1939 ruling.
• 1:23:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: The great 500,000 watt transmitter, the one that had required its own dedicated electrical
• 1:23:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Its own diamond-shaped 831 foot tower was switched down to a fraction of its former capacity and has remained at the standard 50,000 watt limit ever since.
• 1:23:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: All the way down to the present day, where WLW still broadcasts from the very same general area, still reaching listeners across a wide swath of the American Midwest.
• 1:23:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Though never again with quite the same overwhelming continent spanning, gutter rattling force it once commanded during its brief extraordinary heyday.
• 1:23:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: The great transmitter itself however, the very same enormous piece of equipment that had once required 20 water-cooled vacuum tubes and 600 gallons of distilled water per minute,
• 1:24:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: will get hauled away for scrap, once it's 500,000 watt era ended.
• 1:24:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: It remained in place, sitting largely idle, a kind of monument to its own former glory.
• 1:24:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tucked away inside the Cincinnati Broadcasting facility where it had always lived.
• 1:24:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: And remarkably, it would get one final, dramatic moment of revival, years later, under circumstances that nobody back in 1934 could possibly have anticipated.
• 1:24:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: That moment arrived with the outbreak of the Second World War.
• 1:24:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: As the United States found itself drawn fully into the global conflict, following the attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941.
• 1:24:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: The federal government suddenly found itself with an urgent new need.
• 1:24:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: The need to broadcast American voices, American news, and American propaganda across vast distances to friendly populations in occupied Europe to American troops serving overseas and to audiences in Latin America who sympathies the government was eager to maintain.
• 1:25:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: on the side of the Allied powers, powerful, long-range broadcasting equipment.
• 1:25:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: The very kind of equipment that had become essentially illegal for domestic civilian use after 1939, suddenly became enormously valuable again.
• 1:25:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: This time, as a tool of wartime international communication
• 1:25:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: rather than ordinary domestic commercial broadcasting.
• 1:25:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Crosslies engineers and facilities.
• 1:25:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Drawing directly on the expertise the company had developed during its years building and operating the super power WLW transmitter became deeply involved in the American war efforts broadcasting infrastructure.
• 1:26:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The company's engineers helped construct a major government shortwave relay facility, known as the Bethany Relay Station, located a short distance north of Cincinnati, which was eventually handed over to operate under the auspices of an organization most listeners today would recognize by its modern name, Voice of America, the official external broadcasting service of the United States government.
• 1:26:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: according to multiple historical accounts.
• 1:26:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: The original 500,000 watt WLW transmitter equipment itself was, at least for some period during the war, pressed back into active service, transmitting government-directed programming and propaganda material at its old full power.
• 1:26:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: This time, not for ordinary domestic listeners tuning in for dance band, music and so
• 1:27:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: scattered across a world locked in total war.
• 1:27:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is a strange and somewhat poignant footnote to the whole story.
• 1:27:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: The very transmitter.
• 1:27:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: that had once been silenced for being too dangerously powerful for ordinary peacetime civilian broadcasting was.
• 1:27:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Only a few years later, deemed exactly the right tool for a different wartime purpose, where reaching enormous distances with overwhelming signal strength was suddenly, once again,
• 1:27:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: considered a tremendous national asset rather than a competitive threat.
• 1:27:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: So what should we sitting here in the present comfortably distant from both the Great Depression and the Second World War?
• 1:27:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Actually take away from this strange, sprawling, electrically charged story of a Cincinnati radio station that briefly became the most powerful broadcaster
• 1:28:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think there is a genuinely useful lesson buried in here about the relationship between raw technological capability and the social and political structures that eventually grow up around it to contain that capability.
• 1:28:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Paul Crosley Jr. was not by most accounts, a villain in this story.
• 1:28:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was a curious, restless, talented engineer and businessman who simply kept pushing the available technology as far as the rules of his era would allow him to push it.
• 1:28:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Motivated by a genuine excitement about what radio could do, mixed liberally with an entirely understandable commercial desire to sell more radios and attract more advertisers.
• 1:28:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: He built something extraordinary, something that genuinely expanded what people believed was technically possible.
• 1:28:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in doing so, he created real, tangible.
• 1:28:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes magical benefits for listeners in rural and underserved areas who had previously struggled to receive any clear radio signal at all.
• 1:29:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: but the same raw power that allowed WLW to bring reliable radio service to underserved farmers, also allowed it to make light bulbs glow mysteriously in people's bare hands, rattle gutters, loose from rooftops.
• 1:29:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Drown out a legitimate competing broadcaster in a friendly neighbouring country and concentrate and almost unprecedented amount of advertising reach and potential cultural influence into the hands of a single private businessman.
• 1:29:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: The very same engineering achievement that felt to many listeners, like a kind of everyday miracle, had felt to regulators in Washington and competing broadcasters across the country, like a genuine and serious problem, one significant enough to eventually warrant Senate resolutions, years of formal regulatory hearings, and ultimately, a firm legal ceiling.
• 1:30:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: that brought the entire grand experiment to a permanent close.
• 1:30:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is worth noting how familiar this basic patent feels even now, in our own very different technological era.
• 1:30:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: We have, in recent decades, watched a small number of enormously powerful technology platforms grow to reach audiences, numbering not merely in the tens of millions, the way WLW once did.
• 1:30:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: but in the billions, spanning the entire globe rather than merely a continent.
• 1:30:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: We have watched governments and regulators in country after country grapple with strikingly similar underlying questions.
• 1:30:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: How much concentrated reach, concentrated cultural influence, concentrated ability to shape public opinion and capture advertising revenue
• 1:31:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Before that concentration itself becomes a kind of public concern.
• 1:31:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Regardless of how well-intentioned or technically brilliant the people running that platform happen to be, the specific technologies change completely.
• 1:31:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: From vacuum tubes and diamond-shaped steel towers to fiber optic cables and algorithmic recommendation engines.
• 1:31:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the underlying tension between genuine technological achievement and the broader
• 1:31:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: almost comfortingly, consistent across the decades.
• 1:31:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Powell, Crosley, Jr. himself went on after his broadcasting glory days had ended to continue running his various manufacturing businesses and remained the owner of the Cincinnati Reds professional baseball team.
• 1:31:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: a franchise he had purchased back in February of 1934, the very same eventful year that his great transmitter first roared to life.
• 1:32:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Under his ownership, the Reds-1 Penance and in 1940, a World Series Championship.
• 1:32:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Crossley also continued tinkering and innovating in other areas, including early refrigeration technology for rural homes, without reliable electricity, and even early experiments in television broadcasting.
• 1:32:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: He passed away in 1961.
• 1:32:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Having lived to see his beloved radio station transition into the television age as well.
• 1:32:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: A medium he had also been quietly experimenting with.
• 1:32:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: as far back as the late 1920s.
• 1:32:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for spending this time with me tonight.
• 1:32:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Here on Sleepless History, if you enjoyed drifting through this particular corner of the past, there are many more strange and true stories waiting for you whenever you are ready to come back.
• 1:33:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Until then, sleep well, sleep easy, and let the quiet hum of history carry you the rest of the way.
• 1:33:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Good night.