148 Fun Facts About Radio

Ferdinand Braun, who shared the 1909 physics Nobel with Marconi, built the first example of which device in 1897?

The cathode-ray tube: Braun built it as a laboratory instrument for tracing electrical waves on a glowing screen, and it became the picture tube of television sets for most of the 20th century.

Where did Marconi report hearing the letter S sent across the Atlantic from Cornwall on 12 December 1901?

Signal Hill, Newfoundland: on 12 December 1901 Marconi reported hearing three clicks, the Morse letter S, sent from Poldhu in Cornwall; nothing recorded it, so historians have long debated what he heard.

After a gale carried off his balloon in 1901, what held up the aerial for Marconi's transatlantic radio test?

A kite: it trailed 500 feet of wire above the hilltop, and the first one sent up that morning was torn away by the same gale before a second held long enough to listen.

Marconi's mother Annie was the granddaughter of the founder of which famous drinks company?

Jameson whiskey: Annie Jameson was a granddaughter of John Jameson, founder of the Dublin distillery; her family's connections helped Marconi find backers abroad when Italy showed little interest.

Marconi was born in 1874 in which Italian city?

Bologna: Marconi built his first wireless sets at his family's estate outside the city and was soon sending signals to a receiver about a mile away, before he left Italy to find backers.

How did radio stations around the world mark Marconi's funeral in July 1937?

With two minutes of silence: the day after he died in Rome, wireless operators and broadcasters across the world shut down their transmitters together at the hour set for the service.

Marconi was offered free passage on the Titanic but sailed three days earlier on which liner instead?

Lusitania: Marconi had paperwork to finish and preferred that ship's public stenographer, his daughter Degna recalled, so he sailed three days before Titanic left Southampton in April 1912.

In his reported Christmas Eve 1906 radio broadcast, Reginald Fessenden played a solo on which instrument?

Violin: by Fessenden's own account the programme from Brant Rock, Massachusetts, also carried a Handel record and verses from Luke's Gospel, and operators as far off as Norfolk, Virginia, heard it.

The SI unit of frequency, used to tune every radio dial, is named after which physicist?

Heinrich Hertz produced electromagnetic waves in his Karlsruhe laboratory in the late 1880s and measured their speed; he died at 36 in 1894, the year Marconi began the experiments that put them to work.

Whose 1864 paper predicted electromagnetic waves and argued that light itself was one?

James Clerk Maxwell read 'A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field' to the Royal Society in December 1864; he died in 1879, years before any experiment produced the waves he had predicted.

In 1943 the US Supreme Court struck down Marconi's key tuning patent, citing earlier work by Lodge, Stone and which famous inventor?

Nikola Tesla: the ruling came a few months after his death, in a case the Marconi company had brought against the US government for using its patents during the First World War.

What name did Lee de Forest give the three-element vacuum tube he developed around 1906-1908?

Audion: de Forest added a wire grid to John Ambrose Fleming's two-element valve, and once he cascaded several tubes in 1912 the faint signals of radio and telephone lines could be amplified enormously.

What was the inaugural program of Pittsburgh station KDKA in November 1920?

Presidential election returns: KDKA picked election night for its debut, so its few listeners learned that Harding had beaten Cox before any newspaper could print the result.

Engineer Frank Conrad's experimental station 8XK inspired which company to launch KDKA?

Westinghouse: vice-president Harry P. Davis saw Conrad's weekly broadcasts drawing regular listeners and reckoned that a company station would sell the receivers Westinghouse could build.

Which liner raced to rescue Titanic's survivors after its wireless operator caught the distress call?

Carpathia: operator Harold Cottam was minutes from bed when he heard the call, while the much nearer Californian missed it because her only wireless operator had shut down for the night.

Which distress call were Marconi's ship operators instructed to use from 1904, before SOS took hold?

CQD: a Marconi circular of January 1904 ordered it for any ship in distress, and Jack Binns's CQD from the sinking liner Republic in 1909 brought the first major sea rescue made possible by radio.

Which country was the first to adopt the SOS distress signal, in 1905?

Germany required the signal on its own ships from 1 April 1905, and the international radio conference that met in Berlin the next year adopted the German distress sign for every seafaring nation.

Which Morse code pattern is the SOS distress signal?

SOS is sent as three dots, three dashes, three dots, run together as one continuous signal; it was chosen in 1905 for being unmistakable, not as an abbreviation of any phrase.

The Radio Act of 1912, passed after the Titanic disaster, confined which group to wavelengths of 200 metres and below?

Amateur operators were pushed onto short waves then thought nearly useless for distance; a decade later the same wavelengths turned out to carry signals across oceans.

WEAF's first sponsored program in August 1922, often called the first radio commercial, promoted what?

Apartments in Queens: the Queensboro Corporation paid for about ten minutes on WEAF on 28 August 1922 to pitch its Hawthorne Court apartments in Jackson Heights, closer to an infomercial than a jingle.

Who was appointed the first general manager of the British Broadcasting Company in December 1922?

John Reith, a Scottish engineer with no broadcasting experience, got the job by answering a newspaper advertisement, then spent years fending off politicians who wanted to steer the new service.

The BBC became a public corporation on 1 January 1927 under which kind of legal instrument?

A royal charter: it comes from the Crown, not from Parliament, and runs for a fixed term, so the BBC's future has to be renegotiated with the government each time a charter runs out.

During the 1926 General Strike, supporters of the strikers nicknamed the BBC what?

British Falsehood Company: newspapers had got BBC news banned before 7 pm, but the strike stopped the presses, the ban was waived, and radio abruptly became the country's main supplier of news.

The 1988 Christmas Radio Times sold roughly how many copies, a British magazine record?

11 million: Guinness certified it as the best-selling issue of any British magazine, from the years when Radio Times alone could print the BBC's listings for the week ahead.

Which opera star sang two arias in Marconi's pioneering broadcast from Chelmsford on 15 June 1920?

Nellie Melba's concert was paid for by the Daily Mail and thrilled wireless listeners, yet before the year was out the Post Office had shut the Chelmsford broadcasts down.

Which song by the Buggles was the first thing MTV played when it launched in August 1981?

Video Killed the Radio Star had topped the charts in 16 countries with its lament for the voices of the wireless age, which made it a pointed opening choice for a television music channel.

Armstrong developed wide-band FM in a basement laboratory at which university?

Columbia: Armstrong had studied there under Michael Pupin, later inherited his professorship, and paid for the FM research himself in the basement of Philosophy Hall.

In 1948 Armstrong sued which corporation and its network NBC for infringing his FM patents?

RCA: the suit dragged on for years and consumed most of Armstrong's wealth; after his death in 1954 his widow Marion pressed on with the cases and won a string of settlements.

In which country was Armstrong serving in WWI when he developed the superheterodyne?

France: Armstrong was a Signal Corps officer at a Paris laboratory when he devised the superheterodyne, the circuit that went on to sit inside almost every radio and television receiver.

What does the 'AM' in AM radio stand for?

Amplitude modulation varies the strength of the carrier wave in step with the sound, which is why a thunderstorm, which also jolts a signal's strength, comes through an AM set as crackle.

AM signals can travel long distances at night by bouncing off which layer of the atmosphere?

The ionosphere: after sunset its absorbing D layer fades, so medium-wave signals reflect off the higher layers and a distant AM station can appear on the dial after dark, then vanish at sunrise.

FM broadcast stations are usually assigned to which part of the radio spectrum?

Very high frequency (VHF): the FM band sits at about 88 to 108 MHz, where waves travel in nearly straight lines instead of bending round the Earth, which is why FM fades behind hills.

Hans Idzerda's station PCGG began regular FM entertainment broadcasts in November 1919 from which city?

The Hague: Idzerda's 'Dutch concerts' found much of their audience across the Channel, and a British newspaper paid for programmes aimed at English listeners before his company went bankrupt in 1924.

In August 1920, an early radio broadcast from Buenos Aires carried a live performance of Parsifal, an opera by which composer?

Wagner: Enrique Susini and three companions sent the opera out from the roof of the Teatro Coliseo, and Argentines came to know the four as 'the madmen of the roof'.

Orson Welles's 1938 radio play The War of the Worlds aired on the eve of which holiday?

Halloween: Welles signed off by telling listeners that if the doorbell rang and nobody was there, 'that was no Martian', and woke next morning as the most talked-about man in America.

In Orson Welles's 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast, where do the first Martians land?

Grovers Mill, New Jersey: the script moved the invasion from Victorian England to a real rural hamlet and told it as news bulletins breaking into an evening of dance music.

Who wrote the script for Orson Welles's 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds?

Howard Koch thought the novel dull and dated and struggled for under a week to turn it into news bulletins; within a few years he had shared an Academy Award for writing Casablanca.

Orson Welles was 23 when he staged The War of the Worlds as an episode of which radio series?

The Mercury Theatre on the Air was a low-budget series with no sponsor and a small following, named after Welles's stage company, until one broadcast put his face on front pages across the country.

Which radio series opened with 'Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men'?

The Shadow: the line, answered by 'The Shadow knows!' and a sinister laugh, opened the Mutual network series from 1937; announcer Frank Readick delivered it even after Orson Welles took the title role.

The term 'fireside chat' was coined by an executive at which network before Roosevelt's May 1933 address?

CBS: Harry Butcher of its Washington office put 'fireside chat' in a press release before the 7 May 1933 address, so the White House's most famous phrase was not the White House's own.

Roosevelt's first fireside chat, on 12 March 1933, addressed which subject?

The banking collapse: with every bank shut by a national holiday, Roosevelt told listeners it was safer to keep money in a reopened bank than under the mattress, and deposits flowed back within weeks.

Roosevelt had a removable dental bridge made for his broadcasts to eliminate what?

A whistle through a gap in his teeth: Roosevelt had a removable bridge made so air would not whistle through the gap into the microphone; he also kept about 80 percent of his vocabulary to the thousand commonest English words.

Which soap opera began on US radio in 1937 and ran on television until 2009?

Guiding Light spent four years on radio and television at once; serials like it were sponsored by soap makers, which is how soap operas got their name.

The Lone Ranger, radio's masked rider of the Old West, premiered in 1933 on station WXYZ in which city?

Detroit: station owner George W. Trendle and writer Fran Striker launched the masked Texas Ranger there, and three years later the same pair made the Green Hornet his great-nephew.

The Lone Ranger's galloping radio theme was lifted from the William Tell Overture by which Italian opera composer?

Rossini: the finale of his William Tell Overture, like the show's other classical cues, was used because it was in the public domain and cost the station nothing in composer's fees.

Amos 'n' Andy, one of radio's first hit comedies, was created in 1928 in which city?

Chicago: Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, two white performers voicing Black characters, quit WGN when it rejected their plan to distribute recordings and relaunched the act on WMAQ.

Airing Herbert Morrison's 1937 airship-disaster report broke which NBC rule?

It never played recorded material: NBC made its first exception for Morrison's discs, which were flown out of Lakehurst and aired the next day in one of the first coast-to-coast news broadcasts.

The words 'Oh, the humanity' were uttered by a radio reporter watching which airship burn?

Hindenburg: Herbert Morrison was describing the airship's arrival at Lakehurst, New Jersey, when it burst into flames; for all the horror he reported, 62 of the 97 people aboard survived.

What was Edward R. Murrow's signature opening line in his radio reports during the Blitz?

This is London: his former speech teacher Ida Lou Anderson suggested it as a crisper alternative to the long greeting he had inherited from his predecessor in the job.

The Nazi propaganda broadcasts of 'Lord Haw-Haw' opened with which phrase?

Germany calling: William Joyce, the best-known voice behind the nickname, was born in New York, yet Britain hanged him for treason in January 1946 because he had held a British passport.

Which US president fully pardoned Iva Toguri, the DJ branded 'Tokyo Rose'?

Gerald Ford granted the full pardon on 19 January 1977, his last full day in office, after investigators found that key witnesses at her treason trial had been pressured into lying.

Which US government-funded international broadcaster began in 1942 to counter Axis propaganda?

Voice of America went on the air in February 1942, weeks after Pearl Harbor, promising German listeners the truth whether the news was good or bad.

Radio Free Europe was funded for its first two decades by which US agency?

The CIA paid for Radio Free Europe in secret from 1950, behind a public fundraising drive called the Crusade for Freedom, until Congress began funding the station openly in the early 1970s.

In 1995 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty moved its headquarters from Munich to which city?

Prague: post-Cold War budget cuts made Munich too costly, so RFE/RL accepted Václav Havel's invitation and moved into the parliament building left empty when Czechoslovakia dissolved.

Which two companies jointly produced the Regency TR-1, the first commercial transistor radio, in 1954?

Texas Instruments and I.D.E.A.: TI supplied the transistors and Industrial Development Engineering Associates, a maker of antenna boosters, built the set after the major radio makers showed no interest.

Which C. W. McCall trucking song rode the CB radio craze to number one in the US in early 1976?

Convoy: its trucker slang sent listeners out to buy CB sets and inspired a 1978 film, yet McCall was really Bill Fries, an adman who had invented the character for bread commercials.

Sony's TR-63 pocket radio of 1957 popularised which power cell?

The nine-volt: the first pocket sets of 1954 needed a brick-like 22.5-volt battery, and the small flat cell the TR-63 adopted went on to become the standard for transistor radios.

Which electronics brand name was coined in 1930 for a car radio built by Galvin Manufacturing?

Motorola: Paul Galvin joined 'motor', for motor car, to the '-ola' ending then fashionable for sound products, and the radio's name grew so famous that the company adopted it as its own in 1947.

Ronan O'Rahilly launched Radio Caroline in 1964 after failing to get airplay for which artist?

Georgie Fame: O'Rahilly managed the singer and could not get his record played by Radio Luxembourg, which then pushed mainly major-label releases, or by the monopoly BBC, so he put a station on a ship.

Radio Caroline's first broadcasting vessel, the MV Caroline, was formerly a Danish what?

Passenger ferry: the ship had sailed as the Danish ferry Fredericia before O'Rahilly bought her; she was refitted at Greenore, the Irish port owned by his father, and re-registered in Panama.

Which prime minister's government outlawed Britain's offshore pirate radio stations with the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act of 1967?

Harold Wilson's Labour government made it a crime to supply or advertise on the ships from August 1967; weeks later the BBC answered with a pop station of its own, staffed by former pirate disc jockeys.

Todd Storz is credited with inventing the Top 40 format at station KOWH in which city?

Omaha: Storz and his father bought KOWH in 1949, when barely one home in 25 tuned in, saw ratings climb whenever records were played, and built the station around the hits.

Watching patrons repeatedly choose the same songs on what reportedly gave Storz the Top 40 idea?

A bar jukebox: by the popular account, customers kept paying to hear the same few records, and Storz went on to count jukebox plays to compile a weekly list of hits for his station.

Which disc jockey popularised the phrase 'rock and roll' on mainstream radio in the early 1950s?

Alan Freed pushed the phrase on his Cleveland show and in 1952 staged the Moondog Coronation Ball, generally seen as the first major rock and roll concert, for which far more tickets were printed than the arena could hold.

Which broadcaster testified in the 1960 payola hearings but escaped punishment, partly by divesting his music holdings?

Dick Clark's investments in music publishers and record labels were judged a conflict of interest, so he sold his shares, kept his job hosting American Bandstand and came through the hearings unscathed.

Wolfman Jack made his name on border blaster XERF, located across the Mexican border from which Texas town?

Del Rio: XERF broadcast from Ciudad Acuña, just across the Rio Grande, with 250,000 watts, five times the US limit, and its night-time signal reached much of North America.

Wolfman Jack played himself as the disc jockey in which 1973 film?

American Graffiti: Wolfman Jack plays the DJ whose show ties the night together; Lucas gave him a fraction of a point of the profits, which paid him a steady income for the rest of his life.

Casey Kasem's American Top 40 debuted over which US holiday weekend in 1970?

Independence Day: the countdown that came to be heard around the world began over the July 4 weekend of 1970 on just seven stations.

NPR's very first broadcast, on 20 April 1971, covered what?

Senate hearings on the Vietnam War: NPR carried the Foreign Relations Committee sessions live two weeks before it had a programme of its own, when All Things Considered made its debut.

Who was the first host of NPR's Morning Edition when it premiered in 1979?

Bob Edwards was borrowed from All Things Considered as a stopgap host for a few weeks, days before the show's November 1979 debut, and stayed until 2004.

After naming its first two radio satellites Rock and Roll, XM gave the next pair which nicknames?

Rhythm and Blues: the second pair went up in 2005 and 2006 because a design flaw was fogging the solar panels of the first two and cutting their working lives short.

Which shock jock left terrestrial radio in 2006 for a five-year, $500 million deal with Sirius satellite radio?

Howard Stern: on his first day, 9 January 2006, he and his agent collected Sirius shares worth $218 million as a bonus, because subscriber numbers had already beaten the targets in his contract.

Where does the word 'ham' for an amateur radio operator come from?

A 19th-century jibe at clumsy telegraphers: wire operators called a poor sender a 'ham', and the insult is thought to have passed to radio hobbyists, who adopted it; the three-surnames tale first surfaced in 1948.

FCC rules require a US ham operator to transmit what at least every ten minutes during a contact?

Their call sign must also be sent at the end of every contact; the rule's stated purpose is to make the origin of each transmission clear to anyone who happens to be listening.

What is unusual about how a crystal radio set produces sound?

It needs no battery or mains power: the set runs on the energy of the incoming radio wave alone, which is why it can drive an earphone but never a loudspeaker.

Nashville station WSM has aired which country music show since 1925?

Grand Ole Opry: it began as the WSM Barn Dance in an insurance company's fifth-floor studio, and the station's call letters still stand for that insurer's motto, 'We Shield Millions'.

The FCC was created in 1934, absorbing the licensing duties of which earlier body?

The 1927 Radio Act had given that predecessor the power to assign frequencies and power levels, and some stations lost their licences.

Which FCC policy, abolished in 1987, had required broadcasters to air contrasting views on controversial issues?

The fairness doctrine dated from 1949; once it was gone a station could fill its day with one-sided opinion, and its end is often linked to the rise of political talk radio.

Which talk radio host's show went into national syndication from New York's WABC in August 1988?

Rush Limbaugh was a local host in Sacramento when former ABC Radio executive Ed McLaughlin signed him; within two years the show drew five million listeners, and it later aired on some 650 stations.

Russia marks Radio Day on 7 May because of whose 1895 demonstration of a coherer-based lightning detector?

Alexander Popov built the device to warn of approaching thunderstorms, not to send messages; he had drawn on Oliver Lodge's published experiments, as Marconi was doing in Italy that same year.

Finding little backing in Italy, Marconi registered his first company, the Wireless Telegraph & Signal Company, in 1897 in which city?

London: Marconi had arrived the year before, aged 21, and an engineer cousin paid for his patent and helped form the company, so the firm that launched the radio age was not Italian at all.

Marconi's first regular transatlantic radio-telegraph service in 1907 linked Clifden in Ireland with which station?

Glace Bay, Nova Scotia: Marconi sited the two stations on facing shores to keep the Atlantic hop as short as possible, and the public service opened in October 1907 by sending 10,000 words.

Regular entertainment broadcasts began in the UK in 1922 from Marconi station 2MT in which village?

Writtle: the Tuesday-night shows from an old army hut, with engineer Peter Eckersley at the microphone, proved so popular that they led to London's 2LO and then the BBC.

Telefunken was founded in Berlin in 1903 as a joint venture between AEG and which company?

Siemens & Halske: Kaiser Wilhelm II pushed the two rival firms to pool their radio patents in Telefunken in 1903; the company went on to build the long-wave stations at Nauen and at Sayville, New York.

What 1920s accessory let a radio set run off household mains electricity for the first time?

The battery eliminator plugged into a wall socket to do the work of a set's costly batteries, and was itself made obsolete within a few years, once tubes designed for mains current arrived in 1927.

Richard Ranger's photoradiogram was shown off in a transatlantic radio test that began with a picture of which US president?

Calvin Coolidge: his portrait led the pictures sent in 1924, and the same idea, known as radiofax, went on to deliver weather charts to ships at sea.

After the Titanic disaster, the US Wireless Ship Act was amended in 1912 to require what of large ships' radio rooms?

A continuous watch, kept by at least two operators: the 1910 Act had required a radio but let a lone operator switch off and sleep, as the one on the ship nearest Titanic had done.

Armstrong's experimental FM station W2XMN broadcast from which New Jersey town?

Alpine: the 425-foot tower Armstrong built on the Palisades in 1938 still stands, and New York's television stations borrowed it as an emergency transmitter after the World Trade Center mast was lost in 2001.

World Radio Day, 13 February, marks the 1946 founding of which organisation's radio service?

The United Nations: UNESCO proclaimed the day in 2011 after a request from Spain's radio academy, and picked the date on which UN Radio had been set up in 1946.

In 1933 Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky announced radio waves coming from which constellation?

Sagittarius: Jansky had been told to track down static that might spoil radio telephone calls, and with a rotating antenna on Model-T wheels he traced one faint hiss to the centre of the Milky Way.

Which song was the first complete record played when BBC Radio 1 launched in September 1967?

Flowers in the Rain by The Move was promoted with a postcard mocking a politician, and the libel case that followed sent every penny of its royalties to charity.

On A Prairie Home Companion, Garrison Keillor's best-known segment brought the 'News from' which fictional Minnesota town?

Lake Wobegon, where 'all the children are above average', gave psychology the Lake Wobegon effect, its name for the human habit of rating ourselves better than most other people.

Car Talk began in 1977 when only one invited mechanic showed up at a public radio station in which city?

Boston: Tom Magliozzi was the only mechanic to turn up for the panel at WBUR, later brought along his brother Ray, and NPR took the pair national ten years on.

The six 'pips' that mark the hour on BBC radio are officially the time signal of which place?

Greenwich: the Royal Observatory generated the pips from 1924 until the BBC took over in 1990, and the last one is longer than the rest so that listeners can tell which pip falls on the hour.

Castaways on BBC radio's Desert Island Discs are automatically given the Bible and which other book before choosing a third?

Shakespeare's complete works come with the island, like the Bible, which a castaway may swap for another religious or philosophical text; the one luxury allowed must be of no help in escaping.

Charles 'Doc' Herrold made scheduled entertainment broadcasts from 1912 in which city?

San Jose: Herrold ran a wireless college in the Garden City Bank Building, strung a huge umbrella-shaped antenna from its roof, and sent out music on a regular schedule a decade before the radio boom.

On 1 January 1997 the US EAS took over from which earlier nationwide alerting scheme?

Emergency Broadcast System: in 34 years it was never once used for a national emergency, although a false alarm in February 1971 told stations across the country that one had begun.

OSCAR 1, the first amateur radio satellite, launched in 1961, beamed which two-letter Morse message?

HI: the satellite rode into orbit as ballast on a spy-satellite launch and sent the greeting for three weeks; in Morse, the same two letters are how operators laugh.

Which weakness of Superman debuted on a 1940s radio serial years before appearing in the comics?

Kryptonite first appeared in a wartime radio story and reached the comics only in 1949. A popular tale that it was invented to give the lead actor a holiday is disputed by historians.

Which landmark, due for demolition in 1909, was spared because it proved useful for radio telegraphy?

The Eiffel Tower was built as a temporary centrepiece for the 1889 world's fair. Its wireless station went on to intercept enemy messages during World War I.

Which future US president recreated Chicago Cubs games from wire reports on 1930s Iowa radio?

Ronald Reagan got each play by teleprinter at WHO in Des Moines and improvised the rest as if he were at the ballpark. A spring-training trip to California with the Cubs led to his Hollywood screen test.

Which American co-discoverer of DNA's double helix competed as a boy on Chicago radio's Quiz Kids?

James Watson grew up on Chicago's South Side and joined the show's panel of bright youngsters, who had to step down at 16. He was a University of Chicago student at just 15.

Which emperor's voice did ordinary Japanese first hear in a 1945 radio address announcing surrender?

Hirohito recorded the speech the night before, and rebel officers raided the palace in a failed bid to destroy the disc. His formal court Japanese left many listeners unsure what he had said.

On Good Friday 1930, a BBC radio announcer said there was no news; what filled the slot instead?

Piano music followed the announcer's one-line bulletin on 18 April 1930. It is remembered as the only time the BBC told listeners that nothing newsworthy had happened.

In the best-known story, Radio Caroline was named after the young daughter of which US president?

John F. Kennedy was pictured in Life magazine with his children playing in the Oval Office. Founder Ronan O'Rahilly is said to have liked the image of playful disruption of government.

Which Hollywood star co-patented a frequency-hopping radio guidance system for torpedoes in 1942?

Hedy Lamarr devised the jam-proof system with a composer friend, but the US Navy turned it down as too bulky to fit in a torpedo. The same principle later fed into Bluetooth and early Wi-Fi.

Casey Kasem, host of radio's American Top 40, also voiced which Scooby-Doo character for decades?

Shaggy was Kasem's role from 1969 until he quit in 1997 rather than voice the character in a burger advert. A vegetarian, he returned only when Shaggy gave up meat too.

Which halved objects did radio sound-effects artists knock together to mimic horses' hooves?

Coconut shells were radio's old-fashioned way to suggest clattering hooves. Monty Python and the Holy Grail borrowed the trick when its budget could not stretch to real horses.

US broadcast call signs generally begin with K to the west of which river and W to the east?

The Mississippi became the dividing line in 1923, when the boundary moved east to balance the two regions. Pittsburgh's KDKA, licensed in 1920, kept its K as a famous exception.

Which band's 1979 single Video Killed the Radio Star became the first music video shown on MTV?

The Buggles' video opened MTV at 12:01 a.m. on 1 August 1981, though the single had stalled at number 40 in the US. A young Hans Zimmer can be glimpsed in it playing a keyboard.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy began as a 1978 BBC Radio 4 comedy series written by whom?

Douglas Adams wrote the radio scripts before any of the novels existed. It was the first radio comedy made in stereo, a privilege the BBC then reserved for drama.

The BBC's wartime V for Victory radio campaign used the opening bars of which composer's Fifth Symphony?

Beethoven's four famous notes, three short and one long, match the letter V in Morse code. The BBC made them its call sign for programmes beamed to occupied Europe.

Memphis disc jockey Dewey Phillips gave which future superstar a first radio airing in July 1954?

Elvis Presley's debut single That's All Right got spin after spin from Phillips. He then asked on air which high school the singer attended, a coded way to tell segregated Memphis that he was white.

Which drink brand sponsored radio's Little Orphan Annie and gave listeners secret decoder badges?

Ovaltine's ad agency wrote the scripts and spent almost seven minutes of each episode selling the drink. The decoder scene in the film A Christmas Story sends up the craze.

Which spoken distress call, devised by a Croydon Airport radio officer in the 1920s, echoes the French for 'help me'?

Mayday was chosen because much of the air traffic then ran between Croydon and Paris, so the word had to be clear to pilots on both sides. By convention it is spoken three times in a row.

What does CB stand for in CB radio, the two-way craze that swept American truckers in the 1970s?

Citizens band took off after the 1973 oil crisis, when truckers used it to find fuel and warn each other of speed traps. Films such as Smokey and the Bandit spread the craze to ordinary drivers.

In a famous 1978 episode of WKRP in Cincinnati, what does the radio station drop from a helicopter?

Live turkeys plummet onto a shopping mall in the station's doomed Thanksgiving giveaway. The plot was based on a real radio promotion in which the birds were tossed off the back of a truck.

In the sitcom Frasier, psychiatrist Frasier Crane hosts a radio call-in show on station KACL in which city?

Seattle is the hometown Frasier returns to after his years in a Boston bar on Cheers. The spin-off won the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series five years in a row.

Which king's 1939 radio address on the outbreak of war is the climax of the film The King's Speech?

George VI is played by Colin Firth, who won the Best Actor Oscar for the role. The film follows the king's work with therapist Lionel Logue to master a stammer before facing the microphone.

Radio amateurs around the world tuned in to the beeps of which Soviet satellite in October 1957?

Sputnik 1 carried four antennas and a transmitter whose pulses any radio hobbyist could pick up. Soviet scientists even asked listeners to tape-record the signal for them.

The BBC Radiophonic Workshop, founded to make sounds for radio, recorded which TV show's electronic theme in 1963?

Doctor Who's theme was written on paper by Ron Grainer and turned into electronic sound by the workshop's Delia Derbyshire. The same unit had devised effects for radio's Goon Show.

Which radio host of novelty records launched Weird Al Yankovic's career by playing his homemade tapes?

Dr. Demento, the on-air persona of Barret Hansen, received the first tape after speaking at Yankovic's school in 1976. He later paid for the parodist's first record.

Which future Pink Panther star voiced a string of characters on BBC radio's The Goon Show in the 1950s?

Peter Sellers performed alongside Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe, and the BBC signed the troupe partly to secure him for more than seasonal work. The first series went out under the title Crazy People.

Which member of Queen wrote the band's 1984 hit Radio Ga Ga, a nostalgic defence of the medium?

Roger Taylor, the band's drummer, got the idea when his young son grumbled at a song on the car radio in Los Angeles. The video borrows footage from the silent science-fiction film Metropolis.

New York's Radio City Music Hall, opened in 1932, forms part of which Manhattan complex?

Rockefeller Center was planned with a mass-media section nicknamed Radio City, and the hall kept the name. The plot had first been meant for a new Metropolitan Opera house, cancelled in 1929.

A 1973 radio broadcast of which comedian's routine about forbidden words led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling?

George Carlin's monologue aired one afternoon on New York station WBAI. The justices ruled 5–4 that regulators could not ban such material outright but could restrict it to certain times of day.

The giant Arecibo radio telescope, which collapsed in 2020, stood on which Caribbean island?

Puerto Rico's karst sinkholes offered a ready-made bowl for the 305-metre dish, the world's largest single-dish telescope for 53 years. It also staged the climactic fight of the Bond film GoldenEye.

Quiz Kids, the 1940s radio panel of child prodigies, was originally sponsored by which stomach remedy?

Alka-Seltzer backed the show from its NBC debut in Chicago in 1940, when it was only a summer stand-in for another programme. It stayed on radio for 13 years.

Which country became the first to switch its national radio networks from FM to digital, in 2017?

Norway moved its national networks to DAB+ that year, which gave rural listeners far more channels than FM had offered. Small local stations were allowed to stay on the old system.

Shortwave numbers stations, which broadcast strings of spoken digits, are widely believed to carry messages for whom?

Undercover spies can copy the digits on an ordinary shortwave set and decode them with a one-time pad. US prosecutors said a Cuban ring arrested in 1998 took its orders that way.

Which BBC Shipping Forecast sea area was renamed FitzRoy in 2002 to avoid a clash with Spain's forecasts?

Finisterre became FitzRoy in honour of the founder of the Met Office, who had captained Darwin's ship the Beagle. Radio 4 listeners protested at losing the old name, but the change went ahead.

The first singing commercial on radio, aired in Minneapolis on Christmas Eve 1926, sold which breakfast cereal?

Wheaties' maker owned station WCCO and put the jingle on its own airwaves. The cereal later tied itself to sport, putting baseball's Lou Gehrig on the box in 1934.

Which US president became the first heard on radio, in a 1922 speech honouring Francis Scott Key?

Warren Harding embraced the new medium along with his commerce secretary, Herbert Hoover, who convened the first conference of broadcasters that same year to sort out licensing.

Which author scripted the first royal Christmas message, broadcast on radio from Sandringham in 1932?

Rudyard Kipling wrote the words for a monarch who doubted the untested medium until a summer visit to the BBC reassured him. The talk also launched the Empire Service, forerunner of the World Service.

Which fugitive murderer was caught in 1910 after a ship's captain sent a wireless telegram to British police?

Dr Crippen was crossing the Atlantic with his lover disguised as a boy when the captain recognised them. A detective overtook them on a faster liner and was waiting in Canada.

Which radio comedian staged a spoof 1940 run for US president as the candidate of the Surprise Party?

Gracie Allen toured the country by private train with her husband and straight man, performing their show in each city. Her party's mascot was a kangaroo, and Harvard students endorsed her.

Which radio comedian played a vain miser who scraped at the violin and forever claimed to be 39?

Jack Benny had in fact been a child prodigy on the violin before he turned bad playing into a running gag. His programme began on radio in 1932 and later moved to television.

Which country's longwave radio mast was the tallest structure in the world from 1974 until it collapsed in 1991?

Poland built the 646-metre mast so that state radio could be heard around the globe. After it fell, the title of world's tallest structure passed back to a television mast in North Dakota.

A 1949 Spanish-language War of the Worlds broadcast ended with rioters attacking the radio station in which capital?

Quito panicked at the staged invasion, and when the hoax was revealed the fear turned to fury against the station and the newspaper that owned it. At least seven people died, and the station was silent for two years.

Radio quack John R. Brinkley grew rich in the 1920s by transplanting the glands of which animals into men?

Goats made Brinkley's fortune at $750 an operation, and he built his own Kansas station, KFKB, to advertise the surgery. His medical degree had been bought from a diploma mill.

Which broadcaster did Guglielmo Marconi set up in 1931, attending its first transmission in person?

Vatican Radio went on air with a message from Pope Pius XI, with the inventor in attendance. The station was entrusted to the Jesuit order from the start.

In early crystal radio sets, the fine wire called a cat's whisker usually touched a crystal of which mineral?

Galena, a lead ore, was the usual crystal, and the listener probed its surface with the springy wire to find the most sensitive spot. The pairing was the first kind of semiconductor diode.

Lines from Chanson d'automne were read on BBC radio in June 1944 to alert the Resistance; who wrote the poem?

Paul Verlaine's opening lines, aired on 1 June, warned that the invasion was near. The next lines, on the night of 5 June, meant it would begin within 48 hours and that railway sabotage should start.

American radio dials made from 1953 to 1963 carried small triangle marks for which Cold War alert system?

CONELRAD would have silenced most stations and left a few taking turns on 640 and 1240 kHz, so that enemy bombers could not home in on a steady signal. The marks showed listeners where to tune.

Which oil company sponsored the Metropolitan Opera's Saturday radio broadcasts for 63 years, until 2004?

Texaco began in December 1940 with The Marriage of Figaro and kept going for the longest continuous sponsorship in broadcasting. A merger with Chevron ended the run.

Which New York disc jockey became known as the 'Fifth Beatle' during the band's 1964 American visit?

Murray the K was the first DJ the group welcomed into their circle, and he broadcast nightly from a Miami room he shared with their lead guitarist.

Which Australian radio telescope, star of the film The Dish, helped relay television pictures of Apollo 11?

Parkes produced such clear pictures that NASA stayed with its signal for the rest of the two-and-a-half-hour broadcast. The dish was working in gusts beyond its safety limits at the time.

Which astronomer spotted the first pulsar as a regular blip on a Cambridge radio telescope's paper chart?

Jocelyn Bell Burnell was a doctoral student when she found the pulsing source, briefly dubbed Little Green Man 1. The Nobel Prize for the discovery went to her supervisor rather than to her.