Radio Buttons Create "Save"

The 1920s and 1930s were the Golden Age of Radio. Sandwiched between the two world wars, this new technology called radio rapidly exploded upon the country and the world. 

Imagine it. Prior to radio, there was… nothing, nothing broadcast live at all. Sure, there were newspapers, magazines, books and other print media. They’d been around for a few hundred years. Bookstores, libraries, newsstands, and more, all filling up space throughout the world with knowledge and stories. They were normal. However, they were all delayed in time. Yesterday's news was about the best you could do, but what if something was happening today? Or better, now?

Normal is an interesting word. It contains this mythos that there are people or ideas that don’t need to be questioned, or shouldn’t be questioned. They are automatically true. They are normal. Back in the 1920s, it was still possible for things to be “normal” because great things didn’t change that fast. That was maybe the last decade for this to be true.

But radio brought the ability to listen to something else live. You could listen to the same thing, far away from where you were at the moment, at the same as your neighbors and community did. Baseball games would be broadcast out people’s windows so that you could hear it as you walk down the street. It’s no surprise that jazz and radical new dance wear became huge in this decade. The Great World War was over. The great Spanish flu pandemic was over. The old world was over. Radios with their ability to listen to things live across the country gave people hope again after it being lost. This was a big deal. 

A big deal. 

In 1923, only 1% of homes owned a radio. These were naturally the wealthy families across the country. It was still a new thing, but everyday people quickly began to understand what this meant to them. In only eight years, over half the households had radios at home. From next to nothing all the way up to half in eight years, or 1931. By 1937, over 75% of homes had radios.

Granted, the Great Depression (was everything Great back then?) did start about halfway through radio’s preponderance in the US. People were out of work. It was unlike anything experienced in this country before, or after. But radios were the future. They gave people hope.

Throughout the lifetime of radio during these years, people needed to dial in the frequency of their preferred station. Essentially, they fished for their station. Tuning into 980AM? Turn the dial to about 985, back off to 977, back to 983, 979, and then finally 980. It was a process that people didn’t realize at first was difficult. They needed to associate their favorite radio stations with a specific spot in the dial. 

Then in 1938, buttons happened. RCA Victor among others in that year came out with electric tuning or automatic tuning, or as they were later called, radio buttons. “Every program is tuned as if an engineer did it for you” proclaimed an ad from RCA. “It makes you want to trade in your old set on the spot.”

Radios provided a bank of five or six buttons on the front that let you guide what those buttons meant. You would tune to a local station as you did before, but then when you got it perfectly dialed in, you would either push in the button further in another level or first pull it out to then save your setting at that position. Then the next time, you’d simply push the button. Likely from the comfort of your couch or living room chair.

This simple seeming story is not this simple. 

These simple radio buttons mark the first time in our history in which we had the ability to save things. Doorbells, light switches, flashlights and so on beforehand didn’t have this. Your options were set before you, essentially on or off. But this was transferring the random dial of nearly infinite options (ok, many finite ones) into a fixed set of favorites. Analog to digital. 

This was important because every region had different radios available to them. Cincinnati vs Boston vs Los Angeles all had their own radio stations. Radio manufacturers had no way to know where individual radios would end up. There was no way to provide preset buttons. They had to be handled locally.

Local radio sellers within various cities would often presave radio presets for their customers. If you were in Pittsburgh, then they would set up KDKA for you, and so on. This was geared toward people who didn’t understand this technology that well, which at first, was nearly everybody.

It was a fascinating era that led to a ton more.