We examine which is Oldest Voice Broadcaster of a service for Domestic Listeners.

Actual test transmissions of Morse Code using Spark Gap transmitters started in the 1890s!

In St. Louis, Missouri, the European Emigre, Nikola Tesla made the first public demonstration of radio communication in 1893. Addressing the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia and the National Electric Light Association, he described and demonstrated in detail the principles of radio communication. The apparatus that he used contained all the elements that were incorporated into radio systems before the development of the vacuum tube. In 1895, Guglielmo Marconi sent a telegraph message without wires, but he didn't send voice over the airwaves.

US Broadcast History:

May 20, 1920. First scheduled broadcast in North America, XWA (CFCF) Montreal. A concert by vocalist Dorothy Lutton was broadcast. See also an earlier entry for XWA. Arthur E. Zimmerman, Ph.D., who is researching the history of the radio stations of the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of Canada, Limited, believes that CFCF "has a strong claim as the oldest 'real' radio station in the world, the criterion being that it pre-announced a broadcast for May 20, 1920, and it can be verified that the broadcast actually took place."

After the 1917-1918 war, there was a new wave of interest in broadcasting, with many of the pre-war stations starting up again, and new outlets going on the air steadily in 1919-1920. One was 8MK, operated by an employee of the Detroit News, which began an aggressive programming schedule in the summer of 1920. This station later became WWJ. 6ADZ in Los Angeles also commenced broadcasting around this time, and later evolved into KNX.

Meanwhile, the Conrad broadcasts over 8XK in Pittsburgh had generated enough interest for Westinghouse to make a permanent commitment to them. In October 1920, the company applied to the Commerce Department for a commercial broadcasting license (all broadcasters up to this point were operating as amateur class stations) The license was granted on October 27th, assigning the call sign KDKA, and operations with the new call commenced on November 2nd, with election night coverage.

So, in one sense KDKA's "First Station" claim is accurate -- it was the first U.S.A commercial broadcasting license to be issued.

But KDKA wasn't the first broadcaster -- not by a long shot. Nor were the 1920 election returns the first scheduled broadcast -- several stations had announced schedules for programming prior to KDKA, notably XWA in Montreal (later CKAC), which broadcast on a scheduled basis six months before KDKA.

The National Broadcasting Company began regular broadcasting in 1922, with telephone links between New York and other Eastern cities.

British Broadcast History:

The first experimental broadcasts, from Marconi's factory in Chelmsford, began in 1920. Two years later, a consortium of radio manufacturers formed the British Broadcasting Company (BBC). This broadcast until its licence expired at the end of 1926. The company then became the British Broadcasting Corporation, a non-commercial organisation.

MARCONIPHONE AND 2LO

14 February 1922: 2MT goes on air.

Spring 1922: Company sets up Marconiphone department.

11 May 1922: 2LO goes on air.

As the voice of 2MT, P.P. Eckersley parodied speech and song, put on radio theatre - starting with Cyrano de Bergerac - and played records on a "perfectly good mechanical gramophone".

Irish Broadcast History:

In 1916 the Irish Republicans broadcast a call to arms from the General Post Office in Dublin, which they had seized during the Easter Rising attempt to secure independence from the London government. It's not likely that the broadcast was heard by anyone other than postal engineers, but what was important was that the broadcast was made rather than who heard it.

...OR ...

The first station in Ireland was 2BE Belfast in 1924. Other early stations included 2RN Dublin (January 1, 1926) and 6CK Cork (1927). 2BE, Belfast station was the BBC station in Northern Ireland and exists today as BBC Radio Ulster on 1341 kHz.

German Broadcast History:

Early broadcast experiments took place in Berlin on Aug. 27 1897. The receiving station was "Matrosenstation Kongnaes" in the Schwanenallee. This was an experiment of Adolf Slaby and Georg Graf von Arco.

Radio had been in use for postal and business purposes (telegrams, news agencies, etc.) since the end of WWI in 1918. The first thing that resembled a radio broadcast could be received on 22 December 1920 when the staff of the station Königs Wusterhausen near Berlin transmitted a concert they performed themselves.

The first station in Germany to regularly broadcast to the public debuted in Berlin on October 23, 1923, running on 750 kHz at 250 Watts.

http://www.oldradio.com/archives/international/