Early radio is often compared to television because they were both largely created by the same people, and both markets had largely the same structure. However, what people rarely realize anymore is how vastly different the two are. This is partly because radio is vastly different today than it was in its early days. Radio these days is mostly just music and disc jockeys. In it's Golden Age however, radio was made up of a wide array of shows. Radio had everything from horror stories and comedies, to news and sports broadcasts. President Franklin Roosevelt famously used the radio to communicate with the people through his "fireside chats". Essentially, all the kinds of shows we see on TV nowadays all originated on the radio. Kids would fight to be the closest to the speaker, and adults would even fight over what to listen to. While today we know that just about every home in America has a tv, back then, literally every home in America had a radio. Even after the advent of television, radio still maintained its popularity. In the 60s and 70s, transistor radios were by far the most popular media outlet due to their portability. Even today, with the advent of satellite and internat radio, many people still tune in. The question is, why was radio so popular, even after television was created? What did radio do to captivate people so much? The answer, lies in the fundamental difference between radio and television.
Television became wildly popular because for the first time ever, full high quality images could be broadcasted across the entire nation. However, before TV, all people had to go off of was sound. Early radio shows consisted only of people speaking, combined with sound effects. Therefore, each radio show was actually many different shows all in one. The reason for this, the reason early radio was so captivating, and the reason it remains popular still today, is because we the listeners, generate the images that go with the broadcasts. Whereas tv gives us an image, radio lets us create our own. Which means that each and every listener could imagine a show completely differently, and thus one broadcast, is actually millions of different performances. The fact that radio allows its users to create such an integral part of any kind of show, allows its users to become more captivated and interested in it. Imagine for example, a horror show. On tv, we would see a generic scary creature chasing some dumb ass blond bimbo down a dark and dreary highway or hallway, and ultimately, would be a terrible production. However on radio, the creature would be generated by the listener, and thus would literally be created from our fears, allowing for a much scarier performance. TV, as we all know, can get boring after a while; but radio, combined with the power of imagination, is an extremely powerful medium, and the broadcasters of radio's golden age were well aware of that. Unfortunately, this wasn't always a good thing.
On Halloween night, 1938, Orson Welles broadcasted a radio show that would forever live in infamy. The War of the Worlds was a horror novel written by H.G. Wells, about a martian invasion of Earth, and the events that occurred around it. Orson Welles reproduced this chilling tale on the radio, and upon hearing the broadcasts listeners completely freaked out. It got to the point where people actually started fleeing. The main reason this broadcast was so believable was because of the tremendous use of sound effects by Welles. The life-like sounds actually made the listeners believe martians were actually invading. The other reason the broadcast scared so many people, is because listeners back then, much like we do with tv commercials now, had a tendency to change the dial on their radios between breaks, and because of this, most people missed Welles' introduction. The point is that something like this will never happen because of a tv show because we are given an image, but with a radio broadcast, the user's imagination is let loose, and if the osund is good enough, the klistener might even think it's real.
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