The History of Radio and Important Milestones.

Towards the end of the 19th century many scientists and experimenters began researching into wireless communications, Many different experiments led to the development and introduction of radio and communication systems that we know of today.

In 1831, Michael Faraday began experimenting on electromagnetic induction and discovered that electromagnetic forces could extend into the empty space around a conductor, James Clerk Maxwell extended this experiment between 1861 and 1865. In April 1872 William Henry Ward received a US Patent for radio development and in 1872 Mahlon Loomis also received a US patent for a "Wireless Telegraph" however both Mahlon's and William's inventions could not yet transmit or receive radio waves. Many other scientists have explored the theory of wireless radio including Edison, Hertz and Stubblefield.

In 1901 the very first broadcast was made by Marconi between Cornwall, England to Newfoundland, Canada. People were amazed with this experiment as it was the first ever wireless transatlantic message ever made, However it was not voice sent over instead Morse code was sent.

In 1922 Radio broadcasts started from 2MT in Chelmsford on the AM Frequency. The British Broadcasting Company was setup with agreement from the Post Office and other radio manufacturers, Daily broadcasts also began from a London radio station 2LO.

In 1923 the first valve wireless is put on sale and replaces the original crystal sets also the first edition of the Radio Times was released.

In 1927 and 1928 the British Broadcasting Company became the British Broadcasting Corporation and also American, Paul Galvin invented the Battery eliminator so radios can be installed into cars.

In 1932 the first BBC broadcast was made from Broadcasting house, with the BBC Dance orchestra with radio DJ Henry Hall in 1939 the BBC Home Service launches but sadly a bomb was dropped on the Broadcasting House in 1940, Killing seven people. By 1946 BBC's third programme launches and the first BBC FM broadcast was made from a transmitter in Kent.

1956 brought the first transistor radios to the UK making it possible to listen to the radio anywhere with portable radios and in 1957 the combined license fee was introduced costing £4 however a radio license was charged at £1.

Ten years later in 1967 BBC Radio One was introduced and the other existing radio stations were renamed Radios 2,3 and 4.

In 1971 the Radio license was abolished.

1973 brought the launch of Capital Radio.

In 1979 Conservative Government were elected with the idea to expand commercial radio, In 1989 the Government relaxes certain restrictions on commercial radio.

In 1990 BBC radio 5 started and in 1992 Radio Luxembourg closes down.

In 1994 BBC Radio 4 was renamed as Radio Five Live, Also in 1996 the Broadcasting Act begins planning for the launch of digital broadcasting including DAB Digital Radio.

In 1998 the first commercially available digital radio tuner was invented and made by Arcam and demonstrated in Scotland. Also Digital One was awarded a national digital broadcast license.

In 2001 the first digital portable radios were put on sale and in 2002 BBC launches five new digital radio networks including BBC 1Xtra, Five Live Sports Extra, 6 Music, BBC7 and the BBC Asian Network.

Evaluation: Media Technologies and the Construction and Research, Planning and Evaluation of our Project

Research and Planning of our Project:

When Researching and Planning my project the main Media Technology I decided to use was the internet, I used a lot of different research pages to find out about the History of radio and radio drama, some websites such as wikipedia.com were very helpful when looking up the history of radio. I also used the listen online tool on the BBC Radio website to listen to a number of different shows and broadcasts to get an idea of what a Radio Drama episode looks like. I also used my Facebook account to ask friends what genre of radio drama we should decide to create, this was a good idea as it was almost a way of conducting primary research as people could comment on my post with there suggestions! Another found another useful website that had an archive of clips from radio history that are well know and famous, I hosted these to my own file host and made a flash MP3 player for my blog, now my audio files can be played on the blog! 

When planning my Poster and Radio listings I used a scanner to scan my hand drawn images onto the computer to post onto my blog, this was a quick and easy process as it scanned my photo's and saved them as a .jpeg file straight away. 

Construction of our Project:

Hardware - 

When recording our radio drama we used a selection of different tools to record our voices, The college has a Sound room where we could record our work using there soundboard and microphones, These were all connected to an Imac which had a piece of software installed that was listening and recording our voice and surroundings. We also used a Digital Camera when creating our first poster design and I used a DSLR camera to capture the image for my final poster. 

Software -

We used a huge amount of different softwares when constructing our Recording, to begin with we used the Mac OSX Leopard operating system for all of our work. Within that we mainly used Soundtrack Pro to edit and modify our recording, we also used a piece of software called Audio Hijack Pro which was used to record sound that was being played on the computers Line-In, We used this to record sound out of the Safari web browser to use on our work. When creating our posters I used Iphoto to import my photo's from the camera and sent them straight to Adobe Photoshop for editing, My whole poster was constructed in Adobe Photoshop however my double page radio listing was designed in Adobe InDesign as it is a tool design for creating publications. I also used the Safari web browser to access blogspot.com to write this blog out, sometimes I used Microsoft Word to type out my blog posts when I was unable to connect to the internet, I also made my first post via e-mail, Blogspot offers a service where you can write an e-mail and send it directly to your blog as a post.

I also used a website called mydatanest.com which is a file host, I used this to host my .MP3 files on my blog, which included my sound clips and final radio recording, I also created a flash MP3 player to play some famous clips from radio history. 

Evaluation of our Project:

When evaluating my work I used the Advanced HTML text editor that is provided with your Blogspot account to type up my posts, at some point I had to upload some sound clips so I used a website called mydatanest.com which is a File host to host my .MP3 files, once they were uploaded onto my host I used a piece of HTML code that would help Blogspot understand that I wanted an MP3 file to be played on my blog.