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Reading an absolute gem of a paper about the origins of radio broadcasting and the weird role department stories had in the process, by Noah Arceneaux: jstor.org/stable/4092802…
In the 1910s, some of the early experimenters with radio were department stores, which set up broadcast stations in the hopes of selling radio sets. Made sense, as the "selling ad time to companies" model didn't really emerge until 1922.
One of the pioneers was John Wanamaker, a department store owner with a gift for PR. Starting in 1911, he advertised "online" shopping services where passengers on ships could order via telegraph and pick up their purchases when they docked.
Evidently, the New York Store, as a prank, decided to include a pair of socks that had been ordered in a mail delivery to a ship off Long Island. A biplane flew over the ship and dropped a sack of mail, with the socks included. Take that, Amazon!
On May 13, 1914, Wanamaker's expanded to broadcasting sound. Just to give you a sense of how advanced this was - the vacuum tube amplifier, the first practical tech for broadcasting voice and sound, wasn't invented until 1912...
Anyway, Wanamaker's in NYC broadcasts a record by Italian tenor Enrico Caruso. A listener on a ship 60 miles at sea telegraphs back “Am hearing music clearly but that’s a rotten phonograph. Get a new one and some new records.” There have always been haters.
Screw time travel to the future. I want to visit the 1910s.
