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Listen to the Best Radio Station

It may seem strange to think that there are people still alive today who were born before the introduction of what we call “radio”.

If you asked the average person what “radio” means to them, they might tell you about their plastic kitchen radio they leave on in the background while making breakfast, the built-in car radio they listen to while driving to work, or even the portable, mp3-player-like device they can listen to with headphones on public transport (although this is more of an early-2000’s device, and is now considered fairly obsolete).

“Kitchen radios” and car radios have already been around for a long time, but as we move further into the 21st Century, the concepts of radio and radio stations continue to develop with advances in technology.

Since the beginning of this century, we’ve had the ability to call up any song we can think of and listen to it directly over the internet, or store thousands of them on our computers, and since the introduction of smartphones, we’ve had almost constant easy access to music when we’re on the go.

So, why not offer the same easy access to radio stations? Whether you’re listening with your phone, your computer, or in your car, imagine being able to tune in to any radio station you can think of, from any style or genre, from every corner of the world.

What is radio?

So, although you might think of a radio as being an electronic gadget, the word has many meanings and definitions. For example, the verb (“to radio someone”) means to send energy with waves from one place to another without the need for wires, whether it’s from one room to the next or country to country. A piece of equipment called a “transmitter” sends out the radio signals, which are picked up by a “receiver”. This is why the 1930’s and 40’s term “wireless” was used for household radios, as the concept was relatively new.

Radio still has a lot of uses, despite the mid-2000’s rise of mp3 players and , and more recently that of and streaming services like In fact, many people simply didn’t want to deal with new technology and stuck to their old ways, particularly older generations. Some people also preferred the radio because it constantly introduced them to new songs and artists that they wouldn’t necessarily hear with mp3 players.

Radio is still important in both more-developed and less-developed countries. In many developing countries such as Thailand and Nicaragua, it’s used as an educational tool for teaching topics such as nutrition and health education. In South Africa, there are more than 150 independent radio stations, whereas 30 years ago there were only 10 on the entire continent of Africa.

Throughout history, it has been debated over who was the true father of radio, but despite Nikola Tesla’s demonstration of a wireless radio in 1893 in St. Louis, it was Guglielmo Marconi who won the race by transmitting the first radio signals across the Atlantic Ocean in 1901. In the following years leading up to the First World War, radio was primarily used to send messages to and from ships via Morse code, but was not used commercially. During WW1, it was used almost exclusively by the military, although the technology at that time was not advanced enough to replace the use of carrier pigeons.

In the early 1920’s, radio began to rise in popularity amongst civilians. In the USA, the Pittsburgh radio station KDKA became the first to be officially licensed by the government, and its parent company Westinghouse began selling wireless radios to the public. In the UK, the Post Office received almost 100 requests for licences from would-be broadcasters, and so decided to set up the BBC.

By the beginning of the Second World War, it had become a common family past time to sit around a wireless radio listening to programmes and news broadcasts. During WW2, the radio was vital in relaying news of the war to families all over the UK, and was an effective tool for boosting public morale.