This 1924 recording was via the new Western Electric recording system under development which was only commercially introduced in 1925. WEAF in NY was the AT&T lead radio station before being sold to RCA in 1926 when it became the flagship NBC Network station from NYC. Western Electric was the AT&T reseach and development arm so that they were able to put to use their system to record with fidelity this, the earliest example of a radio broadcast in history.
@tedrobinson372 That's fascinating - am currently studying early electrical disc recording (particularly those prior to the Western Electric system like those developed by Guest & Merriman) - Would be interesting to see the details of this 1924 Western Electric recording and the disc(s) that were produced. Do you know where I can find more information about it?
This is supposedly the only recorded broadcast of the callsign WLAG (Minneapolis). WLAG operated from September 4, 1922, to July 31,1924, when it became insolvent and went off the air. (WLAG was briefly put back on the air to participate in the National Defense Day Broadcast.) It was reorganized and began broadcasting again on October 2, 1924, as WCCO, extant today. From what I understand, this broadcast created a controversy because we'd supposedly fought "the war to end all wars" (WWI) and would never again fight a world war. To think otherwise was to be a labeled a "warmonger."
This preciously rare radio recording captures a pivotal moment in time in American history when there still existed much popular resistance to the idea of a large, professional peacetime U.S. military force akin to those of continental Europe. The nation had just exited a world war that, while comparatively less costly in terms of casualties and social stability to the U.S. than it was for most of the other belligerents, had served to strengthen pacifist and isolationist feelings among large swathes of the population. The armed forces of the United States underwent drastic reduction in force orders closely following the end of the war in Europe in late 1918, so that by the mid-1920s the size and strength of the U.S. military (esp. its peacetime Regular Army) were in much the same state as they had been before American entrance into the late European conflict prompted a massive buildup of U.S. military force. Postwar disarmament concerned many politicians and officers within the War/Navy Departments who worried reducing the size of the Regular Army so fast and so drastically from its wartime peak made the nation acutely vulnerable to a wide range of threats emanating from both abroad and within. Those advocating for a path opposite to disarmament ran afoul of an equally significant political coalition that, citing legitimate fears of a powerful peacetime standing army eroding the Constitutional stopgaps meant to protect the nation from military dictatorship as well concerns of a more fiscal nature, steadfastly opposed any measure for increasing in a significant way the Federal budget for military armament and manpower spending. Ultimately, the former group won out, with the size of the Regular Army being frozen at 296,000 men and staying that way until the nation embarked in the early 1940s on yet another military arms drive as war clouds loomed in Europe and the Pacific.
