And now, ladies and gentlemen, your attention, please.

Athemoral is a production of iHeart 3D audio.

For full exposure, listen with headphones.

Every time humans invent a new way to talk to each other. We reignite an age-old debate.

There are people who predict that this communication technology

will prevent war and allow us to all communicate more effectively.

It'll be great. It'll solve all of the world's problems.

That's the techno-utopianism. And then there's the technophobia

where people are concerned that this new technology will harm us, it will rot our brains,

it will control us, or maybe it won't harm us, but it'll harm our children. There's always a grain of truth in all of this in that a new technology does have a kind of

outsized impact until it becomes part of normal life.

My name is Cynthia Myers.

I'm the author of a book called A Word from our sponsor, Admin, Advertising, and the Golden

Age of Radio. And I'm Professor Emerita at the College of Mount St. Vincent in New York City.

As we'll come to see, the history of advertising and radio is in many ways the story of radio itself

and a foundational chapter in the history of American mass media.

The earliest experiments with sending sound wirelessly through the electromagnetic spectrum

took place in the 1890s.

The first form of it is the wireless, which is a telegraph without wires,

where you could send Morse code over the air.

Adding voice and adding actual audio doesn't really happen until the late teens.

In World War I, it's used by the Navy for a ship-to-shore communication.

...