Dorking & District Radio Society

Tuesday 27th February - Early history of the BBC and broadcast receivers

Zoom presentation by Elizabeth Bruton

On 15 June 1920, the famous Australian soprano Dame Nellie Melba made a pioneering broadcast from the radio transmitter at the Marconi works in Chelmsford, England. Celebrated as the "first live public entertainment broadcast in the world by a celebrity", the transmission marked the birth of broadcast radio in Britain and was listened in to by thousands of radio amateurs, some with homebuilt apparatus including crystal sets and others using ex-military radio receivers.

This talk will discuss the birth of public broadcast radio and the BBC in the early to mid-1920s and the development and design of popular broadcasting in the home, first radio sets and later television sets in the 1920s and 1930s.