Key dates in radio broadcasting

1887: Heinrich Hertz was the first person to detect radio waves by causing a spark to leap across a gap that generated electromagnetic waves.

1900: Canadian inventor, Reginald Fessenden, transmitted the world's first voice message.  It took six years for Fessenden to refine his invention when on Christmas Eve, 1906, he made the first radio broadcast in history.

1913: Harold D. Arnold at AT&T developed the amplifying vacuum tube that made the first coast-to-coast telephony and the first transatlantic radio transmission possible in 1915.

1932: BBC World Service launched. Now broadcast in 43 languages with 146 million weekly listeners, the BBC World Service is available on FM in 139 capital cities.

18 October 1954: Texas Instruments launched the first commercial transistor radio, the Regency TR-1, on the US consumer market, signalling radio’s promotion to a mass medium.

1956: Walter Brattain, John Bardeen and William Shockley shared the Nobel Prize for physics for their invention of the transistor.

1995: Plan began its child media programs with a project in Senegal. The media projects allow children to become actively involved in the development process. In a recent Broadcast for Children project, over 2,500 young Senegalese were trained in radio production, expression’s skills and child rights issues. The aim of the project was to allow children to inform their peers, relatives and communities on welfare issues through radio programmes designed and directed by the children themselves.