For those with exceptionally long memories, the emerging Internet medium of the 1990s might have seemed in its pattern of adoption quite similar to the radio medium of the 1920s. What was considered to be, in its infancy, little more than a curiosity, a province for the technologically empowered rather than the masses, came to be a dominant medium of the age. After the means for transmission sound over the air were perfected, the first to take to it were the 1920s version of tech geeks (usually young students), and scattered small businesses (who usually employed those students to build out the transmission hardware.)

On this day, August 31, in 1920, Detroit’s 8MK radio station, owned by the The Detroit News paper, broadcast primary election results — the first radio new report ever.

The paper’s main motivation in building the station was to have control over radio news broadcasts and scoop any possible competition. Not that anyone in the paper’s offices knew much about radio: they hired Michael DeLisle Lyons, an amateur radio pioneer, to set up the station and register it in his name (to keep it from possibly tarnishing their brand.) Hardly anyone had radio receivers to hear the news broadcast at the time, but that did not stop the paper from running a triumphal account a few years later: “The news of the world was being given forth through this invisible trumpet to the waiting crowds in the unseen market place.”