The military and business application of radio were immediately obvious – communication with troops in the field, ships and sea, and between businessmen far from each other were great uses for the new medium. Commercial applications were less apparent. The Westinghouse Electric corporation, which started out in the 1880s, building AC meters and generators, manufactured a bunch of radio receivers, but there wasn’t a market for them yet. So Westinghouse decided to make one, beginning broadcast in November of 1921 and creating (arguably) the nation’s first commercially licensed radio station.

On this day, February 8, in 1922, just months after Westinghouse’s KDKA AM station went on the air, President Warren Harding installed a radio receiver in the White House. Quick to embrace the new medium, he also took a number of action to shape its development.

Harding was the first president to give a radio address live (there were no tape delays in those days) during the dedication of the writer of the Star Spangled Banner, Francis Scott Key. As one of this first actions after the election, he also called a “radio conference” bringing together government regulatory officials with radio amateurs and would-be commercial broadcasters to come up with broadcast standards. Together with a follow-up conference in 1923, Harding created the governmental authority to regulate radio transmissions to create the maximum “public good.”