According to Britannica Online Marconi was developing radio telegraphy beginning in 1894. Initially over short distances measured in meters, across the English Channel in 1896. His first English patent was June 1896.

"Finally, in 1901, Marconi bridged the Atlantic when the letter s in Morse code travelled from Poldhu, Cornwall, to St. John's, Newfoundland, a distance of nearly 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometres)."

The first known radio program in the United States was broadcast by Reginald Aubrey Fessenden from his experimental station at Brant Rock, Massachusetts, on Christmas Eve, 1906. Two musical selections, the reading of a poem, and a short talk apparently constituted the program, which was heard by ship wireless operators within a radius of several hundred miles.

The first commercial radio station was KDKA in Pittsburgh, which went on the air in the evening of November 2, 1920, with a broadcast of the returns of the Harding-Cox presidential election.

In England a well-received broadcast by the opera singer Dame Nellie Melba, were broadcast for about a year between 1919 and 1920. Opposition from the armed services, fear of interference with essential communications, and a desire to avoid the "commercialization" of radio led, however, to a ban on the Chelmsford broadcasts, which the Post Office claimed the right to impose.

The BBC was organized in 1922.