My grandmother used to have a console type radio from the thirties and forties. Along with the regular AM tuner (it’s too old to have FM) it had a tuner for shortwave, with locations from Winnipeg to Berlin listed. It always suprised me since as long as I can remember, shortwave was only available on hard to find specialty radios. Was shortwave that much more popular in the thirties and forties than today? What kind of programs did it carry? And when did shortwave become a niche audience?
Most countries had official broadcasting stations on the shortwave bands. The BBC service was famous throughout the world. The US Voice of America is still a shortwave operation. Cuba probably still broadcasts on shortwave bands to the exile population in Florida.
Shortwave was listened to because you could get stations from all over the world, although distance often created distortion or other listening problems. Because the stations were worldwide and crossed borders, they couldn’t be easily censored. People listened to them to get forbidden news, or news from home, or other points of view. News services on American radio were somewhere between primitive and non-existent until WWII.
All kinds of programs could be found on shortwave, though, not just news programs.
Shortwave still exists, mostly called world band radio. It declined in popularity as news became more easily available on American radio and television. I remember most radios more sophisticated than a cheap transistor had shortwave bands into the 60s, though, and most good radios will still have them.
Not having lived in the thirties, I couldn’t say from firsthand experience. But remember that communications from afar were not frequent, realtime, or common for most people. Shortwave was at least realtime and not expensive. A whole world was opened up to the average listener, who had never heard such exotic things from foreign lands.
I can recall being thrilled with listening to shortwave stations from many countries, as well as communicating with some via ham radio in the 1950’s and 60’s. Getting a distant signal could be somewhat of a challenge, but rewarding.
We sure are spoiled by the Internet and the ease of distant communication, not to mention today’s affordable overseas phone service.
What kind of programs? A wide variety. Ethnic music. Recycled jazz (some stations remote to the US thought that playing US music was the thing to do, go figure.) News. Music. Propaganda, and lots of it. Diatribes. Language shows. Just about anything you can imagine. You hoped that the skip wouldn’t fade out before you got to the end of that great program you were enjoying!
A niche audience? I’m not sure it ever was, for long. It competed with domestic radio, and IMHO after the thrill was gone, most people returned to Fibber McGee and Molly.
The radio networks (and a few electronics manufacturers) had shortwave repeater stations of their own in the 1930s. These were used to conduct various experiments (including television, before it was reassigned to the VHF band) and also to allow people out of range of network affiliates some chance of picking up their programs.
Most multiband sets of the period also picked up police and aircraft frequencies, which were then on a band in between broadcast and shortwave. In 1937, a girl in Florida allegedly tuned in on distress calls from Amelia Earhart. Her father reported them to the Coast Guard and was, apparently, laughed off the phone.