13th January 1910: World's first public radio broadcast comes from the Met Opera in New York

Inventor Lee de Forest earned a Doctorate from Yale’s Sloane Physics Laboratory in 1899, and soon moved to New York City where he worked on improvements to existing radio technology that was being developed by Hertz and Marconi in Europe. It was while in New York that de Forest developed a three-element vacuum tube known as an Audion which, despite finding little immediate success, established the possibility of amplifying radio signals.
De Forest formed the de Forest Radio Telephone Company in 1907, and in an advertisement the same year he claimed that it would soon be possible to broadcast radio signals throughout the city for the public to hear. Three years later he was to prove his prediction correct when he made the first live broadcast from New York's Metropolitan Opera House.
Having installed a 500-watt wireless transmitter backstage, de Forest ran his antenna to the roof where a long fishing pole acted has the mast. Since so few private individuals owned radio sets, de Forest set up public receivers across the city. The signal reportedly reached as far as Newark and New Jersey. Even a ship moored in New York harbor is said to have tuned in.
The broadcast included performances of Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci featuring acclaimed Italian tenor Enrico Caruso. However, contemporary accounts reveal that the principal performers were barely audible due to the low sensitivity of the microphones, while static and other interference clouded the signal. Nevertheless, de Forest had shown that public radio broadcasts were possible, and this stimulating attempts to broadcast music over the airwaves.

[@mannysanguena7900]

DeForest did not use a single audion/vacuum tube/valve to facilitate this,so called 1910 broadcast. DeForest instead modulated a noisy spark transmitter. No amplification and and a dirty carrier led to this broadcast being virtually unintelligible. 500w is a lot of power if the signal had been clean or if the technology had been available. In 1910 it clearly was not. This was clearly another one of DeForest's promotional stunts.
It was Western Electric which first achieved audio amplification in 1914 and radio frequency amplification in 1915 using the vacuum tube.

[@familiezovak9826]

He could have asked Tesla to help him fine-tune the parts that where based on his patents & were used to make his little transmission work better ..

[@Fidelb101]

Smoker #Fidelb went to the opera last week. He really liked song ‘O Sole Mio 👀

[@hodonyassin9760]

Happy 111th Anniversary!!!

[@gerardtango7884]

A major historical hiatus as Signore Arturo e Signore Katz thought radio "a passing fad" the Met dumped the honor to conduct on Maestro Egisto Tango

[@ahmedbutawan140]

Wow. . .i thought that a really great history . . .spectacular amazing so great. . .😅😅😅