1927–1970

Disaster and the Wire

When the bulletin interrupts

Before 1937 American networks did not record, which is why almost nothing of the great disasters of the early thirties can be heard at all. The station documentary changed that: from the fifties onwards local newsrooms went back to their own shelves and to survivors, and what they made — KDKA's 'Scrapbook in Sound' on the Hindenburg, 'Book of Fate' on the 1936 flood — is often the only surviving carrier of the original audio. Alongside them sits the strangest genre American radio ever produced: civil defence drama, in which the federal government paid for thirteen weeks of quiet, well-acted stories about the end of everything.

22 recordings · 6 broadcasters