The directory
Every room in the archive
The shelf is large enough that a menu stopped being useful. This is the whole building, laid out at once — 50 rooms, each with a note on what it holds and why it is worth an evening.
- Rooms
- 50
- Broadcasts
- 81,000+
- Record sides
- 11,400+
- Series
- 560+
The Golden Age
Entertainment, 1900–1962
- 01
Start Here
Six broadcasts in a fixed order, chosen so that an hour is enough to understand what radio was.
One hourEnter - 02
Browse the Archive
The whole shelf, filterable by series, year, length and restoration quality. This is the room to open when you already know what you want.
81,000+ recordingsEnter - 03
The Doors
Short curated ways in for people who don't know where to start: a mood, a genre, a time of night.
Open the roomEnter - 04
The Live Wire
Broadcasts that could only happen once, because they went out live in front of an audience — comedy nights, one-night dramas, and the times it went wrong on air.
Open the roomEnter - 05
Broadway on the Air
Theatre written or rewritten for the microphone: Mercury, the Columbia Workshop, the Theatre Guild, CBC Stage.
Open the roomEnter - 06
The Music Hall
Dance bands, crooners and hotel remotes — the music radio carried before records ran the schedule.
Open the roomEnter - 07
The Early Dial
The first decade of network entertainment, when nobody had settled what a radio programme was supposed to sound like.
Before 1935Enter - 08
The First Recordings
Acoustic-era voices, before microphones: the singers and comics who taught the century how to perform for a machine.
1900–1925Enter - 09
The Phonograph Era
Shellac sides, mirrored one at a time onto our own storage so they keep playing after the source goes dark.
11,000+ sidesEnter - 10
The Handover
Radio's last full decade, made while television was taking the audience away — the shows got stranger and often better.
Open the roomEnter - 11
The Other Dial
Broadcasting from outside America: the BBC, the Empire and shortwave services, and the state radio of the other side.
Open the roomEnter - 12
The Canadian Dial
The northern networks — CBC, CFCF, CFCN — and the variety, hockey and dance broadcasts that only survive in Canadian hands.
Open the roomEnter - 13
Christmas on the Air
Every surviving Christmas broadcast in the archive, filed by season, from wartime services to sponsor specials.
680 broadcastsEnter
The Record
History, as it was broadcast
- 01
The Fifty
The ranked canon: fifty broadcasts, argued for one at a time, and open to your vote.
50 broadcastsEnter - 02
The Canon
Every ranked volume we keep — series, performers, moments — with the reasoning attached.
Open the roomEnter - 03
The Newsroom
The bulletins as they were read, from the Munich crisis to the end of the war, with the interruptions left in.
1938–1949Enter - 04
In Their Own Words
Interviews and unguarded talk: the people of the century explaining themselves at the microphone rather than being described.
1,000+ interviewsEnter - 05
Follow a Star
A life told in order, through the recordings: ten performers followed from first surviving broadcast to last.
10 livesEnter - 06
The Cast Credit Index
Film names indexed against the shelf, so you can hear the people you know from the screen doing the work they did for radio.
Open the roomEnter - 07
The Rarities Room
Enormous stars in series that lasted a season or less — Bogart, Sinatra, Cary Grant, Dietrich.
Open the roomEnter - 08
The Rehearsal Room
The run-through and then the broadcast of the same script, back to back. You can hear the jokes being found.
77 matched pairsEnter - 09
The Auditions
The pitch disc: the show as it was sold to a sponsor, sometimes with a different lead than the one history remembers.
94 audition discsEnter - 10
One Night Only
Broadcasts that happened once and were never repeated — victory nights, bond rallies, testimonial dinners, Command Performance.
1,917 broadcastsEnter - 11
The Venues
Filed by the room the microphone was standing in: the Palladium, the Cafe Rouge, Carnegie Hall, the Cocoanut Grove.
18 roomsEnter - 12
Brought To You By
The sponsors who actually paid for all of this, and the commercial copy they made the cast read out loud.
20 brandsEnter - 13
Not Who You'd Expect
Broadcasts by people you don't associate with radio at all — Disney, Hitchcock, Einstein, Jesse Owens.
Open the roomEnter - 14
The Radio Family Tree
How the shelf connects: spin-offs, recasts, imitators and the writers who carried a house style between networks.
Open the roomEnter - 15
The Radio War
Every side of the war as it was broadcast — Allied pool feeds, the BBC European Service, Radio Tokyo, Germany Calling.
Open the roomEnter - 16
A Century on the Air
The landmark shelves: the days the whole century stopped and listened, each with its own dated timeline.
Open the roomEnter - 17
The World of Tomorrow
Radio explaining the future to itself: the 1939 Fair, the laboratory hours, television's arrival, the atomic age.
1,027 broadcastsEnter - 18
Moments
One broadcast, one page — the provenance, the context, and the recording itself.
Open the roomEnter - 19
Mission Control
Spaceflight as it went out live, mission by mission, from Mercury through Apollo–Soyuz.
17 missionsEnter - 20
The Press Box
Sport as live theatre: the Louis fights, the World Series, the Derby, called by the voices who invented the job.
Open the roomEnter - 21
The Newsreel
Documentary made out of the archive itself — public-domain audio assembled into a narrative rather than a shelf.
Open the roomEnter - 22
The Critic's Circle
Long essays on the great series, written to be read next to the recordings they discuss.
Open the roomEnter
The Dial
Ways to listen
- 01
The Program Guide
Today's listings, hour by hour, the way a newspaper printed them.
Open the roomEnter - 02
The Schedule
Six house channels running around the clock, each with its own character and its own period sponsor breaks.
6 channelsEnter - 03
The Stations
Always-on shuffled stations. Turn one on and leave it on; it behaves like a receiver, not a playlist.
Open the roomEnter - 04
Time Machine
Pick a night in the past and hear what was actually on the air that evening.
Open the roomEnter - 05
You Are There
A landmark day rebuilt hour by hour, with the light of the page following the clock.
Open the roomEnter - 06
On This Day
Everything in the archive that first aired on today's date, whatever year it was.
Open the roomEnter - 07
The Clip Bench
Fifty famous moments cut as short reels you can watch, restyle and export.
50 templatesEnter - 08
The Sign-Off
The end of the broadcast day: closing announcements, anthems, and the carrier going quiet.
Open the roomEnter - 09
The Late Dial
All-night radio — long, low, unhurried programmes to work or sleep to.
Open the roomEnter - 10
Radio Roulette
Spin the dial and land in the middle of something, exactly as tuning used to work.
Open the roomEnter - 11
The Great Radio Challenge
Eight rounds drawn from the archive, scored — how well do you actually know radio?
8 roundsEnter - 12
Drop the Needle
Five recordings, five guesses: name the year from the sound alone.
5 roundsEnter - 13
Listening Parties
Listen with other people, in sync, with the same recording running on every screen.
Open the roomEnter - 14
The Journey
Guided listening paths with a beginning and an end, built by us and by listeners.
Open the roomEnter - 15
Deep Search
Search titles, series and — where we hold a transcript — the dialogue inside the recording itself.
Open the roomEnter