WASHINGTON, March 5, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Following is the daily "Profile America" feature from the U.S. Census Bureau:
FM RADIO DEBUTS
Profile America — Sunday, March 5th. FM radio is 76 years old. In March 1941, the first commercial FM station went on the air — W47NV in Nashville, Tennessee. FM —standing for frequency modulation — was first proposed in a scientific paper written by Edwin Armstrong in 1922. By 1934, he was demonstrating to network officials how FM was unaffected by static, like all the radio stations then on the air, which used AM, or amplitude modulation. World War II interrupted the advance of FM broadcasting, which surged in the 1960s when it began broadcasting in stereo. Today, some 83,000 people work in radio's 15,508 licensed stations, of which nearly 11,000 broadcast on the FM band. Profile America is in its 20th year as a public service of the U.S. Census Bureau.
Sources: Kane's Famous First Facts, 6299
First station/accessed 12/29/2016: http://digitalmediawire.com/2012/03/05/happy-71st-birthday-to-fm-radio/
Edwin Armstrong/accessed 12/29/2016: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/alumni/Magazine/Spring2002/Armstrong.html
Radio employment/County Business Patterns/NAICS 515112: https://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/BP/2014/00A1//naics~515112
Radio stations/accessed 12/29/2016: https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-341807A1.docx
Profile America is produced by the Center for New Media and Promotion of the U.S. Census Bureau. Statistics and accounts drawn from cited non-Census sources are employed for illustrative or narrative purposes, and are not attested to by the U.S. Census Bureau. These daily features are available as produced segments, ready to air, on the Internet at http://www.census.gov (look for "Audio" in the "Library" pull-down menu).
SOURCE U.S. Census Bureau
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