Beginnings

     The "Marconi of Brazil" was a priest, Fr. Roberto Landell de Moura (1861-1928), who experimented extensively and incessantly with wireless communication. By the early 1890s, he had already anticipated or accompanied several European and American inventions for wireless sound transmission. For a time, he lived in New York City, and in October 1904, he obtained U.S. Patent No. 771,917 for a "wave-transmitter." Quite unfortunately, however, not only was there no interest in his work in Brazil, there was even suspicion of it. With his technical genius spurned by the people he sought to help, he died a disappointed man.

     During the rubber boom in the Amazon at the beginning of the 20th century, an American company, Amazon Wireless, attempted to set up radio service similar to others that had been successful in Central America. The endeavor failed because of legal complications and poorly understood equatorial conditions for radio operations. Nevertheless, by the following decade, Brazilian ships and coastal stations had wireless communication.

     The first Brazilian radio broadcast station was the Radio Sociedade do Rio de Janeiro (Radio Society of Rio de Janeiro), with the call letters PRA-2. The station was founded on 20 April 1923 by Professor Edgard Roquette Pinto of the Brazilian Academy of Science, an anthropologist who knew the value of radio from his participation in pioneering expeditions to indigenous regions. The station programmed news and sedate music.

     Because of strictures remaining from World War I, Brazil, like other countries, legally prohibited ownership of radio equipment. These restrictions were loosened as radio became a national craze, one that started in 1922, during the international exhibition commemorating the centennial of Brazilian independence. On Independence Day (7 September), the Westinghouse company mounted a 500-watt transmitter atop Corcovado Mountain, the high peak near the capital, Rio de Janeiro. The equipment broadcast a presidential address down into the city's few but "magical" receivers.

     The craze saw radio clubs spread throughout the country, into the northeastern states of Pernambuco and Bahia, into the Amazon region, and into the southern states of Rio Grande do Sul, Parana, and Sao Paulo. The club format allowed financing of broadcasting stations through membership fees. Such membership authorized individuals to purchase a receiver. Additional costs included government fees and taxes. By 1927 twelve stations broadcast daily in the country.

     By the end of the 1920s Brazil was second to Argentina as the largest importer of radio equipment from the United States, the main provider. The volume of business was worth more than half a million dollars annually. So that they could withstand tropical conditions, American manufacturers built sets with reinforced metal parts. U.S. diplomatic personnel aided not only in the sale of U.S. equipment but also in the promotion of U.S. program style. Before World War II, U.S. radio faced serious competition from British (Marconi) and German (Telefunken) interests. By the early 1930s Brazil itself began manufacturing radios.

     Although nominally prohibited, advertising increasingly became an issue for station owners as their audiences grew faster than their income, which was limited to members' fees. On-air commercials, along with conditions and standards for equipment, training of personnel, control of technical operations, and responsibility for program content, were addressed in the establishment by federal decree in 1932 of the national Comissiio Tecnica de Radio (Radio Technical Commission).

     The dictates of this agency required some radio clubs to close, because they could not afford to meet the new equipment standards. This was true of Brazil's first radio station, which was donated to the newly established Ministry of Education and Culture. It would soon become one of the most renowned broadcasters in the country.

     Most important was that the new legislation allowed for advertising. By the mid-1930s growing commercial revenue allowed radio to become an important media power, competing with newspapers and later with the mass magazines that were to emerge the following decade. For the next two decades, this income would finance a golden age of radio, creating a renaissance of popular culture in sports, music, drama, and comedy. Advertising changed the very purpose of radio as perceived by its Brazilian founders. They, like others around the world, envisioned radio as a sober, refined vehicle for the communication of education and culture, the "British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) model." The competition among stations for listeners (to generate the highest possible advertising revenue) produced a more raucous model, which came to prevail in Brazil.

Radio's Golden Age

     In 1930 the rural planter aristocracy was removed from power by President Getulio Vargas. He would remain in power, using increasingly authoritarian tactics, until he was ousted in 1945. Radio was required by the government to carry a daily program of government news, the Hora do Brasil (Hour of Brazil). Vargas installed a propaganda and censorship bureau that controlled radio, film, and newspapers. Prohibited from engaging in politics, the new media amply compensated by producing the hallmarks of modern Brazilian popular culture.

     Thanks to radio, soccer and samba became definitive marks of Brazilian culture. Soccer achieved its first international fame with the broadcast in 1938 of the World Cup match in France. The programming of music and the rise of the recording industry encouraged the popularization of the samba along with other types of Brazilian song. From this radio music environment emerged singers such as Carmen Miranda and samba composers such as Noel Rosa and Ary Barroso. Radio made the samba schools and carnival of Rio de Janeiro popular throughout the country, enhancing the city's identity as the center of national popular culture.

     Audiences were subsequently attracted to radio for drama and comedy programs, which began to be broadcast in the late 1930s. Stage actors and comedians now had opportunities not only in the emerging cinema industry but also in radio. Serial dramas, known as navelas in Portuguese, produced a generation of actors who contributed to the renaissance of the Brazilian theater after World War II and later provided the talent for television drama.

     Comedy programs, especially satire, which were played before live audiences, became a vital part of radio during the 1940s in the development of variety programs. Radio also affected the Portuguese language, helping to create a popular national style for expressing narrative (news reports), hyperbole (advertising), and deeply felt sentiments (soccer). In a country in which slavery continued until almost 1900, radio was both a vehicle and promotor of modernization. Its advertisements unveiled the glittering products of the modern age: movies, records, cars, electrical appliances, and more. It projected a Brazil that was industrializing, urbanizing, and modernizing.

     The competition for advertising revenue provoked by radio caused newspapers to begin acquiring radio stations and forming national networks. The prime example of this kind of consolidation was O Globo newspaper, established in the 1920s: it created Radio Globo a decade later and then founded today's huge Brazilian-European television conglomerate, TV Globo. The radio station most fondly remembered from the golden age, however, the one that attracted the largest audiences and produced some of the most innovative and elaborate programming, was the Rio station Radio Nacional.

Modern Radio

     The advent of television in the 1950s began the decline of radio, a decline that accelerated with the inauguration of color TV in the early 1970s. Nonetheless, because almost all Brazilians could afford to own a transistor radio, the number of radio stations continued to increase, and radio remained a stable part of everyday Brazilian life. Offering more economical advertising than television, it competed quite well.

     An armed forces coup in 1964 inaugurated a military regime that endured until 1985 and that established a number of organizational changes in telecommunications. The Ministry of Communications was established in 1967. Under its auspices was created the state radio broadcasting company, the Empresa Brasileira de Radiodifusifo (RADIOBRAS), which was given responsibility for maintaining the technical quality and national coordination of the radio system. During the 1990s, Brazil launched several telecommunications satellites.

     By the turn of the century, half of the Brazilian population of 170 million (the fifth largest population in the world) owned a radio. Brazil has nearly 3,000 radio stations-40 per­ cent FM, 60 percent AM. Some stations broadcast using what in Brazil is termed anonda tropical (tropical wave) at 2,300 to 5,060 kilohertz. Radio programming involves mainly music, news, and sports. Since 1985, "phone-in" programs allowing listeners free expression have become very popular.

     Radio has been a fundamental contributor to the modern technical and cultural development of Brazil. The development of Brazilian radio laid the technical foundations for Brazil to ​​create its television industry, the largest in South America. That development in turn formed the basis for Brazil's achieving the largest computer industry on the continent.