Madam, – In his letter (April 22nd), Prof Colum Kenny disputes the claim in my new book, 50 Things You Didn't Know about 1916(Weekend Review, April 18th), that the rebels in Dublin were responsible for the world's first radio broadcast.
He bases his argument on two points. First, that the rebels' transmission doesn't qualify as broadcasting "as we know it", quoting a line from Maurice Gorham's 1967 book, Forty Years of Irish Broadcasting.
However, it’s interesting to read the rest of the paragraph from which that quote is taken. Mr Gorham goes on to explain that the reason this wasn’t “broadcasting as we know it” was for the technical fact that “wireless telephony was not yet available and Morse messages were all that could be sent out”. Nevertheless, Mr Gorham concludes that the rebels’ transmission “was news by wireless, not aimed at any known receiver but sent out broadcast, and that was a new idea in 1916.”
Prof Kenny’s second argument is that the claim on behalf of the rebels “may come as a surprise to many who believe that . . . Canadian Reginald Fessenden made the world’s first radio broadcast on Christmas Eve 1906 [which] included his singing of O Holy Night!” The fact is, though, that many authorities in the communications field are not only happy to agree that the Dublin rebels were first, but fail to even mention Mr Fessenden.
Fellow Canadian Marshall McLuhan, in his 1964 work Understanding Media, says "[1916] was the year of the Irish Easter rebellion and of the first radio broadcast . . . . The Irish rebels used a ship's wireless to make . . . a diffused broadcast . . ."
Desmond Fisher, in his 1978 Broadcasting in Ireland, quotes both McLuhan and Gorham and concludes, “The world’s first radio broadcast was made from Dublin, Ireland, on Easter Tuesday, April 25th 1916.”
Other works broadly supporting the rebels' claim include Broadcasting and politics in Western Europe, edited in 1985 by Prof Raymond Kuhn, and (another Canadian) Prof Marc Raboy's 1990 Missed Opportunities: the Story of Canada's Broadcasting Policy. No doubt these authorities and others have their reasons for recognising the rebels' announcements as a world first over Fessenden's singing.
However, having no wish to initiate a claim versus counter-claim debate, I’m happy to put the matter to rest by inserting the word “news”, since it’s indisputable that the rebels in O’Connell Street in 1916 were responsible for the world’s first radio news broadcast. – Yours, etc,
MICK O’FARRELL,
Ballycullen Road,
Dublin 16.