Radio Learns to Sell Real Estate

On the afternoon of August 28, 1922, a Queensboro Corporation man named Blackwell stepped up to a microphone at WEAF, the AT&T-owned station in Manhattan, and spent about ten minutes talking up a new co-op called Hawthorne Court in Jackson Heights, Queens. The company had paid $50 for the airtime under AT&T's new idea of toll broadcasting, selling blocks of time the way the phone company sold a long-distance call. Blackwell leaned on real estate poetry, warning listeners away from the city's solid masses of brick and pointing them toward the new elevated line out to Queens. No recording survives. But the pitch worked well enough, and got imitated often enough, that historians now call it the first paid advertisement ever broadcast on American radio.