The Eveready Hour
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The Eveready Hour was a radio program that was first broadcast on December 4, 1923 (or, according to other sources, on February 12, 1924) on WEAF Radio in New York. The first commercially-sponsored variety program in the history of broadcasting, it was paid for by the National Carbon Company, which at the time owned Eveready Battery.
The Eveready Hour is considered by radio broadcast historians to be the first commercially sponsored variety program in the history of the medium. The program started locally on radio station WEAF in New York City in 1923 and became a multi-station feed in 1924 over a hookup of stations, mostly in the East and Midwest, which would later serve as the basis of the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), beginning in 1927. The Eveready Hour continued as a featured broadcast on NBC until 1930.
Guests included Lionel Atwill, Arthur "Bugs" Baer, Belle Baker, Eddie Cantor, Pablo Casals, Irvin S. Cobb, Richard Dix, the Fonzaley String Quartet and Laurette Taylor. Directed by Paul Stacey and Douglas Coulter, the show featured an orchestra conducted by Nathaniel Shilkret.
The only known recording of an Eveready Hour broadcast was made by an engineer at the Edison Laboratory in West Orange New Jersey on the evening of May 15, 1928, from the over-the-air signal of station WEAF. This remarkably clear recording contains a local announcement by a WEAF staff announcer, Paul Dumont, and then the first 18 minutes of the hour-long broadcast. This same recording holds the distinction of being the earliest known aircheck (off air recording) of a live dramatic radio broadcast (in other words, a recording of a radio transmission that was not a news event, speech or music only presentation). This rare recording is now archived at the Edison National History Site (EHNS), which is part of the National Park Service.
