Seventy-five years ago this month, the November 1946 issue of Popular Mechanics carried this article about one of our favorit topics, namely, the history of radio. And the article highlights just how much had happened in the medium’s first quarter century or so. The first commercial radio broadcasts had taken place in 1920, and the first permanent nationwide network, NBC, was formed in 1926.

The magazine noted that when KDKA carried the first scheduled broadcast, the 1920 Harding-Cox election returns, there were only a handful of receivers in the nation. But when FDR addressed the nation less than 20 years later, there were more than a hundred million Americans listening.

Obviously, there have been many changes in the last 75 years, but by 1946, postwar broadcasting, of AM, FM, and television, is still recognizable to us today.