Eveready Hour

The Eveready Hour was the first commercially sponsored variety program in the history of broadcasting. It premiered December 4, 1923 (or, according to other sources, November 4, 1923 or February 12, 1924) on WEAF Radio in New York City. Radio's first sponsored network program. it was paid for by the National Carbon Company, which at the time owned Eveready Battery. The host for many years was the banjo-playing vocalist Wendell Hall, "The Red Headed Music Maker," who wrote the popular "It Ain't Gonna Rain No Mo'" (Victor Records). Hall was married on The Eveready Hour in 1924.

The program started locally on radio station WEAF in New York City in December 1923. The idea for the program came when the National Carbon Company's George Furness tuned in WJZ that summer and heard Edgar White Burrill reading Ida M. Tarbell's He Knew Lincoln. Envisioning the unexplored possibilities of radio programming and advertising, Furness became the producer and supervisor of The Eveready Hour, a show he structured to bring the full spectrum of American culture to the airwaves. Media critic Ben Gross later stated that "Immediately after its première in 1923, it became the most important program in broadcasting."

In early 1924 The Eveready Hour began to be carried simultaneously by a second station, WJAR in Providence, Rhode Island, and the number of outlets was expanded to a group of Eastern and Midwestern stations "as quickly as WEAF could add stations" to its "WEAF chain" radio network. On election night, November 4, 1924, the program, hosted by Wendell Hall, was carried by 18 stations, with Will Rogers, Art Gillham, Carson Robison and the Eveready Quartet entertaining between election returns given by Graham McNamee. Joseph Knecht led the Waldorf-Astoria Dance Orchestra. In 1926 the WEAF chain operations were purchased by the Radio Corporation of America, becoming the basis of the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) in early 1927. The Eveready Hour continued as a featured broadcast on NBC until 1930.

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