The 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 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. When it debuted that December, the media critic Ben Gross called it "the most important program in broadcasting."

On election night, November 4, 1924, the program was "hooked-up" to 18 stations. Wendell Hall was the host 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. The Eveready Hour became a multi-station feed in 1924 over a group of Eastern and Midwestern stations, a hook-up which later served as the basis of the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), beginning in 1927. The Eveready Hour continued as a featured broadcast on NBC until 1930.

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