The British Broadcasting Company was founded on October 18, 1922, by a group of wireless manufacturers who wanted a nationwide service that would give people a reason to buy their sets. It was a private company at first. The first broadcast went out on November 14, from a studio in London, and the listeners, most of them amateurs with home-built receivers, numbered in the thousands. Radio had arrived in Britain.
The company grew fast. It was run by a young engineer named John Reith, who took the post with no idea what broadcasting would become and then spent his career deciding what it should be, and he set the tone that still marks the BBC: that it should inform and educate as much as entertain, and that it should speak to the whole country as one audience. The daily news, the concerts, the talks and the plays built a public that had not existed before.
The change to a public body came quickly. The company was dissolved in 1927 and replaced by the British Broadcasting Corporation, a public body set up by royal charter and paid for by a licence fee on every receiving set, which freed it from the manufacturers and from advertising. The shape was Reith's. The BBC answered to the public, not to the market, and it was given the duty of serving everyone.
That structure has held for a century. The BBC added television in 1936, and the World Service, and it became one of the largest broadcasters anywhere, and the licence fee and the public mission have been argued over the whole time. The company founded by the radio manufacturers in 1922 is long gone, but the corporation it turned into, and the idea that broadcasting is a public service, is the thing the date is remembered for.