By the time he purchased NRS, Linden

was already thinking big -- envisioning

a new radio network based in Seattle. The existing networks were all still new

and the business seemingly had nowhere to go but up.

The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) was established late in 1926 but, even

by 1928, it wasn’t able to cover the entire nation. Network stations were linked

by leased telephone circuits which had been built for AT&T’s voice telephone

network. While suitable for speech broadcasting, they weren’t designed for music

which comprised a large portion of radio programming. Converting circuits for

music transmission was a considerable undertaking and AT&T had successfully

developed those enhanced facilities principally in the east and midwestern U.S.

No circuits were available all the way to the west coast so network service didn’t

really exist in the Pacific and Mountain states in 1928.

NBC was the more well-situated network. Owned by the Radio

Corporation of America, it had access to capital and a nationally

significant range of business relationships. Yet, even NBC was

operating at a loss in 1928.

The Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS)

had a shaky start. Even when taken over by

Paley, it was still a network which covered even less of the

U.S. than NBC and lacked the financial resources available to

NBC. It took some years for CBS to begin to operate

profitably.

And both NBC (and its two networks, the Red and the Blue) and CBS were

headquartered in New York.

Radio in the western U.S. had a somewhat different character than the eastern

radio complex. With fewer stations who had to develop without network

programming, these stations established local and regional impact and traditions

that were long-lived. And westerners had long felt (and some still do) that the

eastern U.S. thinks of the western states as “the provinces” so the idea of all

networks being run out of New York ran somewhat against the grain of a visionary

like Linden.

With the existing networks all based in New York, Linden saw his enterprise as

bringing a unique perspective and one which would resonate with the western

U.S. radio stations which, because the technology to link them to the New

York-based networks was slow to evolve, largely lacked network affiliation.

Some smaller attempts to develop regional western networks already existed, such

as the somewhat informal Triangle Network (which linked KOMO/ Seattle, KGW/

Portland and KHQ/Spokane. The most significant was the regional NBC Orange

Network, launched in 1927, linking stations along the Pacific Coast. Don Lee, the

exclusive west coast distributor of Cadillac automobiles, who had purchased San

Francisco’s KFRC in 1926 and Los Angeles’ KHJ the following year, had also

successfully linked his two stations with telephone circuits. These examples likely

influenced Linden’s conclusion that a western-based radio network was a

worthwhile venture.