Lee de Forest was a serial pioneer with a restless mind. He had founded the Radio Telephone Company in 1906 and built his own arc-transmitters, capable of sending full audio rather than just Morse code. Between 1907 and 1910, he staged demonstration broadcasts and even talked publicly about creating entertainment stations, but he never established regular service. In 1914, he set up a laboratory at 1391 Sedgwick Avenue in Highbridge, where his team developed vacuum-tube transmitters -- a recent invention that proved far superior to arc technology for audio transmission. The company manufactured its own "Oscillion" transmitter tubes. By the summer of 1915, de Forest had secured an experimental license with the callsign 2XG, and began using the new technology to broadcast what he called a "wireless newspaper": regular programs of concerts and news bulletins. There were no formal government regulations restricting broadcasting, so the company was free to transmit whatever it pleased.

De Forest struck an arrangement with the Columbia Graphophone Company that prefigured the entire business model of commercial radio. Columbia supplied phonograph records from their offices at 102 West 38th Street in Manhattan; in exchange, the station announced each record's title along with "Columbia Gramophone Company." The debut program aired on October 26, 1916, broadcasting on a wavelength of approximately 800 meters. Carl Dreher, an early listener who would go on to a career in radio engineering, recalled: "The quality was quite good, and I used to listen to the station for hours at a time." De Forest initially layered in advertisements for his own radio parts, complete with catalog and price list, until Western Electric engineers ribbed him into dropping the sales pitches. The bones of modern broadcasting -- recorded music, sponsor announcements, product placement -- were all there in a Bronx laboratory a decade before most Americans had ever heard of radio.

The November 7, 1916 broadcast brought 2XG its moment in history. Working in conjunction with the New York American newspaper, the station aired telephoned bulletins from the Wilson-Hughes presidential race, read aloud by Walter Schare and interspersed with Columbia recordings of "The Star Spangled Banner," "Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean," "Dixie," and "America." The newspaper hailed it as "the first time the wireless telephone has been demonstrated as a practical, serviceable carrier of election news and comment." Just before signing off at 11:00 PM, the station announced that Republican Charles Evans Hughes had won. He had not. Late returns from California tilted the election to Woodrow Wilson. Broadcasting had its first premature call -- a tradition, it turned out, that would prove difficult to break. Five months later, America entered World War I, and all civilian radio stations were ordered shut down. Station 2XG went silent.

When the wartime ban lifted on October 1, 1919, 2XG returned to the air with new announcers, a new record supplier (Brunswick-Balke-Collender), and live performers including Vaughn De Leath, who earned the title "The Original Radio Girl" for her multiple appearances. But restlessness undid the station. In early 1920, de Forest moved the transmitter from the Bronx to Manhattan without government approval, and Radio Inspector Arthur Batcheller ordered operations suspended. De Forest's response was to pack up the transmitter and move to San Francisco, where he launched a new station, 6XC, at the California Theater. He soon abandoned radio altogether to develop Phonofilm, a sound-on-film system. The De Forest company returned briefly to the New York airwaves and even obtained the first broadcasting license issued for a station in New York City proper -- callsign WJX, on October 13, 1921. But WJX appears never to have broadcast a single program. In June 1924, both WJX and 2XG were officially deleted from government records, their pioneering moment already receding into the static of a medium that was leaving them behind.