The innovative company that changed radio in Aotearoa

This year is the centenary of Radio New Zealand. And while broadcasting is one thing, the technology to hear it is another.

An entirely different company called RNZ - the Radio Corporation of New Zealand - was a pioneer radio manufacturer.

Over 30 years, it went from nothing to become what has been called the largest electronics manufacturing and retailing firm in the country.

Related stories:

Ōtautahi Christchurch's Steve Dunford has published the book Radio Preeminent: The Radio Corporation of New Zealand Story. He runs vintageradio.co.nz, a site dedicated to cataloguing Aotearoa-created valve radios - and beautiful pieces of furniture they are.

Because of its geography New Zealand was an early adopter of radio, and in the 1920s was something of a pioneer in this brand-new technology, Dunford told RNZ’s Culture 101.

The Radio Corporation of New Zealand was at the forefront of this booming technology, founded by an émigré, William Marks, with a colourful past, Dunford says.

“He [Marks] had only just landed on the shores of New Zealand from Russia, having escaped prison in Russia and made his own way out through China.

“He met someone, got on a boat under a false identity and came to New Zealand, stepped off the boat, and within 12 hours had a job for the Wellington City Council. And within a couple of years had his own business.”

Marks had worked at a shortwave wireless station in Siberia and ended up in prison as an anti-communist and somehow managed to escape, he says.

“The story's a wee bit hazy and he never really talked much about his past to his family. But as best we can tell, he used his knowledge of electrical systems to tamper with the wiring in the prison and then escaped in darkness.

“So, he did that and then just made his way south into China, met a gentleman there whose brother had recently passed and was able to get his passport and left the country under that new name of William Markov. His original name was Peter Annikov.

By 1929 W Marks Ltd in Courtney Place in Wellington was a flourishing enterprise, he says. Its first radios were sold through Stuart Hardware - a major retailer at the time.

“In 1933, in the Depression, things got a little bit too much and Stuart Hardware went out of business, just as William Marks was getting his company up and rolling into an almost nationwide business. He did what, to me, just seems like pure genius. He took over the premises of Stuart Hardware and turned it into his own business, Radio Corporation.

“From there, they just went through leaps and bounds. Sometime around World War II, they actually bought the buildings.”

The company was a technology leader, developing one of the first radios that could deliver a reliable sound at a time when reception was quite sketchy, he says.

“In the early '30s, shortwave listening became a thing. Shortwave, because of the frequencies it works at are much easier to transmit over very, very long distances.

“So if you wanted to listen to foreign stations, you'd listen to shortwave. If you wanted to listen to New Zealand or Australia, you'd listen on the broadcast band, or what most people today call AM. So those shortwave stations became really, really popular.

“The only problem with it is that the stations would fade in and out, and because of the way tuning works in those radios, it is very, very difficult to actually zero in on a station and keep it there.”

Amateur radio enthusiasts had figured out a way around this, but the method was too expensive to implement in a mass consumer radio, he says.

“Radio Corp came up with a method of doing it that was cost-effective, they just hammered away at this problem until they found a way to make it absolutely rock solid, including measuring the temperatures in different parts of the electronics to work out where would be best to place certain components.

“They put a lot of development into this and came up with what was arguably the world's first domestic band-spread radio with rock-solid stability. Once you tune it in, it would stay there.”

Eventually, the company was bought out by British electronics giant Pye, but many of the company’s beautiful art deco-style radios remain today, he says.

As to the story behind this company that changed the face of New Zealand radio, Dunford says it just had to be told.

“I got to the point where I was really concerned that I had all this knowledge, and I was the only one that had all this knowledge, and if I got hit by a bus, it would be gone. So, I started writing, and four years later, here we are.”