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1931 CBS radio has Bing Crosby on every night in its spot for new talent. The Mills Brothers hitchhike to New York from Cincinnati to audition at CBS radio and are hired on the spot. Kate Smith gets her own CBS show.
July 21, 1931 CBS begins the first regularly scheduled television broadcasting in the country on experimental station W2XAB in New York City. By year's end, CBS is broadcasting seven hours daily, seven days a week. Programming includes "Bill Schudt's Going to Press," an interview show with correspondents, columnists and editors. It is the first regularly scheduled program to be simulcast on radio and television.
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1933
CBS News Editor Paul White organizes the Columbia News Service, the first network news operation, with bureaus in New York, Washington, Chicago and Los Angeles, and stringers, who are newspaper reporters, in most of the country's large cities.
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1935
CBS becomes the nation's largest radio network with 97 stations.
Edward R. Murrow joins CBS.
Frank Stanton, a 27-year-old instructor of psychology at Ohio State, receives a telegram urging him to join CBS. He moves to New York and joins CBS as number three in a three-person research department. His early work focuses on audience measurement: program ratings, geographical studies of CBS station coverage and effectiveness studies on radio's ability to sell goods.
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1936
CBS introduces the first radio quiz show, "Professor Quiz."
CBS lures Major Bowes from NBC to create an hour show of amateur talent. Bowes would interrupt failing acts with a gong. One of the show's winners in its early days was the very young Frank Sinatra.
CBS Radio's broadcast roster includes entertainers George Burns and Gracie Allen, Eddie Cantor, Ed Wynn and Joe ("Wanna buy a duck?") Penner.
H. V. Kaltenborn reports on the Spanish Civil War from French/Spanish border. This is the first battlefield broadcast in radio news history.
CBS launches radio's foremost experimental theater, the Columbia Workshop. Its production of Archibald MacLeish's verse drama, "The Fall of the City," with Burgess Meredith and Orson Welles, quickly brings other manuscripts into CBS.
Dr. Peter Goldmark joins CBS as chief television engineer.
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1937 The daytime drama "The Guiding Light" premieres on radio.
In the face of mounting war tensions, Edward R. Murrow is dispatched to London as CBS's European Director. He hires William L. Shirer, who is based in Vienna, the first of a group of reporters who would famously become known as "Murrow's Boys."
CBS is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
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1938 By the late 1930s, there are about 20 daytime serials on CBS, with a following of millions. Among them are "Our Gal Sunday," "Ma Perkins," "The Romance of Helen Trent," "Life Can Be Beautiful" and "Joyce Jordan, Girl Intern."
For the first time, Edward R. Murrow begins his radio broadcast with the phrase, "This is London."
CBS opens a new $2 million studio and office building in Hollywood.
March 13, 1938 CBS broadcasts a 35-minute special report from multiple locations around the world as the pre-war crisis mounts. It is the first time that on-the-scene European field correspondents are linked with a central anchor in New York for a daily national broadcast. The program is later named "World News Roundup," and it remains the longest-running news presentation in the history of broadcasting.
October 30, 1938 "CBS Mercury Theater of the Air" broadcasts Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds." The fictional news report, imitating the format then used for news flash bulletins, keeps interrupting dance music to inform listeners of the spreading destruction caused by Martians that had landed in New Jersey. Terror-stricken listeners rush into the streets.
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1939 Studio equipment for CBS television broadcasting in New York is installed in Grand Central Terminal and transmitters are installed in the Chrysler Building tower.
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