NEW YORK - On an otherwise unremarkable late October evening in 1938, many Americans relaxed at home, doing what they had become accustomed to since broadcasting had become popular a couple of decades earlier: They listened to radio. It was the Mercury Theatre's live broadcast of a concert from New York's Park Plaza Hotel.

No one expected the urgent news flash.

"Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News. At 20 minutes before 8 Central Time, Professor Farrell of the Mount Jennings Observatory, Chicago, Ill., reports observing several explosions of incandescent gas occurring at regular intervals on the planet Mars."

For the next couple of hours, listeners across the country remained transfixed, some panicked, as details poured out of the radio about the Martian landing in New Jersey.

For millions of Americans, it was a relief when Orson Welles' chilling broadcast of "The War of the Worlds" was revealed as fiction - but it also reminded them of the awesome power of radio.

In this age of information overload, it's easy to overlook the grandparent of 20th-century mass communications.

The clunky device that in its early days resembled a homemade science project filled with tubes and wires. The primitive tuner that people would fiddle to pick up a scratchy broadcast of "Amos 'n' Andy" or a president's speech. The simple yet powerful precursor to television and the Internet. This was radio, which became the foundation on which the information revolution was built.

Consider the legacies radio has established:

The voice of authority: Radio's reach and power were such that anything heard over the airwaves was considered to be fact, said Chuck Howell, the curator of the Library of American Broadcasting at the University of Maryland.

"Part of it was that voice of authority - this was something that did come into your home," Howell said. "It was so glamorous and so high-culture - radio had a real cachet."

The loss of boundaries: Radio connected people over vast distances, enhancing a sense of regional or national unity.

Today, of course, we take for granted the eroding of boundaries that has been carried much farther by the Internet. But it was not always this way.

Not only did radio shrink the distances between people, it helped to bring them together. In the throes of the Depression in the early 1930s, President Franklin Roosevelt began using regular broadcasts as a forum, and families gathered around the radio to listen. "My dear friends ...," he would start each Fireside Chat before going on to explain the latest details of his New Deal.

Information now: In a century of impatience and speed, radio allowed people to get the news immediately, rather than having to wait hours or days for the local daily or weekly newspaper. It became an invaluable propaganda tool, leaping enemy lines during World War II, slipping behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.

From presidential elections to ball scores, radio news gathering progressed, relating key news events as they happened. Events such as the Hindenburg disaster in 1937 showcased the medium in all its glory, a precursor to today's live TV news coverage.

Radio news broadcasting perhaps reached its apex during the coverage of World War II. While World War I was fought through the antiseptic pages of the country's newspapers, the brutality and atrocity of the Nazis' march across Europe was brought to life through radio by the compelling reporting of correspondents such as H.V. Kaltenborn, Edward R. Murrow and Eric Sevareid.

The power to entertain: Much of early broadcasting consisted of radio manufacturers' sometimes desperate efforts to fill air time so people would want to buy a radio to listen. Gradually, however, entertainers cultivated followings, helped tremendously by the introduction of network radio. Led by the National Broadcasting Company and Columbia Broadcasting System, the networks broadcast the same show everywhere in the nation at once.

People would make time to hear shows such as "Our Gal Sunday" and "The Goldbergs," just as people decades later carved out time to watch "Seinfeld" each week.

It wasn't just comedy and music that were popular. Horror and drama serials drew listeners back to the radio each week to hear the latest adventure of The Shadow or The Lone Ranger.

By the end of 1940, 35 million American households, or 80 percent, had a radio.

But it was no longer the only show in town. TV technology existed in the 1930s, but had not been able to flourish due to the prohibitive costs and the lack of television facilities through which to transmit the signals.

Now, however, with the end of World War II, the networks faced a choice: Continue investing money in radio, or start spending money on TV - which offered everything radio had plus pictures. It was an easy decision.

The Golden Age of Radio was nearing an end. But rather than dying out, radio reinvented itself, evolving to a localized format and filling the airtime with everything from rock 'n' roll to today's ranting talk shows. It's now a $15 billion industry, according to Radio Business Report.

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