Both Canadian and Australian governments were quick to appreciate the benefits to be gained from wireless broadcasting. In 1905 in Australia and in 1913 in Canada, ministers of the Crown were given the power to oversee the development of wireless telegraphy. Shortly after the First World War, technical advances made possible the broadcasting of music and the human voice; in 1919 the Marconi Company, through its station XWA, Montreal, initiated radio broadcasting in Canada; in the same year, Amalgamated Wireless of Australasia Pty. Limited, through a small station in Sydney, broadcast Australia's first radio programmes. By the late 1920s, Canada boasted seventy-nine broadcasting stations and 297,000 licensed receivers, while Australia had twenty broadcasting stations and approximately 225,000 receivers. With few exceptions, these stations were privately owned, subject to little government regulation and, in Canada at least, supported entirely by commercial revenues.In the first thirteen years of Australian broadcasting, from 1920 to 1932, at least three different attempts were made to find a satisfactory economic basis for broadcasting. Each reform, however, failed to silence the complaints about poor reception, tardy news reporting, indifferent programming, and the concentration of broadcasting in the urban areas of the country. Limitations of space prevent a discussion of all the schemes attempted, but brief mention will be made of one of them which, if not unique in the annals of broadcasting, is of interest as an historical oddity and an example of man's ingenuity.