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British Broadcasting Company

British commercial radio broadcaster; predecessor to the BBC (1922–1926)

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 26, 2026
Entity authoritySource title only
Source-derived summary

The British Broadcasting Company Limited (BBC) was the commercial forerunner to the public British Broadcasting Corporation and formed on 18 October 1922 by British and American electrical companies doing business in the United Kingdom. Licensed by the UK's General Post Office, its original office was located on the second floor of Magnet House, a GEC building in London, and consisted of a room and a small antechamber.

Editorial summary

“British Broadcasting Company” enters the record as british commercial radio broadcaster; predecessor to the BBC (1922–1926). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what British, Broadcasting and Company can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA dependable orientation record for establishing vocabulary, names and a first evidence trail. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1922—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around British, Broadcasting and Company.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“British Broadcasting Company” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, British, Broadcasting and Company provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 26, 2026. The first chronological checks are 1922.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

Best used for
  • Subject orientation
  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
Verify next

The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “British Broadcasting Company”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow British Broadcasting Company primary sources, British Broadcasting Company archive and British research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “British Broadcasting Company”?
  2. What terminology or title could unlock a more precise catalogue search?
  3. Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “British Broadcasting Company” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.