Switzerland’s global voice turns 75

Switzerland’s global voice turns 75
July 31st, 2010 - 12:35 UTC
by Andy Sennitt.

Seventy-five years ago on Sunday, swissinfo’s predecessor, a shortwave radio service from the Swiss Broadcasting Corp., transmitted its first signal round the world. To celebrate the station’s rich history as the “voice of Switzerland abroad”, swissinfo has compiled excerpts of some of the more memorable programmes, interviews and reader pictures collected throughout the years.

“Dear Swiss men and women in South America,” said Rudolf Minger, Swiss president at the time, using the first words sent over the station’s first broadcast on August 1, 1935.

Over the decades, shortwave broadcasts eventually grew more obsolete, and the last radio programme of what became Swiss Radio International aired in 2004. But the station’s mission lives on. Today the multimedia platform, swissinfo.ch, has assumed a federally mandated duty to inform the Swiss abroad and an international audience about news and events in Switzerland.

To hear Minger’s address, Winston Churchill’s post war speech from 1946 in Bern, and an interview with Louis Armstrong from 1955, among many other excerpts, visit the 75th anniversary special.