On August 1, 1935, swissinfo’s predecessor, a shortwave radio service from the Swiss Broadcasting Corp., transmitted its first signal round the world.
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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, click on the 75th anniversary special link.
You can find an overview of ongoing debates with our journalists here. Please join us!
If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at english@swissinfo.ch.
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The swissinfo.org news and information platform – now swissinfo.ch – went online ten years ago, on March 12, 1999. The online portal has been keeping the world up to date about events in Switzerland in German, French, English and Portuguese ever since. Sites in Italian, Spanish and Japanese went live in 2000. The language line-up…
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Both houses of parliament want to renew government funding for Switzerland’s international information platform, but swissinfo’s future still hangs in the balance. It was to have been a year of festivities to celebrate the 70th anniversary of swissinfo/Swiss Radio International. Instead, 2005 was more like an extended period on death row for the “Voice of…
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This year the internet portal swissinfo.ch is marking its 75th anniversary. The Swiss shortwave service was set up in 1935 and was renamed Swiss Radio International (SRI) in 1978. Listeners from all over the world were very motivated to write in, as a look in our archive reveals. (Christoph Balsiger, swissinfo.ch)
You can find an overview of ongoing debates with our journalists here. Please join us!
If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at english@swissinfo.ch.