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Students make dirt beds, plant seeds and maintain the community garden at Caring and Sharing Learning School.

Today NPR is one of Washington’s most familiar and influential media companies, operating out of a gleaming, ultramodern broadcast facility on North Capitol Street. Its radio programs, online content, and podcasts reach millions of people around the world. But when it launched 50 years ago, in April 1971, National Public Radio was a decidedly scrappy enterprise. How did a modest radio project from a bunch of audio idealists evolve into the multimedia behemoth that we now spend countless hours listening to? To celebrate NPR’s anniversary, we’ve put together a look at its history and tran...

Embed AUDIE CORNISH, HOST: You may not know this, but this podcast has a kind of parent program - a radio show here at NPR called All Things Considered. See what we did there? And 50 years ago this week in May of 1971, that show, All Things Considered, was born. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST) LINDA WERTHEIMER: I hate that job. It was the worst job I ever had. CORNISH: Linda Wertheimer was hired to direct the show, which sounded like this. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

3:24 SCOTT POHL: What do you recall about why WKAR decided to get involved with launching NPR? DAN WARDLOW: WKAR was a big, in terms of staff and budget, public radio station, and WKAR produced a lot of original programming and distributed it on its own tape network at the time and at the same time was buying a lot of programming or getting a lot of shared programming on tape. So, it was sort of a natural development for a station that had 30 or 40 full time staff members, as well as a large part time staff, to want to take that step and be a founding member station for NPR, which WKAR was. I...

(SOUNDBITE OF AD) (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) MINOW: ...And most of all, boredom. CORNISH: It was becoming clear that the public wasn't getting the benefit from the airwaves that it owned. And so in 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson formalized an alternative. It was called the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) LYNDON B JOHNSON (36TH US PRES): ...The Corporation of Public Broadcasting (ph). This corporation will assist stations and producers who aim for the best. We in America have an appetite for excellence, too. And while we work every day to produc...