Early Radio in the USA: The Story of Westinghouse Electric
by George H. Douglas
Alas, Sarnoff's was a voice crying in the wilderness. He would bring the subject up over and over again to Young and to his other superiors at RCA, but RCA was too big and too busy to be playing around with this puny stepchild which seemed to have no clear-cut commercial future. RCA just couldn't be bothered. They had too much else to do. Was there somebody around who did?
Yes, suddenly there was someone interested in radio broadcasting. It was the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, which had been the big loser in the radio sweepstakes when the Radio Corporation of America gobbled up all the fruits in 1919. To be sure, Westinghouse was a stockholder in the newly formed radio giant, but that was small consolation for its losses.
During World War I, Westinghouse had many government contracts for the manufacture of radio equipment, but these had now dried up. RCA had taken over commercial radiotelegraphy in the United States as a virtual monopoly, so Westinghouse was cut off in this direction also. What was there to do?
For awhile it seemed that there might be some opportunities abroad, and immediately after the war Westinghouse sent envoys to European radio companies with the idea of negotiating deals for transoceanic radio since there was seemingly more business than RCA could handle. Alas, Owen D. Young had gotten there first, and had most of the European business sewn up. There seemed to be nowhere for Westinghouse to maneuver.
But Westinghouse had been fortunate in acquiring a few patents that had not already been swallowed up by RCA, one of those belonging to Reginald Fessenden and going back to the primitive days of radio experimentation. Even more important, as things turned out, were the patents of the young Signal Corps veteran Major Edwin H. Armstrong. Armstrong's "feedback" patent was bought by Westinghouse in spite of the dispute with De Forest.
Too, Armstrong had come home from the war with something even more important: his "superheterodyne circuit," which accomplished an amplification of sound far superior to the earlier feedback circuit and which would turn out to be a prime ingredient of radio technology in the years ahead. For his two patents Westinghouse offered Armstrong $335,000, payable over a 10-year period, with promise of additional amounts if Armstrong won his feedback patent suit.
Westinghouse made the purchase just in time, since GE was also offering money for the same patents, and Armstrong might have been tempted to hold out.
Still, even with these additional patents in hand there was no clear idea of what Westinghouse would do with them. The radio side of the Westinghouse Company was withering on the vine. Production of radio equipment had fallen off sharply and no new customers stepped forward. Westinghouse staged radio demonstrations for railroads that ran tugboats and ferryboats on the Hudson River at New York, with the idea of drumming up business, but this did not meet with success.
The scientists who had been assigned to radio work at Westinghouse were eventually given other work. One of the radio leaders at Westinghouse, Frank Conrad, was put to work on electric switches. His assistant, Donald G. Little, was assigned to work on lightning arrestors. Among the newcomers at Westinghouse was Vladimir K. Zworykin, who had been a communication specialist in the czarist army and was a refugee from the new regime in Russia.
Zworykin had worked on television experiments in Russia and asked to pursue them at Westinghouse, but Westinghouse saw little hope in that area at the time.
Still, the Westinghouse radio men had not thrown in the towel. They were determined to persist, even if it meant working on their own. And this was particularly true of Frank Conrad, one of the most gifted and resourceful workers in the company's employ. Conrad was another of those self-taught geniuses unblessed by the constraints of formal academic training. He had dropped out of school in the seventh grade, and had worked his way up at Westinghouse from a bench-hand trainee.
But Conrad was a veritable fountain of ideas. Even before the war he was a radio amateur using his garage laboratory, and his wartime contributions were little short of startling. He had designed and tested for the Signal Corps some transmitters and receivers ( SCR-69 and SCR-70 ), and these had been a big success. Much of the testing of the SCR-69 and SCR-70 had been done in Conrad's garage. He came to hold some 200 patents in a number of areas.
During the war, in addition to his compact radio receivers and transmitters, he developed a wind-driven generator that could be attached to the wings of airplanes and power their radio transmitters. This resulted, at the end of the war, in the capability of transmitting voice messages from ground to airplanes, a highly prized achievement.
After the war, when Conrad's radio work at Westinghouse fell off sharply, he carried on his experiments in his spare time in his little garage laboratory in suburban Wilkinsburg, just east of Pittsburgh. He was now using vacuum tubes in his amateur operations, and his signal was regularly picked up by a number of other amateurs in the Pittsburgh area.
During the early months of 1920 the private Conrad laboratory had become a kind of beehive of radio activity, with enthusiasts and kindred spirits showing up for work and conversation every weekend. Regularly Conrad was sending out his signal, talking to other amateurs, sometimes playing phonograph records, always appealing for information about how good the reception was. Word got out that this radio thing was a lot of fun, and more and more people were swept up in the enthusiasm for what looked like a nifty little hobby.
As time wore on, Conrad's home station ( call letters 8XK ) more and more took on the appearance of a permanent radio station. Conrad's two sons regularly worked as announcers; the Hamilton Music Store in Wilkinsburg loaned records, for which favor it was mentioned on the air. The music was well enough liked that eventually the Conrads started what seemed to be regular "concerts" on Saturday nights.
Even the general public became aware of this burgeoning radio station, and Conrad garnered a certain amount of local notoriety. A newspaper item on May 2, 1920, announced a piano solo by one of the Conrad sons, and the technology of it was explained. A line was to be run from the Conrad home to the garage laboratory, and the sound then "sent out into the ether by the radiophone apparatus located there."
As the months of 1920 passed by, amateur interest increased, and a number of people in the Pittsburgh area were wondering how they might be able to obtain sets of their own. In early September, the Joseph Home Department Store in Pittsburgh put an ad in the Pittsburgh Sun notifying the public that the store had on display a radio set for amateur use that could pick up the Conrad radio programs. Not only was the Horne Company going to display and demonstrate this equipment, they were going to sell it as well: "Amateur Wireless Sets, made by the maker of the set which is in operation in our store, are on sale here, $10.00 up."
Amateur wireless sets on sale! On sale to the general public, not just to the radio ham or buff! The day the ad appeared, Harry P. Davis, vice president at Westinghouse, saw the ad in the newspaper, and it aroused his interest. He was Conrad's superior at Westinghouse, and of course he knew all about Conrad's amateur broadcasts.
But the sale of radio sets to the public, here was an idea that nobody had thought of before. Even if Westinghouse had been shoved out of the central core of the radio business as it now stood, perhaps something new could be drummed up. Sets not merely for radio "professionals" but for the general public--all made by Westinghouse, of course.
The day following the Home advertisement, Davis held a conference with Conrad and other Westinghouse officials raising the possibility of building a bigger and more powerful transmitter at the Westinghouse plant, with the plan of offering radio broadcasting on a regular basis. In subsequent conferences Davis wondered if it would be possible to have a station and a suitable transmitter ready for regular operation in time for the Harding-Cox presidential election on November 2. Yes, it was definitely possible, said Conrad, and accordingly he and Donald Little were assigned to the task.
The immediate objective was to get ready for the election, now only two months away, but the long-term objective was a regular broadcasting service that could be depended on by listeners day after day and week after week. The technical problems would not be hard to overcome with Conrad at the helm; the public relations aspect of the thing was a bit more involved.
But everything moved apace. On the roof of one of the buildings at Westinghouse's East Pittsburgh plant a shack and 100-watt transmitter were built. To give additional range, an antenna ran from the roof of the shack to one of the powerhouse smokestacks. On October 16, the Westinghouse Company applied to the United States Department of Commerce for a license to begin a regular broadcasting service.
By telephone a few days later Westinghouse received permission to use the amateur call letters 8ZZ in case the formal and written license was not received by November 2. However, on October 27, formal notification arrived, and the station received the call letters KDKA (these were the same as those used in commercial shore stations). The station was authorized to use 360 meters, giving them a clear channel away from amateur use.
Westinghouse was also beginning production of sets for home use, and these, together with the imminent inauguration of programming, were given ample notice in the local press. As things turned out, the flood of new sets did not begin until well after the election, but Westinghouse was laying plans for selling them.
They were also making preparations for the programming that was to go out over the air since if one is going to have regular broadcasting one has to have something to broadcast. Arrangements were made to have the Pittsburgh Post telephone the election results to Westinghouse as soon as they became available from the news wire services. Filling up the gaps would be a banjo player and some of those reliable old phonograph records that had been a major part of Conrad's private broadcasts.
The big night came and went without a hitch. To be on the safe side Frank Conrad was standing by at his own transmitter at Wilkinsburg, prepared to send out the returns from there if necessary. But it wasn't necessary. The broadcast on election night began at 8 P. M. Eastern Standard Time and ran until after midnight. Donald Little and John Frazier were in charge of the technical side of the operation, and Leo Rosenberg of Westinghouse's publicity department read the bulletins as they came in.
About the elections there had been little doubt from the beginning, Harding and Coolidge were easy winners over Cox and Roosevelt. There might have been some doubts in the Westinghouse boardroom about the fate of KDKA, but there needn't have been.
The evening was a smashing success, and the next day scores of telephone calls from listeners came through the Westinghouse switchboard. There were many more listeners than there were sets, listeners mainly gathering in large numbers at central locations--churches, lodges, the private homes of Westinghouse executives--to be guinea pigs for the experiment. Everyone was delighted.
Historically, the important thing was that KDKA did not simply turn off its power and fold up after the election night special, but, as promised, continued its nightly broadcasts on a regular basis. At first the broadcast time was a single hour, 8:30 to 9:30 P.M., but before long the schedule would be expanded.
Quite well aware of the nationwide publicity that had been given to the station, Westinghouse in a matter of weeks replaced the 100-watt transmitter with a 500-watt transmitter. In those days the airwaves were uncluttered and, weather permitting, the signal of the Pittsburgh station could be picked up in Washington, D.C., or out on the prairie of Illinois. KDKA also began experimenting with all the peripheral aspects of the art, constructing the first "radio studio" of record. A national institution had been established.
For the first time a radio station had attempted to appeal to a mass audience. KDKA's intent was to sell sets to the general public, not sets by the dozen, but, as things turned out, by the millions. When the year 1920 began the only people who thought about radio thought of it as an art that could be understood and enjoyed only by the expert or the electronics whiz.
When the year 1920 was over there were few who failed to see that radio was calling out to everybody. Now it just might be that the radio receiver could be a household utility like the stove, the phonograph and the electric light. The technology of home reception was still primitive, but the institution was there.
If KDKA was to be the stimulus that would give birth to an entirely new era in wireless history, the evidence of it was neither immediate nor dramatic. A great radio boom was just around the corner, but it did not come, as one might expect, in the months immediately following KDKA's debut, rather it had to wait until early 1922, over a year after that election-night broadcast of 1920.
Between November 2, 1920, and December 31, 1921, only nine additional stations were listed in the Radio Service Bulletin of the Department of Commerce as being licensed for general broadcasting. But in the first few months of 1922 scores of new stations would seek and receive licenses, and the broadcasting idea would then spread like wildfire around the country.
In retrospect, the rather timid development of 1920-21 is not hard to understand. Westinghouse executives had founded KDKA with the idea that a regular broadcasting station would stimulate the sale of Westinghouse-made radio receivers. But full-scale production of such sets was not yet underway, and the audience for radio broadcasts would of necessity be the same small number of amateurs that had made up the radio audience late in 1920.
During 1921 no completely assembled and ready-to-use radio receivers were on the market. Tube sets would be coming in shortly, but in 1921 nearly every set sold to the general public employed the older ( and relatively inexpensive ) crystal components. Reception on these sets remained difficult and erratic.
Too, broadcasting hadn't really proven itself to be a medium that people couldn't do without. KDKA and soon a few others were broadcasting regularly ( although on a very limited schedule ), but the quality of programming was primitive and amateurish. Early in 1921 KDKA selected its first regular announcer and program manager, Harold W. Arlin.
Arlin used all of his resources to think up new ideas that would appeal to the listening audience, but for many months he had to rely heavily on playing borrowed phonograph records, reading news headlines and community service bulletins, and giving extended explanations of the Arlington time signals. There was not really enough on the radio to make this new medium of communication a wildly popular pastime.
Nonetheless, the broadcasting idea had taken hold. In the wake of the KDKA success, Donald Little was sent around the country to prepare for similar broadcasting stations at other Westinghouse installations in the eastern United States. Three of these began operations in 1921: WJZ in Newark, New Jersey, WBZ in Springfield, Massachusetts, and KYW in Chicago ( atop the Commonwealth Edison Building ).
Source: The Early Days of Radio Broadcasting, by George H. Douglas
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