[Hallicrafters] First MW Broadcast. Do You Know?


Richard Knoppow 1oldlens1 at ix.netcom.com
Sun May 1 17:26:30 EDT 2011


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ian" <ianwebb5 at comcast.net>
To: "'Duane Fischer, W8DBF'" <dfischer at usol.com>; 
<hallicrafters at mailman.qth.net>
Sent: Sunday, May 01, 2011 12:40 PM
Subject: Re: [Hallicrafters] First MW Broadcast. Do You 
Know?


> You are brainwashed like the rest who think that the 
> Eastern US was first...
>
> Here's the true story from San Jose, CA -  A DECADE 
> EARLIER!!!!
>
> Ian, K6SDE
>
>
> "This is San Jose calling" - World's First Radio station
>
> While many people were experimenting with "wireless" 
> point-to-point
> communications in 1909, the first radio broadcast was the 
> brainstorm of Dr.
> Charles David Herrold, who ran a small engineering and 
> wireless school in
> San Jose. In early 1909 Herrold and one of his students, 
> 16-year-old Ray
> Newby, connected an antenna, battery, spark coil and 
> microphone to broadcast
> some random comments from a 14-watt transmitter.
>
> Local amateur radio operators, who at the time 
> communicated only with the
> dots and dashes of Morse code, were surprised to hear 
> voice coming over the
> air and contacted Herrold to let him know his transmission 
> had worked.
>
> Soon after, Herrold was broadcasting a short program every 
> Wednesday night,
> often identifying himself as "This is San Jose calling". 
> By 1910 he was
> broadcasting both regular news reports read from the local 
> newspaper and
> records played on a phonograph. His wife also invented a 
> program, "The
> Little Ham Program" where she played "young peoples" music 
> from records
> borrowed from the local music store. The "hams" - as 
> amateur radio
> enthusiasts were called - would buy the record they had 
> heard on the radio,
> making the radio "station" truly commercial.
>
> When licenses were instituted for radio operators, Herrold 
> was given the
> call sign KQW in 1912. The station remained KQW until it 
> was purchased in
> 1942 by CBS, and was eventually moved to San Francisco to 
> become what is
> today KCBS.
>

     I had thought of Chuck Herrold, WWJ, in Detroit, also 
claims to have been broadcasting (under a different call) as 
early as 1912, but the problem is that the the 
discontinuance of all civilian radio during about a three 
year period makes it very difficult to prove any of the 
claims. Also, the question of who first generated revenue 
from selling commercial announcements is hard to answer.
     Previous to the availability of practical vacuum tubes 
modulating a carrier was difficult and none of the 
experiments in transmitting voice were very successful. 
First of all a true continuous wave signal is necessary, 
letting out arc and spark sources. The Alexanderson 
alternator generates quite pure CW but modulating it 
required the use of absorption modulation. There were even 
experiments using water-cooled carbon microphones!  Tubes 
began to be available about 1912 so a number of early 
experiments date from about that time.
     Its difficult to asses if the creation of RCA helped or 
hindered the development of broadcasting. I think it 
probably encouraged it at first but held up innovation later 
because of the near complete monopoly RCA had on patents. It 
was necessasary to have an RCA license and they were hard to 
get and expensive. The problem is made clear in the history 
of Hallicrafters; Bill Halligan had to buy a small company 
which had a license in order to manufacture his own stuff. 
Before that he had to farm it out to licensed manufacturers.
     What _is_ clear is the rapidity which which 
broadcasting became popular once it was established. The 
record of early broadcast station licenses can be found on 
the FCC web site in the form of the old radio bulletins and 
lists of licenses issued year by year.
     Certainly the West coast was extremely active, both San 
Francisco and Los Angeles having many stations quite early 
on. L.A. probably had more than S.F., by the mid-1920s there 
were about twenty-five stations here. Radio shops, car 
dealers, newspapers, churches, and patent medicine purveyors 
were among those who put stations on the air albeit some 
didn't last long.


--
Richard Knoppow
Los Angeles
WB6KBL
dickburk at ix.netcom.com 



More information about the Hallicrafters mailing list
This page last updated 19 Mar 2024.