[Hallicrafters] First MW Broadcast. Do You Know?


Mike Everette radiocompass at yahoo.com
Tue May 10 14:27:00 EDT 2011


The first broadcast was December 24/25, 1906 (nineteen hundred SIX), transmitted from Reginald A. Fessenden's station in Brant Rock, Massachusetts.  An alternator was used as the transmitter.  (Remember the ARRL "Hello" campaign?  This is what it was commemorating.)

Fessenden actually achieved the first transmission of voice by "wireless" in a lab experiment at Western University of Pennsylvania (now University of Pittsburgh) in 1899 (!!!), but the first practical transmission was over a one-mile distance in January 1900 at Cobb Island, Maryland while Fessenden was in the employ of the US Weather Bureau.

There is a "historian" within the Antique Wireless Association who seems hell-bent on discrediting Fessenden regarding the 1906 broadcast; but I don't believe a word of what he claims.  In the course of writing my Master of Arts thesis in History on Fessenden, I examined all (ALL) the documents in all (ALL) 104 archival boxes of Fessenden's papers which are in the collection of the North Carolina State Archives... no doubt in my mind: Fessenden DID do it.

By the way, Fessenden (who died in 1932) was a ham, with the call VP9F, after his retirement to Bermuda.

73

Mike
W4DSE

--- On Sun, 5/1/11, Richard Knoppow <1oldlens1 at ix.netcom.com> wrote:

> From: Richard Knoppow <1oldlens1 at ix.netcom.com>
> Subject: Re: [Hallicrafters] First MW Broadcast. Do You Know?
> To: "Ian" <ianwebb5 at comcast.net>, "'Duane Fischer, W8DBF'" <dfischer at usol.com>, hallicrafters at mailman.qth.net
> Date: Sunday, May 1, 2011, 5:26 PM
> 
> ----- 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
> 
> 
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