This historic American radio station
is sometimes regaled as the world’s
oldest radio broadcasting station, a claim that is often disputed. However, this is not the claim that station
KDKA makes for itself, and its own claim as “the world’s oldest commercially
licensed radio broadcasting station” is completely accurate. The original government license issued to K DKA
confirms the accuracy of their statement.
However, in spite of claims and
counterclaims laid by several other stations, both within the United States and
beyond, it is true without dispute that station KDKA laid a groundwork and
forged ahead with their own development in such a way that the history of radio
broadcasting can almost be described as pre-KDKA and post-KDKA. The informal inauguration of 8ZZ- KDKA on
November 2, 1920 is a pivotal event in the worldwide history of radio
broadcasting as a widespread communication medium.
In addition to the international
impetus that KDKA gave to mediumwave broadcasting, their influence in the
development of shortwave broadcasting is equally evident. However, due to the status and involvement of
KDKA as a combined radio broadcasting facility, in our program today, we
examine the mediumwave development only of this fortuitous station, before we
subsequently penetrate into their shortwave history.
Radio station KDKA began its
broadcast service in the evening of Tuesday November 2, 1920 under a phoned in
authorization allowing the temporary usage of the callsign 8ZZ. The entire facility was housed in a quickly
assembled wooden hut erected on top of Building K at the Westinghouse factory
in East Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. The
newly made 100 watt transmitter radiated on 545 kHz at the low end of what has
since become the standard mediumwave broadcast band, and the antenna was a
single wire attached to a nearby industrial chimney stack.
The initial election-results
broadcast from the new KDKA began at 6:00 pm and even though the results soon
confirmed the successful bid for presidency by the Republican candidate, Warren
G. Harding, the station remained on air all during that night of stormy weather
until midday next day. From then onwards, KDKA
maintained a regular broadcast schedule of music and information, usually
during the evening hours. Some ten years
later, an article in a radio magazine declared triumphantly: Since its inauguration,
station KDKA “has not missed a
single day of broadcasting”.
The first broadcast studio for KDKA
was no more than a microphone with a cable plugged into the transmitter. However, in May of the following year (1921),
they experimented with live broadcasts of locally produced music in the factory
auditorium in East Pittsburgh.
However, undamped reverberation was
a major problem, so they erected a tent on the roof top of the eight storey
Building K, next to the wooden transmitter shack. This temporary location was in use until a
stormy wind blew down the tent, which they then erected indoors in a room at
the factory on October 3, 1921
Give a year later, and KDKA opened
studios in the downtown William Penn Hotel at 530 William Penn Place in
Pittsburgh. Twelve more years and a new
suite of studios was commissioned in the giant skyscraper Grant Building, a 40 storey behemoth located at 310
Grant Street in downtown Pittsburgh; this official transfer occurred on their
fourteenth anniversary, November 2, 1934.
The KDKA studios remained here for
nearly a score of years, and then they transferred to another location at 1
Gateway Center a complex of four skyscrapers constructed on the grounds of
several previously demolished buildings.
Just five years ago, KDKA moved
again, this time to its now current location in Foster Plaza 5 at 651 Holiday
Drive, on the western side of the three rivers that flow through
Pittsburgh.
During the past almost one hundred
years, the major on air studios for KDKA have been installed at five different
locations within the Pittsburgh areas.
Likewise, the major transmitter facilities for mediumwave KDKA have also
been installed at five different locations within the same environment.
The original 100 watt transmitter
was installed in the wooden shack on the top of the eight storey Building K in
the Westinghouse factory complex at East Pittsburgh. The original antenna, a single longwire
affixed to a nearby chimney stack, was soon afterwards replaced by a four pole
antenna system arranged in the shape of a perfect square.
In July 1924, the KDKA transmitter
was installed into a new building, designed in the form of a single storied
house, on Greensburg Pike at nearby Forest Hills. A license was granted for KDKA to utilize three
different transmitters at that location, with a power rating from 500 watts up
to 10 kW. The regular broadcast channel
at this stage was 920 kHz.
Half a dozen years later, KDKA was
ready to move again, this time to a much larger property at a better location,
some 20 miles north of Pittsburgh. A new
building on the 120 acre site at Saxonburg contained several transmitters with
a total power output of 300 kW; the mediumwave transmitters were installed in
the north end of the building and the shortwave transmitters were installed in
the south end of the same building.
Approval was granted for KDKA to
make a gradual transfer of operations from the old transmitter site at Forest
Hills to the new transmitter site at Saxonburg during the latter half of the
month of September 1930. It was also at
that Saxonburg location that KDKA built their famous superpower transmitter
W8XAR which was licensed at 400 kW with approval to transmit experimentally
from 1:00 am to 6:00 am on 980 kHz.
Just eight years later again, KDKA
was ready for the next move, this time from Saxonburg to Allison Park, just 8½ miles from downtown Pittsburgh. A new transmitter building, designed in the
New England Colonial style, was ready for the transfer in early 1940, and the
1937 tower at Saxonburg, standing 718 ft tall, was dismantled and re-erected at
Allison Park.
At this location, a new Westinghouse
50 kW model 50HG was installed; then some 30 years later two 50 kW transmitters
made by Gates were installed, and in turn these were replaced more recently by
two Harris transmitters at 50 kW each.
To this day, KDKA is still on the air at the Allison Park location, with
50 kW now on 1020 kHz, some ¾
century since this site was brought into service.
We might also add, that half a
century ago, KDKA maintained an auxiliary back-up transmitter facility at 4337
Fifth Avenue in downtown Pittsburgh. At
the time, the signal from a 5 kW mediumwave transmitter was shunt fed into a
tower that was subsequently taken over for use by a new TV station WQED.
Mediumwave radio broadcasting
station KDKA has always been a reliable verifier of listener reception reports,
and over the years they have responded with a goodly variety of excellent QSL
cards.
Next time: We venture into the
illustrious KDKA shortwave story.
(AWR/Wavescan-NWS 359)
