Special thanks to the Wavescan staff for this week's feature from a Texas radio pioneer
Jeff: Most features we present on the history of broadcast radio, and shortwave in particular, seem to feature men. But we would be remiss in not mentioning that there were also a number of female pioneers involved in the early days of radio, and today, Ray Robinson in Los Angeles has the story of one of them.
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| Mary Texana Loomis and one of her transmitter projects |
Ray: Thanks, Jeff. Yes, today’s feature is about Mary Texanna Loomis, who in 1920 founded the Loomis Radio School in Washington, D.C. This topic was suggested by Wavescan listener Martin Dawson on Prince Edward Island in Canada, after he had read an old article in Radio World which in turn had been sourced from articles in several old magazines and newspapers of the 1920s and 30’s.
In the 1920s, if you wanted to get a job in America as a commercial radio operator or a shipboard radioman on an American vessel, you needed a Commercial Radio License, issued by the U.S. Department of Commerce. The best way to obtain such a license was to attend one of the few radio schools that operated in principal cities around the United States. Two of the most distinguished schools were in Washington, D.C.: the National Radio Institute and the Loomis Radio School. The latter was the only woman-owned radio school in the country. Mary Texanna Loomis was the principal instructor and that rare creature in the 1920’s: a female authority on radio.
Mary was a distant cousin of Dr. Mahlon Loomis, who in 1866 had experimented with ‘stealing current from the atmosphere’ using kites and metallic string. In one experiment, he flew kites from two peaks of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia and, using a galvanometer, was able to detect a change in current in one kite when he grounded the line of the other. Subsequently, he was able to send Morse Code messages between the two locations, a distance of 18 miles. And that experimentation in wireless communication took place a full nine years before Guglielmo Marconi was even born.
Mary Texanna Loomis was born on August 18, 1880, in a homesteader’s shack near Goliad, Texas, the second child of Alvan and Caroline Loomis. Her middle name, ‘Texanna’, was bestowed in honor of the state where she was born.
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| Mary Texanna Loomis |
The family moved to Rochester, N.Y., in 1883, where she had a respectable middle-class upbringing. She was sports-minded in her youth, participating in swimming and horseback riding. She also took voice lessons and became a good soprano. She learned to speak three languages: French, Italian and German. A grandfather was a strong influence; he taught her to use tools and to build mechanical devices, and he helped develop her interest in science and the new inventions of the industrial age.
Mary Loomis married Turner Erving Howard in October, 1898, in Buffalo, NY. Sadly, the marriage ended in divorce in 1917, and there’s no record that they had any children. Mary then reverted to her maiden name of Loomis.
After her divorce, Mary moved to Washington, where she looked unsuccessfully for music employment. But her life took a new turn when she attended a lecture on the emerging technology of wireless communication. Fascinated, she read everything she could find on the subject. At the age of 38, at a time when radio was the field of only a few experimenters and inventors, most of them men, she graduated from radio school and earned her first-class radio telegraphy license.
During World War I, she worked for the Red Cross and also as a secretary in a wireless school. It was only then that she learned about the experiments of her distant cousin, Mahlon Loomis, and she resolved to open a radio operator’s school in his honor.
In 1920, she invested every cent she had and incorporated the Loomis Radio School. Located at 401–411 Ninth Street in the northwest quadrant of Washington, D.C., it offered a six-month course preparing students for the first-class commercial radio license exam. Most students who graduated found positions as shipboard radio operators. Loomis was the school’s president and principal lecturer. She taught radio using equipment she constructed herself in the school’s machine shop, and taught her students not only how to operate, but also how to build radio equipment. “No man can graduate from my school until he learns how to make any part of the apparatus,” she said. “I give him a blueprint of what I want him to do and tell him to go into the shop and keep hammering away until the job is completed. I want my graduates to be able to meet any emergency or mishap that may arise someday far out on the sea.”
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| The Loomis Radio School in Washington, D.C. |
She lived a frugal life in a boarding home, and worked 12 to 15 hours a day teaching, grading papers and writing. In time, the Loomis Radio School offered four courses, with the main one (for would-be commercial radio operators) leading to a first-class commercial radio operator's license. A second course for technical training taught how to build a receiving set. A third course led to a license as an amateur radio operator, and the fourth was for operators who needed only to renew an expired license or who had been military operators and needed only minimal training.
Her students also gained practical experience operating a radio transmitter through the use of the school’s amateur station, W3YA. Loomis was a noted lecturer and member of the prestigious Institute of Radio Engineers. She authored and marketed the popular book “Radio Theory and Operating for the Radio Student and Practical Operator.” This was a reference text of 886 pages with 700 illustrations. It was advertised at a reasonable price and was offered postage-paid directly by the school. It subsequently became a textbook used by many educational institutions and government agencies.
By 1928, the Loomis textbook was in its fifth edition, then amounting to 1,006 pages. “Radio Broadcast” Magazine called it “one of the most comprehensive volumes in its field.” Mary dedicated her book to her cousin Mahlon Loomis.
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| Loomis teaching a class of future radio operators |
The depression that began in 1929 affected the school severely, as it did tens of thousands of other businesses. Fewer students could afford the training, and larger schools like the National Radio Institute had more resources to weather the hard times. Further, a new competitor, the Capitol Radio Institute, would open in Washington in 1932. In 1930, Loomis reorganized the school as the Loomis Radio College, Inc., but it was dissolved in early 1933.
Not much is known about Mary’s later life. She is known to have relocated to San Francisco in 1938; the census shows that she lived in the St. Francis Hotel and listed her occupation as a stenographer. Mary Texanna Loomis died in that city in June 1960 at the age of 79, and was buried at the Woodlawn Memorial Park in Colma, California.
Back to you, Jeff.
Jeff: Thanks, Ray. And in a few weeks’ time, Ray will have a story about another woman who was active in early radio – Mary Day Lee.
(Wavescan/Ray Robinson)
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