New Zealand - Early Wireless before Marconi!
Jeff: There has been much interest lately in the installation of a new Ampegon analog/DRM SW transmitter for Radio New Zealand Pacific, which is currently planned to be on the air by May 2024. We hope that installation goes well, and congratulate the authorities in New Zealand for reinforcing their investment in DRM technology for digital radio broadcasting to the Pacific. We thought it might be opportune to go back and review the very early history of wireless development in New Zealand when that country also led the world! Ray Robinson has more.
Ray: Thanks, Jeff. Yes, strange as it may seem, way back at the beginning of the wireless era, little New Zealand way down south was actually ahead of the experimental activities in Europe, with more people on the inventive scene than any other country in the world at the time. So, let’s return to the year 1888, seven years before Marconi came onto the scene in northern Italy.
Because, 1888 was the year in which George Kemp began his wireless experiments in the areas around Gisborne, in the central east coast of the north island. At the time, Kemp was working for the New Zealand Post & Telegraph Department. He was familiar with the workings of the telegraph and telephone, with its usage of electricity to convey a message along a long connecting wire. He attempted to communicate with distant places by using long antenna wires for both the transmitter and the receiver, and by submerging them in the waters of the nearby river.
In another experiment, he dipped the ends of the transmitting and receiving wires into the waters of two different wells. During the year 1894, at the time when the young Marconi was beginning to tinker with the idea of sending wireless messages through space, Ernest Rutherford at Canterbury University in Dunedin, South Island New Zealand, had already accomplished this. Rutherford was successful in transmitting a signal a distance of 25 feet through several intervening walls.
Subsequently, Rutherford successfully transmitted a wireless signal over a distance of half a mile at Cambridge University in England. This was a world distance record at the time. Rutherford went on to a distinguished career in nuclear physics, for which he was ultimately knighted with the title ‘Sir’, and he was also awarded a Nobel Prize.
In the late 1890’s also down in Dunedin, several university students began their own experiments with wireless equipment. In the year 1899, by which time Marconi had arrived on the scene over in England, one of the students, John Cooper, successfully demonstrated wireless transmissions at the university. During the following year, three more students successfully transmitted a wireless signal from one room to another; and as a sequel, they hooked up their equipment in such a way that the receiver rang a bell at a distance of two hundred yards.
After these events, several more New Zealanders got into the act, with further successes in wireless transmissions. James Logan sent a Morse Code message across Wellington Harbour; and seventeen-year-old Mr. J. L. Passmore built his own set of wireless equipment, and subsequently transmitted a Morse Code signal over a distance of six miles. Passmore Crescent, in the Dunedin suburb of Maori Hill, is named in honor of the Passmore family.
In the very early years of the 20th century, wireless events were under development in several countries of Europe as well as in Australia and New Zealand. The Marconi Company at Chelmsford in England sent out a batch of electrical equipment for installation in New Zealand. For the first time in the history of the Dominion, ‘wireless’ was given a public demonstration, and the event occurred at the Christchurch International Exhibition.
The Marconi Company successfully transmitted signals from the Exhibition in Hagly Park to the Islington Freezing Works, a distance of seven miles. This exhibition was opened on November 1, 1906, and it was open to the public continuously well into the new year 1907.
During the year 1908, three young men constructed their own wireless equipment, and they sent a goodwill message to the New Zealand Parliament in session, and also to the Postmaster General. Using the initial letters of their last names, these three young men linked themselves together as the SHB Wireless Company of Dunedin.
Attempts at long-distance international communications then began, and the first successful transmission was made on February 3, 1908, when three Royal Navy vessels, Pioneer, Powerful and Psyche, relayed a message of goodwill between the Prime Ministers of New Zealand and Australia. One year later, a return message was sent between the two countries, this time direct from Sydney to New Zealand without an intervening relay ship in the middle of the Tasman Sea.
And, the George Kemp we mentioned earlier – the one who had been experimenting with receiving and transmitting wires as aerials submerged in water - succeeded in contacting a passing ship, the Ophir, with his electrical equipment. The Ophir had been equipped for wireless telegraphy, and the ship's wireless officer observed activity on the equipment, but he was unaware someone was trying to send him a message!
After the Great War, New Zealand continued to lead the way by featuring prominently in the very early experimentation with radio broadcasting. Just one year after the famous KDKA was launched in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the first radio broadcast was made in New Zealand.
The now historic figure, Dr. Robert Jack, was Professor of Physics at the Otago University in Dunedin at the time. He assembled his own radio transmitter and formed the Otago Radio Association, first going to air with music recordings on October 4, 1922.
The music was on gramophone records on loan from a local music shop. The only known item of content in this historic first program was a recording of the popular song, "Hello My Dearie".
The first broadcast from this first radio station in New Zealand was heard as far away as Wellington, 500 miles to the north of Dunedin. Programming from this new station was on the air for two hours, twice a week, on Wednesday and Saturday evenings.
This radio station received the first transmitting license in New Zealand with the original callsign being simply DN for ‘Dunedin’. In fact the station claims to have been the first in the southern hemisphere, and the fifth oldest in the world, five weeks older even than the BBC. Subsequent callsigns allocated to the station were 4AB and 4ZB, and from 1948 until the 1980s, it was 4XD, on 1431 kHz.
Here’s a clip of announcer Ivor Fennessy on 4XD on 2nd July 1982:
Today, the station just identifies as ‘Radio Dunedin’ without using a callsign. Their frequency has changed too, but they are still on the air on medium wave with 2½ kW on 1305 kHz, as well as being on a couple of FM frequencies and streaming via the Internet.
On shortwave, Radio New Zealand Pacific is regularly heard in both analog and DRM modes across the Pacific and in western North America. Until recently, the station utilized a pair of 100 kW transmitters at Rangitaiki in the center of the North Island – one being a hybrid analog and DRM unit, and the other an older analog-only unit. That older analog-only one was decommissioned a few weeks ago and is now being disassembled and removed, to make way for the new Ampegon analog/DRM transmitter currently being shipped from Europe. Installation and testing is expected in the Feb/Mar/Apr timeframe, with a planned on-air date of May 1st, 2024.
(Ray Robinson/AWR)