WSAJ in Grove City, Pa., was born from an earlier amateur station at Grove City College, and it survived for decades as a relic of the dawn of American broadcasting.
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(The WBZ license moved to Boston in 1931, and of course it’s still going strong there.)Īnother 1921 site is not only still standing, it was still in use until just a few years ago. The wire antenna that was strung between the towers remained in use until 1962, when WBZ finally shut down the Springfield transmitter, by then known as WBZA. The Conrad garage where the earliest broadcasts of 8XK (later KDKA) in Pittsburgh was torn down a few years ago, and the original KDKA transmitter towers on the roof of Westinghouse’s East Pittsburgh plant are gone as well.Īnother early Westinghouse station still stands, though: atop the old Westinghouse factory in East Springfield, Mass., there are still two rusty towers that can be dated all the way back to September 1921, when a little station called WBZ went on the air out there. You’ll look in vain to find any physical remnants of 8MK/WWJ in Detroit, or of 9XM/WHA in Madison. The towers of most of the earliest stations that were indisputably “broadcasters” are long gone.
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What’s the oldest transmitting facility still standing? I suppose there’s an argument to be made for Reginald Fessenden’s Brant Rock, Mass., tower, where that famous Christmas Eve 1906 broadcast may or may not really have happened.īut all that’s left now of the 400-foot hollow steel tower erected a century ago is a hulking concrete base and some cracked insulators, and in any event it’s a bit of a stretch to describe this as a true “broadcast” facility.
(click thumbnail) WTIC’s 1929 transmitter building, built to house the station’s first 50,000 watt RCA traMost issues of Radio World are filled with pages of information about what’s newest in the world of radio, and rightfully so.īut when Editor in Chief Paul McLane asked me to write about some of the more unusual and distinctive sites I’ve seen in my travels, my thoughts turned to some of the oldest radio artifacts still out there in the field. (click thumbnail) WCCO’s original 1924 transmitter building, constructed at the Coon Rapids site for the ‘ (click thumbnail) The 1921 WBZ antenna towers in East Springfield, Mass. (click thumbnail) At KWG, these sawed-off poles once supported the antenna. That’s engineer Paul Shinn dusting the 1930 transmitter. (click thumbnail) … and its 1927 Western Electric. (click thumbnail) WLW’s 500 kW monster rig …
(click thumbnail) The demolition of Frank Conrad’s garage in Wilkinsburg, Pa., the original 8MK/KDKA, in March 2
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