I AM THE BRUCE!

Jet magazine called Ramon Bruce Philadelphia's first negro disk jockey. It was a damn shame when WHAT-AM later fired him for "flagrant neglect of duty" and "insubordination." Bruce claimed that they fired him for joining AFTRA because he was fired by telegram "55 minutes" after joining the union. For his part Bruce filed charges with the local labor board. It was a dirty public fight. Station Manager Dolly Banks even claimed that his absenteeism required that they hire Cal Williams and Jocko Henderson to fill in...and that they were the only staff that had joined any union.

Every biography says that Bruce was a former pro football player but they never say for what team. But, starting in December of 1945 on WHAT, Ramon Played Jazz and Rhythm and Blues all week then Gospel on Sunday. His show was initially called "Snap Club " and later "Ravin with Ramon."  He broadcast live from Club 421 and later Powelton's Cafe and Paul's Carnival Club. He was an amazingly popular DJ in a time when segregation was legal. He was receiving 1,000 letters a week by some reports and earning $50,000 dollars a year in an era when that was a CEO salary. He owned restaurants and a record store. He also released some very bad recordings that Billboard dismissed as the "delusions of Ronald Colman." People bought them anyway. In 1949 still on the upswing WHAT gave him an afternoon show as well.

The root cause of his firing is uncertain but in 1949 the FCC reported that Bruce "belongs to a number of negro and other organizations..." The language is vague but that sounds slightly accusatory. Ramon wrote a column for the paper the Philadelphia Afro-American. That kind of black pride was new and not welcome in all quarters. Maybe joining the union was the last straw for management.

Mr. Bruce went from WHAT to a new program 1230 WCMC-AM in Wildwood, NJ where he broadcast live from the Riptide Club. He was known as "The Bruce" which to my mind was the superior stage name anyway. He was making more money on the side booking R&B tours milking that growing audience for R&B in New Jersey. In 1954 he joined WNJR-AM, a bigger signal covering better parts of the Jersey market. He stayed there for about 3 years.

WAAT-AM in Newark, New Jersey, where he took off again. He continued to book theater tours Heartbeats, Cadillacs, Valentines, the Avalons, LaVern Baker, the Clovers and many others, they toured in the region playing shows in Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey.  He stayed on at WAAT until at least 1957 when he was listed in Sponsor magazine as having the best ratings of any program on the station. He was dead less than 5 years later after what the papers called "a long illness." He was only 39 years old. By 1968 Robert St. John was already describing Ramon Bruce in print as a "pioneer negro deejay." He certainly was that.

Transcription Mystery Disc # 176

This is not the kind of disc I normally find. It's a 10-inch Audio disc with an outer-edge start. It spins at 78 rpm though I had to rip it at 33 rpm because of a notable curvature in the disc. It's is labeled in nice clear block letters "9th Inning 2nd game of 1947 World Series Yankees-10 Dogers-3" This is a recording of the last minutes of the most famous 9th inning rally in Baseball history.

1947 World Series

 
The recording is just a bit over 4 minutes long and about half way in Mel Allen introduces "the old red Head," Red Barber who is heard for the rest of the recording. Allen wasn't just a sports fan, he was also a radio man. He started out in 1933 announcing college football games on 960 WBRC-AM in Birmingham. His sports broadcasting career at CBS started in 1937 where he stayed until the Yankees fired him as an announcer in 1964. They brought him back in 1976. In 1990 he guested and did play-by-play on WPIX-TV for a Yankees game making him the oldest sportscaster of the day at 77.  He died in 1996.

FRB

We do not know what causes the phenomena we call a Fast Radio Burst (FRB.)  They are similar to the pulses known to emanate from pulsars, and gamma ray bursts (GRB) except they do not repeat cyclically. Also, the known signals from pulsars are close, relatively speaking.  Most known pulsars are inside the Milky Way, or the Magellanic Clouds. FRBs seem to originate outside our galaxy, 5 - 10 billion light years away.

The first FRB was only detected in 2007. Duncan Lorimer and David Narkevic of West Virginia University in Morgantown detected a single burp lasting under 5 milliseconds.  In 2012 Evan Keane,and his colleagues began detecting similarly brief events. By comparison a GRB usually lasts around 50 milliseconds.  But their pulse dispersions both arrive first at higher frequencies and then progressively moved to lower frequencies before stopping.


But part of that sweeping effect is caused by the signal traveling through space. Space isn't all void, it's filled with random atoms, and particles. The radio waves at lower frequencies get slowed down more than the ones at higher frequencies. That means that the higher frequencies arrive first. But that distortion allows us to theorize about their immense power and the great distance they have traveled, but not the cause. More here.

Interracial Host and Co-Host

I came across a quote from Ahmet Ertgun that sent me thumbing through my radio history books for attribution:

"The hot show in New York in those days - the two hot shows - were Willie and Ray - Willie Bryant and Ray Carroll, and the Symphony Sid Show..."

The quote was in the context of Alan Freed but of the other two shows mentioned I only knew one. Symphony Sid was Sid Torin. But who were Willie and Ray? Ray Carroll was the first white DJ to co-host a program with a black DJ. He started out co-hosting with another white jazz man Symphony Sid on WMCA. I think ray was at WWRL prior to that.  Ray and Sid paired up for just a year in 1947.  Bryant was already the emcee at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem which is how he got his nickname. He appeared in a couple films. In 1946, CBS hired him as the first black host of a network radio program, "Night Life. By then Ray Carroll was already on WMCA with Sid. Sid Hired Bryant to flip records.  Ray and Willie started their program together that February and stayed at it for 6 years on 1480 WHOM-AM. In 1952 they added a second program together on WOV. Sometimes it aired live from Birdland.

Willie Bryant was born in New Orleans and raised in Chicago. He did vaudeville tours tap dancing with the Whitman Sisters, and later the Chocolate Revue with Bessie Smith. He played the Shim Sham Club in Harlem with Leonard Reed where they invented the dance, the Shim Sham. In 1934 he put together his first band, The Wilie Bryant Orchestra. Between 1935 and 1938 they cut 26 sides mostly for Victor and Bluebird. They were truly excellent. Give it a listen here. 

Their program was cancelled in April of 1954 by the VP of WHOM, Charles Bolton. Bryant said it was the first time he'd been booted from a job in 30 years. He described the firing as political. Bolton denied it but he was the same guy that later that month very publicly "banned" some slightly risque songs from the station playlist. At the time WHOM was actively pursuing a license from the FCC for UHF TV license. They had first applied for channel 31 in 1952. They abandoned in in April 1954. Maybe Bolton was feeling some pressure about his Interracial program? Maybe it was because Alan Freed had just hit town and White DJs playing R&B were just safer.

Ray just went back to WMCA and was hosting an R&B program, "Night Watch" by May of 1954. Like any career his had peaked, he'd already been in radio 20 years. In 1957 he moved to WICC-AM in Bridgeport, CT to host a morning program. By the early 1970s he was hosting an interview program called "Sounding Board" on 1450 WNAB-AM in Bridgeport, CT. Bryant tried to move into television he was already negotiating terms but it wasn't until 1949 his program debuted. He hosted "Uptown Jubilee" a Tuesday night black variety show on CBS-TV.  It was short-lived. In 195, he got another network radio show, ABC's "Rhythm on Radio. He bought a bar in the Bronx. None of that lasted either. He moved to California and did a little more radio on KSAN and KALI. He died in 1964. More here.

Static is Spectral

So what is static? In once sense of the word, static just means stationary. But we're talking about radio static— noise in other words. You might already be thinking "white noise" but there are many times of noise as there are many causes of noise. Most noise is intermittent. Static continues over a long duration which allows it to have a spectral definition. Most sources of true static are also man made. Strangely, we have found uses for static.

Below is a list of most of the accepted and measurable definitions for times of static.

White Noise -  A random signal with a consistent power spectral density. In other words, a signal that contains equal power within any frequency band with a fixed width.

Pink Noise - Also called Flicker Noise, this has  signal with a frequency spectrum with a power spectral density that is inversely proportional to the frequency. Here each octave carries an equal amount of noise power. But each octave represents a frequency band twice as large, in arithmetic terms, as the one below it, so when plotted on a spectrogram this would produce a line with a steep decline. More here.

Brown Noise - Also called Red Noise, or Brownian Noise. This signal decreases in power by 12 dB per octave. That sounds specific because it is also the kind of signal noise produced by Brownian motion. The sound is kind of a low roar resembling a heavy rainfall, similar to Purple Noise.

Blue Noise -  The power density of this signal increases 3 dB per octave with increasing frequency, the inverse of pink noise. The power density is directly proportional to the frequency. In computer graphics, it's actually used for dithering.  More here.

Green Noise - This signal is similar to pink noise but it has a power spike centered around 500 Hz. It has some technical applications in halftone dithering.

Purple Noise - Also called Violet noise, here the power density increases 6 dB per octave across the spectrum with increasing frequency. It has a power density directly proportional to the square of the frequency. More here.

Grey Noise - This is very similar to white noise except that the plotted spectrum is arched downward in the middle like a traditional smiley-face amplifier EQ. This gives the impression of it being equally loud at all frequencies, though it is not. It's exploiting the nature of the human ear.

Black Noise - Noise that has a frequency spectrum of predominantly zero power level over all frequencies except for a few narrow bands or spikes.

City 99.5 Radio on Fire!

This is a hardcore radio man all the way. He manages to stay on air at City 99.5 and on the mic while the studio around him catches on fire. This is the first time I've ever heard of a studio fire not stopping a broadcast. Personally I'd have put on a 60-second PSA and gotten an extinguisher.

Transcription Mystery Disc #175

This 8 inch metal core Recordisc has an outer edge start and spins at 78 rpm. It's one of the unusual cases that is not only labeled, but the edge start box is even correctly checked. It's dated for 10-6-46, with the title "Five Minutes More" and the recorder is marked in cursive capitals... might be RAC, RAG, R+G... can't tell. I really hate cursive. But it's probably just the engineers initials.
 
The recording is of a popular orchestra playing the tune "Five Minutes More."  I thought it might be Tex Beneke. They cut the song as a hit single in 1946, but so did Glen Miller, Bob Crosby, The Three Suns, Frank Sinatra, and even Skitch Henderson. This is none of those bands.

At the 2:30 mark I figured out why. It's not a dub of a record. It's a live radio recording. The Host breaks in amid light applause and says "There goes that band again" as string music fades up. That phrase was the closing theme of the Dick Jurgens Orchestra. The audio is too good for this to be a live recording, it had to be a recording of a radio performance. Dick Jurgens was playing the Hotel Claremont in June of 1946, and Yank Bandstand for ARFS that fall. He didn't have his own CBS program until 1948. I deduce that somehow this is a recording from one of those "Yank Bandstand" programs. More here.

DJ Merle Travis

I know all of two songs by Merle Travis but I bet you know them too. "Dark as a Dungeon" and "Sixteen Tons" were both written and recorded by Merle Travis in the mid 1940s. But 10 years before that he made his first forays into radio and that is where we shall begin. There are two versions of the story, but one has him playing the "Tiger Rag" at the age of 18 on 1280 WGBF-AM in Evansville, IN. He was attending a dance in 1936 and his brother talked the DJ into letting Merle play a short tune during the break. That appearance got him invited to play in the band the Tennessee Tomcats. His career would go on to include the Knox County Knockabouts, Whitley's Western Swing Band, the Drifting Pioneers, Clayton McMichen's Georgia Wildcats, Brown's Ferry Four and many others.

A year after his radio debut, he was hired by fiddler Clayton McMichen as guitarist in his Georgia Wildcats. but while the Wildcats were regulars on WAVE-AM in Louisville, KY that was years after Travis left the group in 1939 to join the Drifting Pioneers, a Chicago-area gospel quartet. They became very popular regulars on the Boone County Jamboree program on WLW-AM. The program was later known as Midwestern Hayride. Travis stuck with the station long after the group broke up and fell in playing with other country artists like Grandpa Jones and the Delmore Brothers whom he played with as Brown's Ferry Four.

He went to LA and played on Cliffie Stone's Hometown Jamboree, which aired on both KXLA-AM and KCOP-TV. On KXLA he also played on Town Hall Party and Dinner Bell Roundup, and on AFRS on the Melody Roundup. On KNX he became a regular cast member of The Hollywood Barn Dance. It wasn't until the late 1960s Travis relocated to Nashville and became a member of the Grand Ole Opry. More here.

He was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970 and elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1977. In the 1980s CHM records started to reissue his old records while he recorded new material.  He died of a heart attack in 1983. The Country Routes label has since issued several compilations of his radio transcriptions from the 1940s and 1950s

OFDM and COFDM

Engineers know that OFDM (orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing) is a multi-carrier transmission system i.e. it uses a number of narrow band sub-carriers, and is resilient in the face of multi-path interference, and narrow-band interference. Thouse is it sensitive to phase problems. It's used in both wireless and DTV. The problem with OFDM is that people just don't know what the word "orthagonal" means. So lets discuss orthogonality.

In Euclidean geometry (the normal geometry you got in high school) orthogonality is the relation of two lines at right angles to one another. In other words... they are perpendicular. But that is a strictly 2 dimensional understanding. Radio waves are not lines, they radiate outward and can be polarized in any orientation. So successive waves can overlap and not even intersect and share the same frequency. Try to imagine it like a series of overlapping slinkys. But each slinky is carrying redundant data so while this increases it's resistance to interference, is has the downside of reducing the load of data it can carry. If that sounds a lot like FDMA that's because they are similar.

COFDM is coded orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing. COFDM and OFDM only differ in that with COFDM forward error correction is applied to the signal before transmission. (Remember the transmission can be occurring on 1,000 narrow-band frequencies.) In this manner COFDM reduces the number of errors caused by lost carriers from shadow fading, frequency selective fading, channel noise and other propagation effects.

Forward error correction improved it's redundancy by encoding an error-correcting code. This was the receiver can correct a certain number of errors without retransmission. This idea was comes form a single American mathematician, Richard Hamming. In 1950 he created the first error-correcting algorithm: the Hamming (7,4) code. It was such a good idea we even use it in modems. He was a damn genius and died in 1997 after a long and accomplished career.

WFNM Log

I found these in a record sleeve not too long ago. These 8 pages are from a 37 year old WFNM station log that was at least 23 pages long. The date is listed on two different pages as Saturday 11/20/76. Those same pages also list the station as broadcasting at 10 watts on 88.7 MHz and on campus at 720 AM. I believe the second frequency to have been a carrier current service to the dorms.  The DJs listed for that day were John Smith, Bill Fredricks, Spencer Thomas, Cliff Lewis and Stan Evans. Ben Fredericks notes their EAS test received from 1490 WDDL-AM at 3:15. That station is now WLPA-AM.

Today WFNM broadcasts at  100 watts on 89.1 FM. The station originally began as an AM carrier current station in 1957 "broadcasting" from the basement of Ben Franklin Hall. In 1973, WFNM acquired a class D license to operate at 10 watts on 88.7. So as small as it sounded, those 10 watts were a step up.  In 1976, WFNM moved into new studios in the Steinman College Center. It wasn't until 1980 under GM Jonathan Ziss that the station got it's Class A license and moved to 89.1 FM operating at 100 watts. More here.

So these logs catch WFNM between phases. Before 1973 they were a campus-only service. After 1980 they were a local FM service. For the 7 years in between  In 1976 it operated on an uncomfortable middle ground, only audible in parts of it's metro but at last outside of the dorms. These pages were saved not for historical reasons but to be used as scratch paper. The back side of each page is covered in mad illegible scribblings the like of which may never be decoded.

You can download it

HERE

Solder Joints

It is very easy to solder poorly. A bad connection can under-perform and you might get away with it. You might also start an electrical fire or burn out a board component. A bad splice increases resistance. You can have high-quality, well-maintained tools, proper parts and still get a poor connection if you don't know how to solder the damn connection properly.

There are self-taught engineers have will suggest some electrically unsound connections. I am no expert, but I know how to execute the basic four splices. You need to know them all:

1. Temporary Hook Joint
This joint is made without the aid of solder. It's a temporary joint used in testing or or you feel like living dangerously.  Band one wire over another to make the first hook, then repeat the process. To tighten you can gently compress the hooks with pliers.

2. Bell Splice
This is the most common splice you'll see. It's behind every electrical plug in your home. With heavier guage wire such as that case just strip the wires to the same legnth and grip the ends with lineman's pliers and twist them together. For a temporary connection put on a nut, for a permanent connection brush with flux and then solder.

3. T-Joint
This splice is used to connect a leg to an unbroken lead.  First you strip away an area of insulation from the lead. Then twist the new wire around it. With stranded wire there is the temptation to divide the wire into a "Y" and braid it in two directions. This is unwise. The crook of the Y can arc if there is a void and resistance will likely vary between the two sides of the leg.

4. Western Union Splice
This is only for the truly hardcore. (See below) This complicated splice is also called the Lineman's splice.  The complicated wrapping pattern actually tightens when pulled which is why you usually see it only with wires under tension. This is probably why it was developed for the telegraph. It's description in the NASA guide describes it as stronger than the unbroken wire. Just note that it is only intended to be used with solid rather than stranded wire.

Transcription Mystery Disc # 174

This is a 10-inch Soundcraft transcription disc. It spins at 78 RPM and has an outer edge start. It is clearly labeled and dated and for once in clearly printed letters "RICH & MARILYN STORIES & SONG 12-30-46.  The recorded Side A on New years even and Side B on New Years day.

Rich & Marilyn
 
The recording is peculiar though. The father, mother and children act out rehearsed and scripted comedies. The level of dedication is unusual, leaving me to wonder if one of them might have been active in at least local theater, if not radio theater. Dad has a bit of an odd sense of humor to say the least.

The Things They Do To Tradio.

Half a century ago it was also the brand name of a coin-operated hotel radio.  Today Tradio  is a portmanteau of "trade" and "radio." That word describes the program format as well. People call in to the program offering to buy or sell items. I've encountered various programs over the years, usually in tertiary markets on AM stations with callers selling livestock, trailers, tires, waffle irons.. it's the flea market of broadcasting. The first Tradio program was supposedly started in 1950 by an appliance store owner in Seguin, TX buying airtime in 1580 KWED-AM. More here.

The name Tradio has been trademarked by Simply Local Broadcasting, owners of 106.3 WRIL in Pineville, KY. So other stations have turned to synonyms like Swap Shop, the Trading Post or the like. One notable major market outlet is Wheelin' and Dealin' with Dave Ramos on WTAM-AM in Cleveland, OH. KDKA-AM in Pittsburgh, PA airs Tradio from 4:00 -7:00 PM every Saturday. WCCO-AM in Minneapolis tried out The Great Garage sale in 2008. But typically these shows are found in small metros.


What makes the format more notable is that for years now it has been the comedic target of of the Howard Stern Show.

I have no idea how this started. But open phone lines and live radio have always been a target for cranks. In this case the culprits are often Stern staffers Richard Christy and Sal Governale, but just as often it's clearly a random fan. While they all also prank call weathermen, public tv outlets and other morning shows there's something kind of wrong about pranking these more hapless, small-market Tradio programs and those in particular seem a tad more worthy of our sympathy.

GEE

In 1935, the British began developing GEE. It was developed by Robert Watson-Watt at the Air Ministry and introduced by the Royal Air Force (RAF). The idea of hyperbolic navigation known in the 1930s, but the first trials didn't happen until 1941.  Starting in 1942 these radio signals were used to guide the WWII carpet bombing of Germany. Germany began it's attempts at jamming the GEE system in 1943 but these were largely ineffectual. So what's hyperbolic navigation?

Hyperbolic navigation is a class of radio navigation systems based which determines position based on the  microsecond difference in timing between the reception of two signals.  While you need three points to triangulate a location in 3 dimensional space, the surface of the earth is effectively a 2 dimensional plane. But hyperbolic navigation requires the plotting all of the potential locations of the receiver for the measured delay. This produces a series of hyperbolic lines (a parabola) on a chart. Taking multiple measurements narrowed this down. GEE was the first such system. 

Imagine two terrestrial radio stations located 186 miles apart. At light speed (the speed radio signals travel) their signals can reach each other in exactly 1 millisecond. So Station A emits a pulse, this pulse is received at Station B and it triggers the transmission of another pulse 1 ms later. But a ship in motion at a third location will receive these at odd intervals because of the distance from each station. But knowing their interval, they can plot a circle around each transmitter, and at their points of intersection (parabolas) they can determine their possible location down to a set of two. Then they had to use traditional navigation to pick which of the two. The source of that problem... is time.

In order to measure the exact time it took for a signals to reach the receiver, the receiver must know the exact time the signal was transmitted. But reliable millisecond time-keeping wasn't possible in the 1930s. The most common clock to use with GEE was a crystal oscillator. But that drifts about 1 to 2 seconds in a month. That may sound trivial, but 2 seconds is a distance of 372 miles... that's the difference between Bermuda and the Carolina coast. That's a big deal. (This problem wasn't overcome until the advent of atomic clocks in the 1960s.) So instead of absolute time, differential time was used. Your distance from the two transmitters was unknown, but the difference between their signals was measurable on an oscillograph and the delay curves were available on a chart.

GEE signals were all sent on the same frequency which made it difficult to distinguish the original signal from the response signal. Chains of GEE stations were built in the UK, France and northern Germany. Ultimately it was replaced by VOR systems and LORAN. Some of the British GEE equipment was used in the later GEE-H system which operated at the 20-80 MHz range. The last GEE chain was shut down in 1970

The irony in all this is that hyperbolic navigation was originally developed by Germany. Meint Harms lectured on the topic as a masters student at Seefahrtschule Lübeck, a navigational school. After becoming a professor of Mathematics, Physics and Navigation at the Kaisertor in Lübeck he began to demonstrate models of the system which he patented in 1932.

The Wrong Way To Listen to the Radio

This is very very stupid.

They are wearing rubber gloves which helps but it's not enough to prevent RF burns. This is obviously an AM station. The electric arc between the radio tower and the hand-held weed is modulated with the radio signal. That electrical arc heats the air around it and the expanding air moves more air— a sound wave. Were that experiment carried out inside a vacuum, the arc would continue, but the sound would not.

Please do not do this at home.

DJ Hoppy Adams

In 1952 Morris Blum hired Charles "Hoppy" Adams to DJ on 1190 WANN-AM. Billboard even noted hsi hire in their May issue that year. He remained at the station ultimately for more than 40 years. He followed a trail then only recently blazed by Hal Jackson who became his mentor. WANN was then a daytimer airing gospel, blues and early rock-n-roll. Hoppy was a Maryland Native, born in the Annapolis suburb of Parole in 1926. He worked as a cab driver and started his own cab company.How he ended up applying for work at WANN I have no idea.

The station signed on in 1947, only the third station on the dial preceded by fellow daytimer WASL and full service station WNAV. Blum focused his station on the black community. Arriving 5 years later Hoppy was emceeing a series of concerts at Carr's Beach Pavilion with live remote broadcasts on Sunday nights. But because of segregation, white teenagers weren't allowed at the shows. Huge acts performed such as the Drifters, the Coasters,  Little Richard, Lloyd Price, Etta James, The Shirelles,and even James Brown. Hoppy became a local celebrity. Magazines and newspapers published pictures of him alongside Bill Dagett onstage and Illinois Jacquet. More here.


In 1989 Burrelle's Black Media Directory listed Hoppy as both the Program Director and the Music Director. Morris Blum was still the GM and SM.The Radio Yearbook still listed him as a Blues DJ in 1991. He died in 2005 at the age of 79. More here. Morris Blum outlive him by 5 years. More here.

Transcription Mystery Disc #173

This Recordisc transcription disc is in the worst condition I think I've ever seen... well the worst that still had any thing attached to the substrate. I thin we've all seen a bald disc or two. This disc is labeled and dated, though the damage has physically removed the data from large portions of both sides. I carefully cleaned what was left and made a somewhat successful attempt to recover at least some of the audio.

The disc is 8 inches in diameter and spins at 78 rpm with an outer edge start. The recording dates are for October 14th and 15th of 1941. The first cut "Everybody Blames Us" is totally unknown to me but the other side, "When the Mists" is an old hymn from the late 1800s. In this version it's a male lead supported by a church organ, it's followed by a little preaching. The first cut is either a dub or a radio recording, it's hard to say which with so much audio missing. the other sounds more like a live recording... from 72 years ago. Below is the other side after a thorough cleaning. It was too nasty to put on my scanner.

Gernsback Strike Again!

Hugo Gernsback is one of those names that pops up repeatedly in radio history. His late career success in science fiction overshadowed his snake oil interests in radio and his more bonafide accomplishments like WRNY and Radio News. He is for whom the Hugo awards are named. He foresaw video conferencing, social networking, electrical cars, radar, solar power, and microfilm. He didn't invent science fiction, he was science fiction. But let us discuss his more mortal accomplishments. He built one of the first New York radio stations.. then destroyed it with his own endless tinkering.

In 1925, Hugo founded radio station WRNY which broadcast from the 18th floor of The Roosevelt Hotel in New York City and was later involved in the first television broadcasts. Gernsback savvily used WRNY and his magazine Radio News to cross promote each other. Radio programs on WRNY often were used to discuss articles he had written or published, and some of the articles in Radio News covered the activities at WRNY.  The model was later emulated across the nation by daily newspapers that also owned local radio outlets.

At the time there were only about 500 radio stations in the whole of the USA. WRNY's license was so early, they were pre-FCC, and even pre-FRC.  His company, Experimenter Publishing applied for a license from the US Dept of Commerce to broadcast on 1160 kHz in New York City. But they didn't stay there. Before the station closed in 1934 they'd also have broadcast on 800 kHz, 920 kHz, 970 kHz, 1010 kHz, and 1070 kHz. But not all of those moves went so smoothly. In November of 1926, WRNY then operating on 800 kHz  moved from the Roosevelt Hotel to Coytesville, New Jersey. WHN, then operating on 830 kHz claimed that WRNY was causing them interference.There wasn't much they could do until the FRC was formed in 1927, whereupon WRNY was reallocated to share time on 920 kHz with WPCH.

By then Gernsback was getting bored with regular old radio. Just for giggles in 1927, Gernsback started the shortwave station 2XAL (later W2XAL) operating on 9700 kHz. Then he got the TV bug. In April 1928,he started a venture with Pilot Electric Manufacturing and began broadcasting television experiments on the AM band. His transmission on 1010 kHz yielded a silent black and white image on a screen 1.5 inches square. It had only 48 scan lines.  Impressively that tiny low resolution images could be transmitted in as little as 5 kHz of bandwidth. (For comparison remember that commercial television of the 1940s used 6 MHz of bandwidth.)

The FRC stepped in and stomped on his television dreams. Under the auspices of preventing interference the FRC limited television broadcast to shortwave stations above 1500 kHz. The experimental broadcasts would be limited to one hour per day and their bandwidth limited to  10 kHz. Oh and they couldn't air them during prime time 6:00 PM to 11:00 PM. The bandwidth limitation was critical. TV experiments were no longer possible on the AM band. In the Spring of 1929 a bankruptcy petition was filed against the Experimenter Publishing Company for debts of over half a million dollars. A trust was established and Hugo was kicked out.  His shortwave station W2XAL became property of a flight school and WRNY went to the Curtiss Aircraft Corp. WHN later bought it out and shut it down to end a pesky dayshare arrangement.

Turn Your Old MP3s Into Records

One of my readers, KL from NYC posted this video with a comment on an earlier post of mine. The video is fascinating. In it, audio geek David Nelson demonstrates a home-made recording lathe comprised of unrelated component parts and an old turntable. He made multiple improvements over time which just escalate into a very usable lathe that made very listenable recordings. The process is very impressive and looks like a dangerously appealing hobby for lesser audio geeks like myself.

4th of July

It's a genuine federal holiday. I'm off today, back tomorrow.

The Rise and Fall of WGTL

In 2009, WTCG-AM changed their city of license to Mount Holly, NC from Clayton, GA. When they made the 170 mile move they also changed frequencies from 1370 kHz to 870 kHz and call sign to WGHC.  Why a move so large was even considered I have no idea. They literally jumped over the entire Greenville, SC metro. It's one of the largest moves I've ever heard of and it was only possible because WGTL-AM no longer existed. WGTL stood for "world's greatest textile land" and as you might expect, there's a story behind that.

WGTL-AM was built by Foy T. Hinson and signed on in 1948. (Hinson later founded WKRB) Trouble began only a few years later. The Textile Workers Union of America (TWUA) was on strike in 1951 at the Cannon Mills in Kannapolis among others.  The TWUA was trying to buy airtime locally to cover the news of the strike since most news outlets covering were covering the strike unfairly. The TWUA has held a strike at those mills back in 1934 and it had gone poorly. Their attempt to use media savvy was a response to miserable lessons they learned a couple decades earlier. More here. WGTL at first sold them time, but Cannon Mills was pressuring them to kick out the TWUA.  This was a problem because the equal time rule was still in effect as it had been since 1927. But Kannapolis was a company town and Cannon had a lot of muscle, and the union show was kicked to the curb.

It was personal. Fred H. Whitley was the owner of WGTL, WAAK (and a funeral home) and personal friend of Charles A. Cannon.  Both Cannon and Whitley family members owned businesses that advertised on WGTL.  In the book Waves of Opposition author Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf recorded the joke that "In Kannapolis, the Textile Workers joked that the radio station's motto was "Hear no unionism, speak no unionism, see no unions." The TWUA continued to send them letters for years asking to renegotiate terms for airtime. The situation was so bad there were congressional hearings.

WGTL in some ways was a typical southern small market radio station. It began and ended each day with The Lord's Prayer. From it's debut through the early 1950s it mostly aired big band music, and went MOR in the 60s. In the 1970s they flipped to easy listening. They were an early adopter of the Xmas flip stunting Xmas in May of 1949, and committing to the Thanksgiving stretch in the early 1960s.  In the 1990s the station was still using mostly 1960s-era broadcasting equipment. There were money problems. Following bankruptcy and an eviction proceeding, WGTL signed off forever on December 25th, 1992. Their Blaw-Knox tower was dismantled two years later, the site is now a parking lot. Former owner Fred H. Whitley moved to Las Vegas to live with family. More here. Cannon Mills went bankrupt in 2002 and was sold to Iconix.

Transcription Mystery Disc #172

This Pepsi Disc was filthy, totally filthy. I had to carefully wipe it down. I play back it's cracked splintered surface at 33 rpm then correct the speed digitally. Miraculously, the source audio survived the process. As you can see from the image the outermost grooves are destroyed, but the recording picks up mid sentence in listenable condition. The disc is a 78 rpm, paper-core 6-inch Pepsi co-branded Recordisc, clearly of the make distributed to servicemen in WWII. So I expect this was made between 1941 and 1945, with the later date being far more probable. Though some sources loosely date them to 1942. There are a few undated others floating about the internet too.
Jerry's Love Letter

The audio is of a man named Jerry reading a love letter to his fiancé. She goes unnamed here except as darling and honey. He has a strange cadence that reminds me of Dan Smith from the band Listener. It's kind of like poetry, but also just kind of like he's reading a well-rehearsed letter. Please excuse the new MP3 player today. Divshare is down again. I have no idea why the Cincopa player adds random cover art, but I did learn that removing it is a premium feature.

Women at the FCC

The FCC has always been a wee bit sexist. I was reading in an article about the AWRT in 1951that they were excitedly expecting the nomination of a woman as an FCC commissioner. It didn't happen. I read a few days later about the first female chairwoman of the FCC... appointed only this year! I got curious as to how many women had been commissioners at the FCC. It turned out to be a very small number —an inexcusably small number. The FCC actually was grossly imbalanced until the mid 1980s. More here.


Harry Truman nominated the first woman, Frieda Barkin Hennock to the FCC in 1948. As the FCC (excluding the years it was the FRC) it's leadership had been all male for 14 years. Ms. Hennock served until 1955, a tenure of 23 years. No more women were appointed until 1971, another 16 years —whole presidencies passed. Hennock was the only woman on the commission for a period of almost 40 years.

The situation didn't improve much after Charlotte Reid was appointed in 1971.  Margarite White wasn't appointed until 1976...to replace Reid.  They had agreed to a token woman on the commission, but only one and only one at a time. But in the 1980s it improved. Over the following three decades 29 more commissioners were nominated, 17 male, 12 female — an much closer ratio of 41% to 59%. It's a wild improvement over their historical percentage.  Since 1934 there have been 15 female commissioners out of 80, that's 19%. But before 1980... it was only 8%.  Below I post the entire commissioner list straight form the FCC website for your indignant reference.

Commissioner	Party Affiliation	State
			From	To
Eugene O. Sykes   Chairman	Democrat	Mississippi	Jul 11, 1934 Jul 11, 1934	Apr 5, 1939 Mar 8, 1935
Thad H. Brown	Republican	Ohio	Jul 11, 1934	Jun 30, 1940
Paul A. Walker   Acting Chairman   Chairman	Democrat	Oklahoma	Jul 11, 1934 Nov 3, 1947 Feb 28, 1952	Jun30, 1953 Dec 28, 1947 Apr 17, 1953
Norman Case	Republican	Rhode Island	Jul 11, 1934	Jun 30, 1945
Irvin Stewart	Democrat	Texas	Jul 11, 1934	Jun 30, 1937
George Henry Payne	Republican	New York	Jul 11, 1934	Jun 30, 1943
Hampson Gary	Democrat	Texas	Jul 11, 1934	Jan 1, 1935
Anning S. Prall   Chairman	Democrat	New York	Jan 17, 1935 Mar 9, 1935	Jul 23, 1937 Jul 23, 1937
Tunis Craven	Democrat	DC Virginia	Aug 25, 1937 Jul 2, 1956	Jun 30, 1944 Mar 25, 1963
Frank McNinch    Chairman	Democrat	North Carolina	Oct 1, 1937 Oct 1, 1937	Aug 31, 1939 Aug 31, 1939
Frederic I. Thompson	Democrat	Alabama	Apr 13, 1939	Jun 30, 1941
James Lawrence Fly   Chairman	Democrat	Texas	Sept 1, 1939 Sept 1, 1939	Nov 13, 1944 Nov 13, 1944
Ray C. Wakefield	Republican	California	Mar 22, 1941	Jun 30, 1947
Clifford J. Durr	Democrat	Alabama	Nov 1, 1941	Jun 30, 1948
Ewell K. Jett   Interim Chairman	Independent	Maryland	Feb 15, 1944 Nov 16, 1944	Dec 31, 1947 Dec 20, 1944
Paul A. Porter   Chairman	Democrat	Kentucky	Dec 21, 1944 Dec 21, 1944	Feb 25, 1946 Feb 25, 1946
Charles R. Denny   Acting Chairman   Chairman	Democrat	DC	Mar 30, 1945 Feb 26, 1946 Dec 4, 1946	Oct 31, 1947 Dec 3, 1946 Oct 31, 1947
William H. Willis	Republican	Vermont	Jul 23, 1945	Mar 6, 1946
Rosel H. Hyde   Chairman   Acting Chairman   Acting Chairman   Chairman	Republican	Idaho	Apr 17, 1946 Apr 18, 1953 Apr 19, 1954 May 1, 1966 Jun 27, 1966	Oct 31, 1969 Apr 18, 1954 Oct 3, 1954 Jun 26, 1966 Oct 31, 1969
Edward M. Webster	Independent	DC	Apr 10, 1947	Jun 30, 1956
Robert F. Jones	Republican	Ohio	Sept 5, 1947	Sept 19, 1952
Wayne Coy   Chairman	Democrat	Indiana	Dec 29, 1947 Dec 29, 1947	Feb 21, 1952 Feb 21, 1952
George E. Sterling	Republican	Maine	Jan 2, 1948	Sept 30, 1954
Frieda B. Hennock	Democrat	New York	Jul 6, 1948	Jun 30, 1955
Robert T. Bartley	Democrat	Texas	Mar 6, 1952	Jun 30, 1972
Eugene H. Merrill	Democrat	Utah	Oct 6, 1952	Apr 15, 1953
John C. Doerfer   Chairman	Republican	Wisconsin	Apr 15, 1953 Jul 1, 1957	Mar 10, 1960 Mar 10, 1960
Robert E. Lee   Interim Chairman   Chairman	Republican	Illinois	Oct 6, 1953 Feb 5, 1981 Apr 13, 1981	Jun 30, 1981 Apr 12, 1981 May 18,1981
George McConnaughey   Chairman	Republican	Ohio	Oct 4, 1954	Jun 30, 1957
Frederick W. Ford   Chairman	Republican	West Virginia	Aug 29, 1957 Mar 15, 1960	Dec 31, 1964 Mar 1, 1961
John S. Cross	Democrat	Arkansas	May 23, 1958	Sept 30, 1962
Charles H. King	Republican	Michigan	Jul 19, 1960	Mar 2, 1961
Newton N. Minow   Chairman	Democrat	Illinois	Mar 2, 1961 Mar 2, 1961	Jun 1, 1963 Jun 1, 1963
E. William Henry   Chairman	Democrat	Tennessee	Oct 2, 1962 Jun 2, 1963	May 1, 1966 May 1, 1966
Kenneth A. Cox	Democrat	Washington	Mar 26, 1963	Aug 31, 1970
Lee Loevinger	Democrat	Minnesota	Jun 11, 1963	Jun 30, 1968
James J. Wadsworth	Republican	New York	May 5, 1965	Oct. 31, 1969
Nicholas Johnson	Democrat	Iowa	Jul 1 1966	Dec 5, 1973
H. Rex Lee	Democrat	DC	Oct 28, 1968	Dec 31, 1973
Dean Burch   Chairman	Republican	Arizona	Oct 31, 1969 Oct 31, 1969	Mar 8, 1974 Mar 8, 1974
Robert Wells	Republican	Kansas	Nov 6, 1969	Nov 1, 1971
Thomas J. Houser	Republican	Illinois	Jan 6, 1971	Oct 5, 1971
Charlotte T. Reid	Republican	Illinois	Oct 8, 1971	Jul 1, 1976
Richard E. Wiley   Chairman	Republican	Illinois	Jan 5, 1972 Mar 8, 1974	Oct 13, 1977 Oct 13, 1977
Benjamin L. Hooks	Democrat	Tennessee	Jul 5, 1972	Jul 25, 1977
James H. Quello   Chairman	Democrat	Michigan	Apr 30, 1974 Feb 5, 1993	Nov 1, 1997 Nov 28, 1993
Glen O. Robinson	Democrat	Minnesota	Jul 10, 1974	Aug 30, 1976
Abbott M. Washburn	Republican	Minnesota	Jul 10, 1974	Oct 1, 1982
Joseph R. Fogarty	Democrat	Rhode Island	Sept 17, 1976	Jun 30, 1983
Margita E. White	Republican	Sweden	Sept 23, 1976	Feb 28, 1979
Charles D. Ferris   Chairman	Democrat	Massachusetts	Oct 17, 1977 Oct 17, 1977	Apr 10, 1981 Feb 4, 1981
Tyrone Brown	Democrat	Virginia	Nov 15, 1977	Jan 31, 1981
Anne P. Jones	Republican	Massachusetts	Apr 7, 1979	May 31, 1983
Mark S. Fowler   Chairman	Republican	Canada	May 18, 1981 May 18, 1981	Apr 17, 1987 Apr 17, 1987
Mimi Weyforth Dawson	Republican	Missouri	Jul 6, 1981	Dec 3, 1987
Henry M. Rivera	Democrat	New Mexico	Aug 10, 1981	Sept 15, 1985
Stephen A. Sharp	Republican	Ohio	Oct 4, 1982	Jun 30, 1983
Dennis R. Patrick   Chairman	Republican	California	Dec 2, 1983 Apr 18, 1987	Apr 17, 1987 Aug 7, 1989
Patricia Diaz Dennis	Democrat	New Mexico	Jun 25, 1986	Sept 29, 1989
Alfred C. Sikes   Chairman	Republican	Missouri	Aug 8, 1989 Aug 8, 1989	Jan 19, 1993 Jan 19, 1993
Sherrie P. Marshall	Republican	Florida	Aug 21, 1989	Apr 30, 1993
Andrew C. Barrett	Republican	Illinois	Sept 8, 1989	Mar 30, 1996
Ervin S. Duggan	Democrat	Georgia	Feb 28, 1990	Jan 30, 1994
Reed E. Hundt   Chairman	Democrat	Maryland	Nov 29, 1993 Nov 29, 1993	Nov 3, 1997 Nov 3, 1997
Susan Ness	Democrat	New Jersey	May 19, 1994	May 30, 2001
Rachelle B. Chong	Republican	California	May 23, 1994	Nov 3, 1997
William E. Kennard   Chairman	Democrat	California	Nov 3, 1997 Nov 3, 1997	Jan 19, 2001 Jan 19, 2001
Harold W. Furchtgott-Roth	Republican	Tennessee	Nov 3, 1997	May 30, 2001
Michael K. Powell   Chairman	Republican	Virginia	Nov 3, 1997 Jan 22, 2001	Mar 17, 2005 Mar 17, 2005
Gloria Tristani	Democrat	New Mexico	Nov 3, 1997	Sept 7, 2001
Kathleen Q. Abernathy	Republican	Kentucky	May 31, 2001	Dec 9, 2005
Michael J. Copps   Acting Chairman	Democrat	Wisconsin	May 31, 2001 Jan 22, 2009	Dec 31, 2011 June 28, 2009
Kevin J. Martin   Chairman	Republican	North Carolina	Jul 3, 2001 Mar 18, 2005	Jan 19, 2009 Jan 19, 2009
Jonathan S. Adelstein	Democrat	South Dakota	Dec 3, 2002	June 29, 2009
Deborah Taylor Tate	Republican	Tennessee	Jan 3, 2006	Jan 3, 2009
Robert M. McDowell	Republican	Virginia	Jun 1, 2006	May 17, 2013
Julius Genachowski   Chairman	Democrat	New York	Jun 29, 2009	May 17, 2013
Meredith Attwell Baker	Republican	Texas	July 31, 2009	June 3, 2011
Mignon Clyburn   Acting Chairwoman	Democrat	South Carolina	August 3, 2009 May 20, 2013
Jessica Rosenworcel	Democrat	Connecticut	May 11, 2012
Ajit Pai	Republican	Kansas	May 14, 2012