First Submarine Broadcast

As with all firsts I will first define my terms. By Submarine I mean the craft which travels underwater. I also mean that the broadcast occurred while the craft was fully submerged. A submarine on the surface is no different than a boat, right? This type of transmission was employed throughout WWII by all sides so it would be no surprise that it was developed before the conflict began in Europe. What's surprising is how much earlier.

The Navy took an early interest in radio, they were outfitting their fleet with radios as early as 1916, but only for use at the surface. Some sources I found give the first Submarine broadcast a date of December 7th 1930. These give a location of New London, Connecticut. I think we can all assume they mean off shore. More specifically "they" were 10 miles off shore in Long Island Sound. By "They" I mean that there were in fact two submarines; the USS 0-4 and the USS 0-3. First Lieutenant Norman S. Ives gave a brief description of the mechanics of submarines aboard the USS 0-4 while submerging. Afterward Lieutenant George C. Hern gave a similar talk and also allowed the listeners to hear the acoustics of the submerging USS 0-3. The shortwave signal was picked up and rebroadcast by WEAF, with announcers George Hicks and James Wallington presiding.

The book "Connecticut Firsts" by Wilson Faude cites this 1930 event as the first submarine broadcast as does the "Kane Book of Famous Firsts". The problem with the off-cited date of 1930... is that there is a very credible citation in the Bureau of Engineering Monthly Report of Radio and Sound for an event 10 years earlier. Since this was a prepared broadcast it is obvious that there was testing even technological steps that had to precede it. A photograph of the USS 0-7 here clearly has a radio on board. (pictures) More here.

In the year 1919 the U.S. Navy sponsored a joint project to achieve transmission to and reception by submarines. This project involved the Edison Society, the U.S. Bureau of Standards, the Hammond Laboratory, and the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company. They tested an array of antenna and transmission types. The most crucial discovery was by Willoughby and Lowell of the Bureau of Standards. It was discovered that the very low frequencies suffered much less attenuation in sea water. Attenuation limits the range of radio signals and is affected by the materials a signal must pass through. We call this Path Loss. (I'll get into that in detail some other day.)

In their culminating test, a U.S. Navy submarine off the coast of New London received a signal on 24 kc that was broadcast from a radio station at Nauen, Germany, 3,234 miles away. Furthermore.. the 1921 Text book "Principles of radio communication" by John Harold Morecroft et al. clearly spelled out proper use of loop antennas on submerged submarines. This leaves two questions.
1. Why do so many texts list the 1930 date?
2. What happened in the intervening 11 years?

Postal Radio WWX-AM

Radio began early in our nation's capital. The radio band lit up in 1912 when the Department of Commerce authorized two pioneering experimental stations. One was operated by the Navy in Anacostia, NSF/NOF, and one by the Post Office, 1160 WWX-AM. Government stations were exempt from the Limited Commercial requirement that private stations carried. Stations operated by the U.S. Navy were assigned calls starting with N. The U.S. Army stations were supposed to use calls starting with WUA thru WVZ and WXA thru WZZ. Somehow, the Army loaned some calls to the post office. Great history at the centennial of flight website here.

WWX-AM was unlike all other experimental AMs. It and WWQ in Bellafonte Pennsylvania were a part of Air Mail Radio (AMR) and were the predecessors of modern Flight service stations. It wasn't until September of 1919 that The post office commissioned facilities for the stations. How they operated (and who) for the 5 interim years I do not know. By 1920 the Post office was operating a transcontinental service and was actively building airmail radio stations to support this service. By 1921 they had commissioned seventeen stations, one at each of the airfields they used. [Note the history of WWQ is even more murky since it's calls were also used by a US merchant ship at the same time!]
great history here.

Despite their progress the Airmail act of 1925 was passed and with it government operation of airmail came to an end. [On the plus side Fed Ex and UPS came to begin] On August 12, 1918, the Post Office Department took over airmail service from the U.S. Army Air Service (USAAS). Assistant Postmaster General Otto Praeger appointed Benjamin B. Lipsner, who left the USAAS, to head the civilian-operated Air Mail Service. One of Lipsner's first acts was to hire four pilots, each with at least 1,000 hours flying experience, paying them an average of $4,000 per year. The department also abandoned the polo grounds in Washington, D.C., and moved north to the larger airfield at College Park, Maryland, where it would begin its route to Philadelphia. was moved out of the post office's Monmouth facility and into The Aeronautical Office and their College park airstrip. http://www.pgparks.com/places/historic/cpam/3radio.html

In 1919 the U.S. Commerce Department formally established a broadcast service, with 833 KHz set aside for entertainment broadcasts, and 619 KHz designated for official government market and weather reports. In the Washington D.C. area only WIAY and WQAW received an authorization for 833 KHz. The first broadcast station licensed in the Washington area was WJH-AM on December 8, 1921. Fourteen days later WDM-AM and WDW-AM, received licences tying for 25th place nationwide.

Some stations survived and prospered and in fact are here today. Other became deleted. Of the above stations WJH was deleted in 1924, WDM was deleted in 1925, WDW was deleted in 1922, WQAW and WIAY were both off air by th end of 1924.

While all these stations were going off air the Navy started a second experimental station, 690 NAA in Arlington. It was built as a radiotelegraph station in 1913, right after NOF and WWX, and was located next to Fort Myer in Arlington, VA. In the mid-twenties NAA started to transmit on the broadcast band. Although its broadcasts occasionally included band concerts and speeches, it was mostly used for time signals. By 1927 it was one of three stations on air in that city. The other two were WRC on 640AM and WMAL, then on 1410. Everything else was gone. It wasn't until the early 1940's that radio recovered in D.C.

As typical, much of my D.C. radio history comes from Dave at http://www.dcrtv.org