Another Radio Dial

 

I really like finding old radios that have presets will call signs on them. This one only has three but it still narrows down the era and the location. Lets dig into it. 

WJZ - I've written about this station many times in different contexts. There have been a few WJZs but we can still triangulate this easily enough.  Today 1300 WJZ-AM broadcasts sports radio from Baltimore MA, as they have since they dropped the WJFK call sign in 2008. Starting in June of 2021 they focused on a sports gambling format as "The Bet" which frankly used to be illegal but whatever, we don't really have laws anymore anyway. The more likely WJZ is New York's 770 WJZ-AM first signing on  in September of 1921 and finally dropping the brand in March of 1953 when ABC merged with United Paramount Theatres and flipped to MOR.  This 31 year window frame the timeline.

WRAK - The original 1170 WRAK-AM signed on in Escanaba, MI in March of 1923 at 50 watts. They operated at 100 watts and had a rocky start and were deleted four months later in June. It was then re-licensed in February of 1925 and deleted a second time in January of 1926. they were re-licensed again in February 1926. In 1928 the station relocated to Erie, PA. Somewhere in there they changed owners from the Economy Light Company  to Clarence.R. Cummins. Despite being a short-lived upper peninsula station, it leaves a legacy in the form of Economy Light & Power Company v. U.S. Supra. which helped defined legal navigability for water ways. C.R. Cummins I was also able to identify as the Assistant manager of the Colonial. He appears in 1911 and 1912 issues of variety magazine as the assistant manager of the Colonial and Columbia theatres in Erie, PA. But in 1912  the same magazine announces his move to the Aero Exhibition co. He appears in the John Elmer Reed book History of Erie Country, PA where he is described as an "amusement engineer." Cummins was born in Erie in 1882 to John M. and Mary E. Cummins. His father died in 1889. He got a degree in chemical engineering in Philadelphia. He returned to Erie and co-founded the Colonial Theatre. He went on to manage the Erie exposition and both local air auto shows.

WRAK was operating under a temporary authorization in 1927 because most stations were in 1927. The FRC has been formed and a slew of stations ht to file for formal licenses. By January 1928.  General Order 32, gathered up 164 stations and informed them all that they do not operate in the public interest. Many of these dissapeared forever. But WRAK lobbied to remain and managed to remain licensed but were reallocated on 1370 kHz at 30 watts and by 1929 had relocated to Williamsport, PA and moved to 1400 in 1941.  They were still operating at 100 watts in 1934, but were up to 250 by 1953. More here.

Perhaps the smallest of these three stations was WKOK-AM. Today it operates on 1070 from Sunbury, PA. It began as WJBU operated by Bucknell University, first licensed in 1925. In 1933 Bucknell sold it to Charles S. Blue to convert to commercial broadcasting. The license was reassigned in April, and the call sign was updated to WKOK in July. In 1936 it began a share-time arrangement with WBAX in Wilkes-Barre but that ended in 1939. In 1940 the FCC approved the NARBA changes. WKOK got an increase in power from 100 to 250 watts, and moved from 1210 kHz to 1240. The move to 1070 only came in 1961 but still operating as a daytimer, powering down from 10,000 watts to 1,000.  More here.

This made for an interesting set of stations. All of them had signed on by 1925, and all call signs are still in use today. Thankfully the highly directional WKOK and it's proximity to the relatively low power WRAK we can narrow the origin of this radio station to a few towns, probably on the west branch of the Susquehanna river: Selinsgrove, Sunbury, Lewisburg, Milton, and Williamsport.

My Name Is Not Merv Griffin

...With all due respect to Gary Muller, and the late great Dr. Demento. 

For the record, Merv is no stage name. He was born Mervyn Edward Griffin Jr., so that much is wholly true.  After founding Merv Griffin Enterprises in 1964 he began buying up small and medium market radio stations. At different times the total list included WPOP-AM Hartford, CT and WIOF-FM in Waterbury, CT; WMID-AM in Atlantic City and WGRF-FM in Pleasantville, NJ and in upstate New York WENE-AM and WMRV-FM in Endicott and WBAX-FM in Wilkes Barre. They also had WARD-AM in Pittston and two in Rhode Island WHJJ and WHJY. I count ten stations there but in their own accounting the Merv Griffin Radio Group  "bought, managed and sold 17 radio stations."  I'm still trying to find the balance of 7. 

Only one of those stations bore his name: WMRV-FM.  Originally on 105.5 as WENE-FM the station was a simulcast of WENE-AM. The call signs and programming changed in 1971 with the change in ownership. In march of 2013 it became WBNW under the ownership of Clear Channel. It remains a top 40 station even today.

Just two years after he picked up WBAX in 1971 Griffin and his wife, Julann, divorced just two years later in 1973. She retained ownership of many of the stations as part of the settlement.  There were negotations but in the end Julann got 4 of his then seven stations.  In 1986, following his retirement, Griffin sold his production company, Merv Griffin Enterprises, to Columbia Pictures for $250 million.  Merv Griffin then founded Griffin Group in the months following that sale. The WMRV calls now reside on 93.9 in Danville, NY on a stick that was formerly WDNY and WACZ.

WKOK at Fort Augusta

I am entertained by radio stations built in odd places, or radio stations that build odd places around them. The text on the postcard above reads "Model of Ft. Augusta on the grounds of Sunbury's Radio Station, River Front Drive, Sunbury, PA. The calls are not disclosed but that radio station was 1210 WKOK-AM. But FYI: The calls are on 1070 these days. (They were also on 1240 from 1941 to 1964.) They have been owned by the Sunbury Broadcasting corporation for 78 years.

The real Fort Augusta was a British fortification built in 1756 to protect against French and Indian raids in what was then claimed to be their westernmost settlement. It was dismantled in 1794. The remaining structures burned down in 1852. The commanders residence (the Hunter House) was rebuilt by his grandson.  In 1920 the State of Pennsylvania acquired the property. In 1931 the Hunter House was acquired by the state as well and it became a museum. The tract  serves as headquarters for the Northumberland County Historical Society (1150 North Front Street.)

That address was key to my stumbling upon this. The street address for WKOK-AM in the 1935 Broadcasting yearbook was also 1150 North Front Street. The WKOK-AM studios were then located in the basement of the Fort Augusta building. WKOK-AM didn't sign on until may of 1933 and was the first commercial radio station in Sunbury. Their license was the handiwork of Professor C.W. Halligan of Bucknell University. In 1924 he made a little experimental transmitter and went on air with 50 watts on 1420 under the call letters WJBQ-AM. In 1925 he changed calls to WJBU-AM and increased power to 100 watts. In 1928 he was shifted to 1210 and made to share time with WBAX-AM. Then as now running a station was difficult and expensive. On May 12th 1933 they sold the station and it's hardware to the Sunbury Broadcasting Corp. C.W. Halligan is an odd character, he wrote occasionaly for Popular Science and later worked for Bell labs. He may be the same one that headed up MITRE.

In 1947 Sunbury Broadcasting launched WKOK-FM on 94.1. It simulcasted the AM programming for years. In 1951 National Geographic stopped by to do a photo op with the station engineer who posed in the dry moat of the model fort. The stick on 94.1 Sunbury changed calls to WQKX in the 1950s. In 1973 they stopped publishing the Front Street address in the radio directories and went to a PO Box. I suspect that's about when they moved to their new location parting ways with the little fort in their front yard. The scale model is still at  1150 North Front Street and still replicates the original structure from drawings to one sixth scale.

Rev. Jozef Murgaš

Here is yet another claimant for the title of "inventor of radio." I read a Pennsylvania history book, and under a short media section it wrote much of KDKA of course but also Rev. Josef Murgas. And despite the fact that Marconi had been making transmissions for a decade already, Murgas was declared the inventor...

I find varying accounts of his works. The most lionized was a biography sponsored by the Pennsylvania Slovak Union; written by Stephen J. Palickar in 1950. Palickar was a Slovak nationalist who wrote frequently of their culture past and present. I am not saying that he's an unreliable source. I'll quote Regan; "Trust but verify."

The facts are that Murgas was born on February 17, 1864, in the Tajov, Slovakia and studied the wireless telegraph on his own while in seminary before he came to America. He was a bit of an autodidact, his technical knowledge all came from his own studies. He was experimenting with wireless in the basement of the seminary in 1898. He was strongly interested in painting, botany, electricity, and of course Catholicism. In 1896 he came to Wilkes-barre, PA to establish a parish. He continued his radio experiments almost immediately.

Murgas had read the 1888 paper by Hertz that described the transmission of radio waves through the "ether." The paper was wrong of course, but not so wrong that it stopped Murgas or even Oliver Lodge from transmitting radio waves. Marconi was at work with his first transmissions in 1895 with little disagreement with Hertz so there was little reason it should stop Murgas in 1905.

In 1904 Murgas got the first two of his eventual 13 U.S. patents (759852 and 759826.) He formed the Universal Aether Telegraph Company to raise funds for further experimentation. The Electric Signal Company, of Philadelphia was an investor. It's president Mr. Joseph F. Stokes has a keen interest in the experiments. Murgas erected a 73 watt transmitting station in Wilkes-Barre and a receiving station in Scranton, PA. The Early Radio history website has a great article on this. Josef began public demonstrations in 1905. Fred Kirkendall, then mayor of Wilkes-Barre, transmitted a message in Morse code to Mayor Alexander R. Connell of Scranton.

The history books are full of a lot of Murgas baloney unfortunately. His device is described as emitting a "direct beam wave." His biography stated "only the station for whom a message is intended will receive it." Murgas was using a spark-gap transmitter so that's obviously untrue. Anyone with a cohering circuit in range was receiving it too. But in 1905 that was a short list indeed. His receiving device had no tuning circuit. It relied mostly on the length of the long wire antenna to tune the signal. In July of 1905 Electrical World and Engineer Magazine described it thus:

The antenna is composed of 10 cables made of No. 10 B. & S. stranded, well-insulated copper wires. Each cable hangs from a separate insulator of particularly well-insulated construction. Each insulator is a rubber rod 30 in. long and 1.5 in. thick, with outer petticoat tubes of polished hard rubber. The insulation of the antenna cables is practically perfect, hanging as they do from a cross rope connected to the top of the mast arms. At a height of 30 ft. from the ground all of the cables are fastened to another cross rope attached at each end to a 150,000-volt insulator, and from that point they are gathered in a bunch and brought into the operating room through a hole in the center of a square plate glass window.

One article wrote that he used the "Slaby-Arco system" for his tuner. thsi was not off-the-shelf hardware, it was more like a kit that required you make half the parts yourself. More importantly, the Slaby-Arco system was not just a tuner, it was a transmission and reception pair made for the wireless in 1901. If he was using that name-brand wireless set in 1905, he didn't invent it. None-the-less when reading his patents, they make more sense in terms of modifying Slaby-Arco hardware.

If these modifications were patentable, they may have contributed to the cannon so to speak. His spark gap transmitter for example, was mounted in some kind of spinning barrel that alternated carbon and iron contacts. I think this may have been used to control the timing of the sparks, like a long series of dots in Morse code. And he does refer to it as a "rotary spark gap." He claimed it raised the frequency of the spark audibly. He was trying to make a continuous signal from a quick succession of sparks over one long spark. There is actually some logic to this. He patented that rotary transmitter in 1903. But the patent itself describes it as "imperfect." He was able to modulate this to broadcast both a high and a low tone. His idea was that these could be controlled to alternate like a dot and a dash. Skilled operators could transmit messages at about 40 words a minute.

Supposedly Edison even came down to inspect his apparatus as did Marconi. But in late 1905 gale force winds destroyed his towers, the 50 foot masts collapsed. He needed more money to continue his experiments with radio. His telegraph company was now selling public stock so the funds for this were on hand. Murgas went on to attempt to conduct signal through the earth itself which failed miserably. This seemed to be the turning point. The parties that his investors thought would extend further funding such as the U.S. Navy did not. He filed a few more patents after this but largely faded from public view. He died in 1929 after a fishing trip.

His legacy lived on though, one of his assistants, John Stenger went on to found WBAX in 1922 which still broadcasts today on 1240 in Wilkes-Barre.