FINLAY: Hello again. I'm Mary Lou Finlay. BUDD: And I'm Barbara Budd. This is As It Happens, part two.
BUDD: In your mind's eye, come with me into a little wooden garage in suburban Pittsburgh. It's 1920. There are orange burlap swatches on the ceiling hiding light bulbs, a vase of gladiolus sit on a table in the corner. This is the world's first radio station. It was set up by a man named Frank Concord [sic], and the station later became station KDKA, which is still going strong. However, the garage is in danger of being demolished.
BUDD: Before we find out more about it, we thought we should listen to a little piece of history. Here's what the first emission at station KDKA sounded like. BROADCASTER: This is KDKA of the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We shall now broadcast the election returns. We are receiving these returns through the co-operation and by special arrangements with the Pittsburgh Post and Sun. The election returns will be broadcast as soon as they are received by us here at KDKA. We'd appreciate it if anyone hearing this broadcast would communicate with us, as we are very anxious to know how far the broadcast is reaching. BUDD: That was how the first KDKA broadcast of the American election results of 1920 sounded. It came from Frank Concord's garage in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania. BUDD: The garage has been neglected, but now a committee wants to turn the building into the centrepiece of a National Broadcasting Museum. Rick Harris is the chairman of the Save the Garage Foundation. He's in Pittsburgh. FINLAY: Mr. Harris.
HARRIS: Yes.
FINLAY: We were just listening to an excerpt of one of those early broadcasts. It was election night, 1920, I guess.
HARRIS: That was actually a man by the name of Leo Rosenburg who worked for Westinghouse, but Conrad that night was actually in his garage workshop monitoring the broadcast and was ready to take over if the equipment in the new KDKA station had failed.
FINLAY: Tell us a little bit about Mr. Conrad and his garage.
HARRIS: Sure. Well, Frank Conrad was a seventh-grade-educated genius, I think, who had got a job working for Westinghouse in 1890 and rose up through the company. He had over 200 inventions and patents during his nearly 50-year career with the company, but he also was interested in radio, and radio was a technology that was just emerging at the turn of the century, and he set up an amateur radio station in the second floor of the garage behind his home in the Pittsburgh suburb of Wilkinsburg.
HARRIS: This was in 1916, and during the course of the next few years, he pioneered all of the concepts that make up the modern commercial broadcasting that we know today. And that garage is still standing today, and it's at the centre of an effort to establish a broadcasting museum here in Pittsburgh. FINLAY: What kind of shape is the garage in now?
HARRIS: Well, it's currently unoccupied, but it's changed very little since Conrad's time. The current owners of the garage have donated the building to us, but the sad part is that we have to remove the building from the property because the rest of the property is for sale and the buyer is going to come in in a couple of months and tear everything down, - FINLAY: Oh, no. HARRIS: - including the garage if it's still there. FINLAY: Oh, no.
Do you know where you're going to move it? HARRIS: Well, we do have a site to move it to, and we have some funds raised, but we're hoping to at the very least dismantle the garage and reassemble it on this other site about four miles away. FINLAY: Okay. Back to Mr. Conrad, then. How long did he operate this station? What did he put on it?
HARRIS: Well, it's interesting. He started out getting into radio really on a bet on the accuracy of his watch with a co- worker. In order to really determine exactly what time it was, the only place you could do that was to tune in to Arlington, Virginia, to the Naval Observatory there, which broadcast time signals on the hour. So Conrad built a little radio receiver that picked up those time signals, and his interest in radio from that point just continued really unabated.
HARRIS: He had built this transmitting station in the garage, and during the World War I years, when amateurs weren't allowed to be on the air, he got special permission because Westinghouse was supplying the military with communications equipment, and in that garage was developed some of the very first airplane radio communication equipment and it was under military guard during the war because they were worried about espionage. And there's a lot of interesting stories about that, but really, after the war was over and amateurs were back on the air, Conrad now had this latest technology with voice radio, and he was able to communicate with other amateurs at great distances. HARRIS: And one day in 1919, he got tired of the endless hours of speaking into the microphone that he substituted a photograph record and played music over the air, and inadvertently discovered that there was a large audience of people who had built their own very simple radio sets - crystal sets as they called them in those days - and were listening to these amateurs talk back and forth. And when they heard this music, they wrote or phoned Conrad for more music and more news and to try to play something at a certain time so they could convince a relative for example that music could be played over the air.
HARRIS: He started then twice weekly regular programs of music and news and weather and sports, and continued on through 1920 until his boss at Westinghouse discovered that there was a great interest in the Pittsburgh area and surrounding area of these concerts, wireless concerts as they called them, - FINLAY: M'hm. HARRIS: - that he was putting on. Conrad by then had exhausted his own supply of phonograph records, so he went to a music store in Wilkinsburg and explained his dilemma to the owner who was happy to lend him all of the records he could use as long as he mentioned where they could be purchased.
FINLAY: Yes.
HARRIS: And the store owner soon found out that the records that Conrad played sold much better than others, and really set the tone as commercial advertising being the basis for broadcasting as it is today.
FINLAY: Did he ever get around to putting on live music and drama?
HARRIS: Oh, yes. A couple of his sons were musicians, and they had a small music room on the house, and we have a photograph showing the wire coming out from the music room into the garage where they did what really would have been some of the first remote broadcasts. And they had other performers playing instruments and other live vocal things. In fact, one of the things that convinced Westinghouse to go forward with their own station was an ad that appeared in one of the local newspapers here that described such a concert that Conrad put on including some recorded phonograph records as well as some live music as well.
FINLAY: I guess it's hard for us to imagine the excitement that must have existed around this medium in those early days. HARRIS: I think it is. It's very difficult for me anyway to even imagine what the world would be like today - FINLAY: Without it. HARRIS: - without radio or television, because we're so dependent upon it, and it's changed our world in ways I don't think we even understand yet. But in those days, it was newspapers and magazines and the printed word that people got their information about the world from, and here they could now put on a pair of headphones and tune in to first Conrad and then later his successor in KDKA and get all sorts of news and information and entertainment free of charge without any wires.
HARRIS: The other real claim to fame that may be the equal of the start of broadcasting is that he pioneered shortwave broadcasting which allowed radio signals to be received worldwide at a time when signals faded after a few hundred miles. But Conrad was able to show that these shortwave signals actually continued well beyond that and bounced off the atmosphere and came down in places around the world. So by the mid-1920s, KDKA and Westinghouse were doing programs that were being received in Europe and Australia and South Africa, all from Pittsburgh and all being able to be picked up by people really for the first time in the history of the planet worldwide by radio.
FINLAY: Your project is some kind of a National Historic Trust project now?
HARRIS: Yes.
We recently got a designation from the National Trust for Historic Preservation. They call it a Save America's Treasures Project. While it doesn't mean direct money into the project, it enhances our ability when we go after funding to know that we've received this designation. And right now we've raised about $50,000 and we probably need another $25,000 or $30,000 just to move the garage and then maybe another $50,000 to $100,000 to reconstruct it on this other site. So we're still in the process of raising money, and it's really ironic because, as I'm sure you know, broadcasting generates a tremendous amount of revenue every year in ads alone - FINLAY: Yeah. HARRIS: - I think some $54-billion in the United States between radio and television, and yet we can't seemingly come up with even $100,000 or a $200,000 to preserve the birthplace of the industry. FINLAY: You're not getting any money from the city of Pittsburgh, from Westinghouse, from RCA? HARRIS: Unfortunately, no, and we've been to all of those sources - FINLAY: Really? HARRIS: - and have been turned down, and I don't know why. Maybe it's just not - preserving history is not a priority in the minds of some people, but to me, if you don't know where you've been, you really don't have a good idea of where you're going. And losing this garage, which is to broadcasting what Henry Ford's workshop would be to the automotive industry or the Wright Brothers' workshop is to the aviation industry, it's like cutting off the roots of a tree. It's a shame that the birthplaces of these other industries, many other industries, have been preserved in museums, and yet we can't seem to find enough interest for broadcasting. FINLAY: Well, good luck to you.
HARRIS: Thank you so much.
FINLAY: Thank you. Nice to talk to you on the radio.
HARRIS: M'hm. Bye now.
FINLAY: Bye.
BUDD: Rick Harris is the chairman of the Save the Garage Foundation in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. You can find out more about this story if you just visit us at our website: cbc.ca/asithappens.
BUDD: It always sounds like something from a David Kronenberg movie or something, people waking up while they're still on the operating table. But evidently it happens more than we care to imagine.Last night we heard from an anaesthesiologist in Scotland who has tackled the problem of surgical wake-up. Gavin Kenny has invented a device to keep patients asleep until they reach the recovery room. That story is responsible for this rather hair- raising tale our Talkback machine received.
CALLER: Hi. It's Susan Brough calling from Gorse Landing, Ontario. I'm calling because I was one of those lucky people that woke up in the middle of my surgery, and this happened about 12 years ago, so I'm awfully glad to hear that they're doing something about it. I had heard about these clicks at least six years ago, and to think that it isn't in Toronto yet. CALLER: I mean, it's amazing, because when you wake up - I had one of those anaesthetics where you are paralysed, so I could hear myself screaming and I could see the lights above you on the table, but I couldn't do anything. And it was ages that I could hear that screaming in my brain still, but it didn't really bother me because I figured, oh, what the heck, this is just life, and life doesn't always go our way. So I didn't let it upset me too much, but it is quite a psychedelic experience, I can tell you. So I hope that Toronto brings in this automatic anaesthesia that is introduced as they realize that somebody is not absolutely under the anaesthetic. Anyway, bye-bye.
BUDD: Well, thanks for your call. We're glad you're okay and listening and even calling Talkback, too. You can join the elite club by dialling 416-205-3331.
