: FRANK CONRAD Pioneer Broadcaster Born: May 4, 1874 Died: December 10, 1941 Pittsburgh, PA Miami, FL Frank Conrad, pioneer in public broadcasting, centered world attention on KDKA, Pittsburgh, in the early twenties. The urge to work with tools took him out of seventh grade at the Starrett Grammar School, and he went to work as a bench-hand in the Westinghouse plant at Garrison Alley, Pittsburgh. That was in 1890. Aptitude for mechanics soon advanced him to the testing department. His first important contribution was the circular type watt-hour meter to measure the consumption of electric power, and it became a universal home installation. Intrigued with time synchronization and a desire to have his watch correct to the second, he built a wireless receiver to pick up the time signals of the Naval Observatory broadcast by station NAA, Arlington, Virginia. After conducting experimental work for the government during the First World War, he returned to his amateur radio station 8XK in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania. The radiophone had developed rapidly during the conflict. Conrad rebuilt his station in his garage and began to broadcast phonograph music and to chat with other amateurs. A Pittsburgh department store advertised wireless sets that could pick up Conrad's broadcasts. The idea clicked and the response was so encouraging that Westinghouse officials, chiefly H.P. Davis, vice president, saw the possibilities and applied for a commercial license. The call assigned was KDKA. As a pioneer station, it broadcast the Harding-Cox election bulletins on November 2, 1920, starting a "craze" that swept the country to become a vast new industry - broadcasting! As a result the demand for radio receivers was tremendous. Building crystal detector sets at home became a national pastime with tuning coils wound on cereal boxes and condensers made of tinfoil from the florist shop. Electrical manufacturers, overcome with the demand, expanded plant facilities to fill orders from every city and hamlet in the land. The historic "Radio Music Box" plan of development, which would make radio a household utility, as proposed by David Sarnoff in 1916, had come true. At the time (of his 1916 writing) Sarnoff had pointed to the endless possibilities of utilizing radio for recieving concerts, lectures, events of national importance and baseball scores in the home. In fact, he estimated that if his plan materialized, it would seem reasonable to expect the sale of a million "Radio Music Boxes" within a period of three years, with actual sales of home instruments reaching $75,000,000. (Footnote: Sarnoff, in 1916 the assistant traffic manager of the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America, embodied the "Radio Music Box" proposal in a letter of recommmendation to E.J. Nally, general manager. Sarnoff's accurate foresight was revealed by the fact that in the three years of 1922, 1923 and 1924 RCA's sales of home radios amounted to $83,500,000. Sarnoff became president of RCA in 1930.) During the war it had been assumed that radiotelephony should be developed as a confidential means of communications, but Conrad's experience brought a turn in this tide of thought. Suddenly it was realized that the radiophone's field was one of wide publicity, in fact, the only means of instantaneous, direct mass communication ever devised; here was a service of universal application. There was also a notion in the pre-broadcasting era that frequencies above 1,500 kiloHertz would never be of use because the ground loss was so high. Conrad proved that these frequencies were extremely valuable when the skywave was used. He also showed that the portion of radiation that went skyward at a low angle could be reflected back to earth at a remote point, from an ionized layer above the surface of the earth. His experiments indicated that a series of reflections between the earth and the ionized layer take place before the signal eventually returns to earth at the desired receiving station. Radio engineers, therefore, learned to use these new frequencies for international communications, although they are of little use for local broadcasting because of the high ground losses. Attending a London conference in 1924 to discuss establishment of a radio link between Europe and South America, Conrad staged a dramatic demonstration of short waves by picking up signals directly from Pittsburgh. Revealing how the event marked a milestone in international radio communications, Conrad said: "The consensus of opinion was the very long waves should be used ... I discussed with David Sarnoff the advisability of proposing a short-wave transmitter ... I had taken with me a small short-wave receiver, and found that by using a curtain rod in my hotel room for an aerial, I could receive Pittsburgh on short-wave fairly well ... so we arranged for Pittsburgh to sned extracts from newspapers by code. Mr. Sarnoff played the part of receiving operator, and during the course of an hour or so, in my bedroom, he took down an amount of copy which was practically one day's traffic of the British Marconi Company. At the meeting held next day, he threw a bomb into the group by exhibiting the copy which he had taken. "Incidentally, the success of our little demonstration must have given Mr. Sarnoff some concern as to what to do with several million dollar's worth of long-wave transmitters which had been projected for erection by the Radio Corporation of America on Long Island. Apparently he dissolved his problem because the project as a whole was dropped and short- wave transmitters replaced the proposed long-wave system." (Footnote: Speech at the American Institute of New York City, February 2, 1940.) Conrad was appointed general engineer of the Westinghouse Company in 1904 and assistant chief engineer in 1921. He supervised the development of newer transmitting equipment and the design of the WD-11 radio tube operated from a dry cell, which played an important part in making the first domestic electronic tube receivers possible in compact, simplified form. He recieved the honorary degree of Doctor of Science from the University of Pittsburgh in 1928. For his work in radio he was awarded the Morris Liebmann Prize by the Institute of Radio Engineers in 1926; the Edison Medal of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in 1931; the John Scott Medal of the Institute of Philadelphia in 1933; the Lamme Medal of the A.I.E.E. in 1936; the Gold Medal of the American Institute of the City of New York on February 1, 1940. Oddly enough, radio, the medium in which Conrad flashed the first election returns, was used during the week of his death to broadcast world-wide President Roosevelt's address aksing Congress to declare war on the Japanese Empire. Three days later, microphones in the nation's Capitol picked up a second presidential request, adn the immediate response of Congress, voting hostilities against Germany and Italy. Radio, since Conrad's pioneering efforts, had become a medium in which history is heard before it is written -- a medium in which news is born.