pssc@labrea.stanford.edu (03/21/91)
Since I still seem to have troubles reaching addresses other than directly on IGC or EcoNet, and several people asked for information which I have attempted to send directly, I thought I'd try to post this reply to the Digest. I'd rather be redundant than non-responsive and am seeking additional information, as well. The book on which I promised further information was a biography (I am reasonably certain there has never been an autobiography) of Major Armstrong. The title: "Man of High Fidelity." Author: Lawrence Lessing. Publisher, J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1956. Library of Congress Number: 56-11677. Anyone interested in this subject might also want to take a look at "The Golden Web," by Erik Barnouw, the middle volume of a three-volume set on this history of broadcasting in the U.S. Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1968. Library of Congress Number: 66-22258. It covers some of the same ground, but not as detailed as in the Lessing book. Any good University department of communications would have it in the library; the Lessing book may prove harder to find. Some questions had been raised in the Digest about who was where and when. According to both books, but I took most of this literally from Barnouw, Armstrong went on the air with a regular schedule and the experimental license W2XMR (I was wrong in my first posting), with a full 50kw, from Alpine, New Jersey, in 1939. Two Yankee Network stations picked the programs up and re-transmitted them at 2kW. In March, 1934 he went on the air (power not known to me) from the Empire State Building, but the receiver population was confined to one, a set operated by a friend of his in Long Island. This transmitter was removed (by request of RCA) in 1935. While AT & T was guilty of some shenanigans in regard to Armstrong, the main villain, as I'd previously noted, was RCA and the "General." If anyone looks into this further, I am curious about when WNYE-FM, a station owned and operated by the Board of Education of the City of New York and at which I worked as a high school kid in the early 40s, went on the air. I had thought it was 1939 and that Chicago had gone on the air with a similar one even two years earlier, but can find no trace of this in either of the two books. It may have been, but the educator who founded it has been deceased for about ten years now, that the educational broadcasts originally were aired on WNYC-AM, the City's Municipal Station and later shifted to FM. I know they were FM in 1941 because I was then a freshman in high school and did station breaks along with other chores. The station was located at Brooklyn Technical High School but swept in students from high schools all over the city. We did programs under the rubric: "The All City High School Radio Workshop." Some of us acted, some directed, some produced, some did sound effects or ran the console, some used a broom to good effect. Great training and many of us went on to careers in radio broadcasting; some have even become famous. By that time, or shortly thereafter, all New York City schools were equipped with the necessary "special receivers." This may be more than any respondent wants to know, but I'd be appreciative of anything other than the above you learn.