Experimenter Publishing - WRNY

WRNY

KDKA in Pittsburgh was the first commercial radio station in the United States, having made their first broadcast in November 1920. By 1925 there were over 500 broadcast stations in the United States. KDKA was operated by Westinghouse Electric to help sell radio receivers. In addition to radio equipment manufacturers, many publishers were starting stations. Experimenter Publishing applied for and was granted a radio station license to transmit at 1160 kilocycles (kHz) with the call sign WRNY. (Over the next three years they would use 800 kHz, 1070 kHz, 970 kHz, 920 kHz and finally 1010 kHz.) The state of the art studio was in a room on the 18th floor of the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City and the 500 watt transmitter located on the hotel roof. The first broadcast was on June 12, 1925 and was reported in the New York Times. The opening speaker was former Senator Chauncey Depew followed by the "father of radio", Lee De Forest. This was followed by live musical entertainment. The Times noted Hugo Gernsback's Staccatone signal generator that was used before the station signed on and signing the end of programs. The Staccatone was a primitive music synthesizer described in the March 1924 Practical Electrics magazine. Experimenter Publishing used the radio station and the magazines to promote each other. The station call letters, WRNY, appeared on each magazine cover.

By 1927 there were over fifty radio stations and 1.5 million radio sets in the New York metropolitan area. There were so many stations it was common for stations to share the same frequency at different times during the day. The Radio Act of 1912 did not mention broadcasting and it was not clear who controlled radio stations, the states or the federal government. Early radio receivers were not very selective and there were frequent disputes over interference between stations with adjacent frequencies. In November 1926, WRNY (800 kHz) moved its transmitter from the Roosevelt Hotel to Coytesville, New Jersey (directly across the river from Manhattan). Radio station WHN (830 kHz) claimed this blocked their signal and alleged WRNY was a "pirate" broadcaster. In 1927 the Federal Radio Commission was established with the authority to regulate broadcast stations.

Hugo Gernsback first wrote about television in the December 1909 issue of Modern Electrics and had reported on the technical advances in his magazines. By 1925 mechanical scanning television systems were becoming available with resolutions of up to 60 scan lines. These mechanical systems were simple enough that a hobbyist could construct a television receiver. Vladimir K. Zworykin and Philo Farnsworth were developing electronic scanning systems that were the precursors of modern television. These would not be available for another decade.

In April 1928, Pilot Electric Manufacturing and WRNY announced that television broadcast would begin that fall. Pilot would provide the transmitting equipment. Pilot also sold the receivers but Experimenter Publishing magazines provided complete plans that allowed readers to build their own television. The system used by WRNY had 48 scan lines with 7.5 frames per second. The image was about 1.5 inches square. This low resolution picture (without sound) could be transmitted in the 5 kHz audio bandwidth of an AM radio station. (The NTSC 525 line standard definition television signal is allotted a 6 MHz bandwidth.) The first test broadcast was on August 12, 1928. Others had been transmitting television before this but WRNY was the first to have a regular scheduled program. Hugo Gernsback estimated that there were around 2000 television receivers in the New York area.