MISCELLANY
1.The first broadcasting stations of the world.
Speech was first transmitted for reception by the general public from Washington D.C.in 1915 when Europe was still at war.During 1916 the first `broadcasting' station in the world began regular transmissions from a New York suburb.
In 1919 Dr.Frank Conrad, then Assistant Chief Engineer of the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company, set up, in his own garage in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, a 75-watt transmitter (8XK) from which he broadcast musical entertainment for other radio enthusiasts.This was the first continued scheduled broadcasting in history.The Westinghouse Company realised the potential value of Conrad's work and built KDKA, the first regular commercial broadcasting station in the world, which began its career by announcing the results of the Harding-Cox election returns on the November 2nd 1920.
The first broadcasting station in Europe was PCGG which began transmitting on November 6th 1919 from the Hague in Holland.Hanso Steringa Idzerda, a 35 year old engineer, obtained the first licence granted in Europe for the transmission of music and speech for general reception, as opposed to the wireless telegraphy stations which had been operating point to point services.From the end of 1919 to 1924 this station transmitted a series of musical programmes three times a week called `The Hague Concerts'.The original wavelength of 670 metres was later changed to 1,150 metres.
At that time most of the people who heard these concerts would have been using headphones and they would not have been very critical about the quality of the sounds they were hearing compared to the magical novelty of snatching voices and music apparently out of thin air.This historic transmitter can be seen in the museum of the Dutch Postal Services in the Hague.
The first transmissions of speech and music in England were made from Chelmsford, Essex, when a 15kW transmitter of the MarconiCompany began regular transmissions in February of 1920.
In the summer of 1924 the world's greatest radio companies - British Marconi, German Telefunken, French Radio Telegraphie and AmericanR.C.A.- met in London to discuss transatlantic communications.The learned gentlemen all agreed that the Atlantic could only be spanned by ultra-long waves of 10,000 to 20,000 metres, which would require the use of hundreds of kilowatts of power and receivers as large as a trunk, not to speak of antennas more than a mile long.Dr.Frank Conrad, who was also present at the conference, had brought with him a small short wave receiver less than a foot square.When he connected it to a curtain rod as an antenna the faint but clear voices of his assistants in the U.S.A.were heard from nearly four thousand miles away.With this spectacular demonstration he administered the deathblow to all plans for high power ultra-long-wavelength transmitters, and from then on the commercial companies concentrated their efforts on developing equipment for international communications on the short waves.
With present-day electronic news gathering and world-wide satellite links, the problems faced by broadcasting organisations fifty years ago when transmitting programmes which did not originate in a studio were thought to be very complex.In the B.B.C.Handbook for 1928 there was an article entitled `Outside Broadcast Problems' which said,"Work outside the studio is often the most difficult that the broadcast engineer can be asked to undertake; not so much from a technical as from a practical point of view.Very often he has to take his apparatus to some place he has never seen before, set up his amplifiers in most awkward positions, test his lines to the studio, decide on his microphone placings and run out the wiring in the space of an hour or so, with little previous experience to guide him.It is in fairly echoey halls, theatres and churches that the majority of outside broadcasts take place.For example, a sermon preached in a church would be intelligible probably to the whole of the congregation.But to render it intelligibly on a loud-speaker, the microphone would have to be, say, not more than ten feet from the speaker.In broadcasting a play from a theatre, when the speakers are moving about, the only way of dealing with the problem is to use several microphonesand a mixing device which enables the engineer to change silently from one microphone to another, or to combine them in varying proportions.Some rapid switching may sometimes be necessary.
"Even with good microphones and amplifiers the engineer in the field may often experience difficulties with the lines connecting the outside point to the studio.The majority of such lines do not transmit the higher frequencies adequately, especially the longer ones.The problems become immense when European simultaneous broadcasts are attempted.Experiments on the continental wireless link have done no more than reveal its unreliability.The undersea telephone line, however, does not give either good or even intelligible quality of speech if it is longer than a couple of hundred miles, and it is quite unusable for the transmission of a musical programme.
"The B.B.C.has been the first in the world to exploit Simultaneous Broadcasting to its fullest advantage for a national system, and thanks to the co-operation of the Post Office engineers, it is possible to pick up a programme wherever it may take place within the British Isles and radiate it simultaneously from all distribution centres.
