Conrad's Garage
Produced by: Joe Richman All Things Considered (NPR)
11/30/2001


ANNOUNCER: This is All Things Considered from NPR news, I'm Robert Siegel.

[Lost and Found Sound Theme Music, old-time radio announcer sounds]

SIEGEL: Thomas Edison said, "To invent you need a good imagination and a pile of junk." -- which might describe the contents of Frank Conrad's garage on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. Some say that that is where the modern broadcasting industry began. In 1920 Conrad's weekly broadcast from his garage led to the founding of KDKA, which is widely considered to be the world's first commercial radio station. For our occasional series Lost and Found Sound, Joe Richman has the story of Conrad's Garage.

[Radio sounds, static. Tuning into the ham radio]

JOE RICHMAN, REPORTER: The sounds that came out of Frank Conrad's garage in 1919 and 1920 are gone. There were no recordings made and everyone who participated in those weekly broadcasts has died. In fact, there may be only one person still alive who actually heard what was going on in that garage. A man named Harry Mills.

MILLS: This is K4HU.

[Ham radio sounds: "We can read you"]

MILLS: Hello Charlie, W1HVA here's K4HU. How are you this evening?

CHARLIE: Ah pretty good.

[Static and ham sounds in background]

RICHMAN: Harry Mills is 94 years old. He was an engineer for RCA most of his life, but for the last eight decades heís been going on the ham radio just about everyday. Mills first discovered radio in 1919. He was 12 years old and his parents bought him a copy of the Boy Scout Handbook.

MILLS: In the book, after a lot of the camping and a setting up the tent in the rain and the helping old ladies across the street and so on, in the back was a chapter on how to build a wireless station. I had never heard of such a thing. So I built one.

[Rustling in Mill's studio]

I'll show you how it works. Photograph plates and tin foil condenser and weather stripping and this is a ford coil, a ford ignition coil. You hook it up to your antenna and you're on the air.

[Sounds of spark signals]

RICHMAN: This is what radio sounded like when Mills first started. The dots and dashes of Morse code.

[Morse signals]

MILLS: That's the letter "V" which is used for test purposes. If he heard me he'll come back [Morse signals] and we hold a conversation. It's as simple as that.

[Morse sounds]

RICHMAN: Almost every night Harry Mills would lie in his bed and listen to amateur radio operators signal back and forth. Then one night he heard something different.

MILLS: I remember it was ten or eleven o'clock at night and all at once this voice appears. I remember letting out a yelp or a shout of some sort and my dad, who'd just gotten out of the bath, come in wrapped in a towel just be sure I was all right, something hadn't happened to me. And I said Dad look I'm hearing this fellow talking. And we shared the headphones, we only had one pair of headphones, and he allowed that I was right.

[Victrola plays]

RICHMAN: Harry Mills had stumbled on to the experimental transmissions coming from Frank Conrad's garage thirty five miles away.

[Music swells]

MILLS: He was talking and he says now I'm going to play a phonograph record and he did. It was astounding. I didn't know you could do that. To begin with I hadn't heard voice before, and add that the music. It opens up a whole new world.

[Music]

RICHMAN: Frank Conrad was not the first person to talk and play music on the radio.
Inventors like Reginald Fessenden, Lee DeForest and Marconi had been doing such experiments as early as 1906. But back then radio was seen as a method of one-to-one communication like the telegraph. Few envisioned radio as a way to reach many people at the same, to broadcast. Frank Conrad was among the first to use the word broadcasting. It was originally an agricultural term used to describe the distribution of seeds over a large area. In his garage, Conrad helped to change the concept of radio [music fades out] and he did it largely by accident.

RICK HARRIS: [Speaking through microphone] Testing, testing. Testing 1,2,3, test 1,2,3. This is Frank Conrad from the garage. This is what it would have sounded like anyway.

[Cranking and moving sounds in background]

RICHMAN: It's probably fair to say that nobody cares about Frank Conrad's garage than a man named Rick Harris. Harris is an amateur historian who has dedicated his life to preserving and researching the history of that garage. [Tapping and tinkering in the garage]. He's collected replicas of the equipment Conrad used, a microphone made out of the top of a candlestick telephone mounted in a small box stuffed with cotton in a hand cranked Victorola.

[Cranking and tinkering sounds. Crank turning]

HARRIS: You turn the crankÖ

RICHMAN: Rick Harris says the story of Frank Conrad's garage really begins with the Victorola. Conrad was an engineer for Westinghouse so he had access to vacuum tubes which allowed him to transmit his voice over the air. But at the time Conrad wasn't thinking about broadcasting [Victorola cranking]. He was simply trying to test and improve his transmitting equipment.

HARRIS: The problem was his voice after talking endless hours in to the microphone would wear out so he got the idea one to put on a record that would give him two or three minutes to adjust his equipment and would save his voice.

[Sound of cranking machine, squeeking]

HARRIS: This one...is an ancient one so I don't know what it's going to sound like.

[Static, then, music starts. Marching music]

HARRIS: And as soon as he started playing the music, he began getting requests for more music. And he would get phone calls and letters asking him to play a certain song at a certain time so someone listening with their crystal set could convince a relative that you could actually play music over the air. He found very quickly that there was an audience out there.

[Recording of Conrad interview]

CONRAD: People would call me up at night and ask me to transmit. They had some friends who wanted to listen to something coming out of the air.

RICHMAN: This is Frank Conrad [Conrad interview in background] recorded in the late 1930s, not long before he died.

CONRAD: And we finally got to take that I sort of arranged the same program twice a week, every Wednesday and Saturday night. Of course at that time we no idea what it was going to end up into.

[Music starts, runs on through Richman]

RICHMAN: Over time Conrad's garage started to sound more like a radio station. Along with phonograph records, Conrad would transmit piano solos by family members and baseball scores. And then when he started to run out of records to play, Conrad went to the Hamilton music store and asked if he could borrow some for his broadcasts. The owner said yes, as long as Conrad agreed to announce the name of the store on the air. Slowly Conrad was building the one thing the radio industry hadn't yet thought much about ‚ an audience. But the real turning point came on September 29th 1920 when the Joseph Horne department store placed this ad in the Pittsburgh Sun.

HORNE ANNOUNCER: Air concert picked up by radio here. The music was from a Victorola in the home of Frank Conrad. Mr. Conrad is a wireless enthusiast and puts on these wireless concerts periodically for the entertainment of many people in this district who have wireless sets. Amateur wireless sets are on sale here $10 and up.

HARRIS: The ad really caught the attention of Conrad's boss at Westinghouse, a man by the name of Harry Davis who, the story goes, called Conrad in the next day and said essentially I would like to put you out business because I would like Westinghouse to set up its own station. And Davis asked Conrad could that be done and Conrad said, of course.

RICHMAN: So over the next month Conrad and his team began constructing a wooden shack on the roof of the Westinghouse plant. They built a one hundred watt transmitter. And at 6 p,m, on the night of November second 1920 the newly licensed station KDKA went on the air.

ANNOUNCER: This is KDKA of the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Co. in East Pittsburgh, PA. We shall now broadcast the election returns.

[Station announcer in background]

RICHMAN: The station launched by broadcasting the results of the Harding-Cox presidential election. There were no recordings of that broadcast but in the late 1930s the original announcer, Leo Rosenberg, made this re-creation.

ROSENBERG: Weíd appreciate it if anyone hearing this broadcast would communicate with us as we are very anxious to know how far the broadcast is reaching and how it is being received.

HARRIS: Well, nobody had ever heard of such a thing. You had to wait until the next day to find out who won the election.

RICHMAN: Harry Mills, who was thirteen by this time, remembers going down to the local newspaper where they had set up a receiving station.

MILLS: Somebody would sit at the receiver and a crowd gathered outside and they would watch these returns being updated as the numbers came in bigger. The next day in the newspaper, of course, the talk was gee, for the first time ever people were able to get the reports before the newspaper was printed.

DOUGLASS: I think itís very difficult for us today to imagine really quite what a magical moment this was.

RICHMAN: Susan Douglass is a professor at the University of Michigan and the author of "Inventing American Broadcasting." She says the KDKA election broadcast was a watershed event.

DOUGLASS: And because there were no connecting wires, because there was this concept of the ether, there was kind of a cosmic connection for people. It was a quasi sort of spiritual event that these voices were coming out of the air, into your home.

[Victrola plays]

RICHMAN: And two weeks after that first transmission, Westinghouse introduced the first radio for the general public: the Aeriola junior, which sold for 25 dollars. The broadcasting boom had begun... and over the next few years, radio would move out of the garage... and into the living room.

[KDKA ID]

RICHMAN: Today, KDKA is widely considered the oldest radio station in the country. History has not been as kind to Frank Conrad's garage.

[Bulldozer sounds]

RICHMAN: This fall bulldozers began to clear the site. It will soon be a Wendyís. The bulldozerís destroyed Conradís house. But Rick Harris and a group of supporters called the Conrad Project managed to save the garage. Piece by piece.

MILLS: The woodwork, all of the doors, the windows and some 25 thousand or so bricks. The ones that survived anyway. I donít know, itís just the more I learned about Frank Conrad and what he did and the fact that heís virtually unknown outside of Pittsburgh, ttís just something, it feels that heís been overlooked for what he did.

RICHMAN: Someday Harris hopes to reconstruct Conradís Garage and turn it into a museum.

[Ham radio signals]

RICHMAN: Frank Conrad may have helped to launch the modern broadcasting industry, but that wasnít really his vision. Conrad was just a talented engineer tinkering late at night in his garage trying to connect to people through the air. And that pretty well describes what 94-year old Harry Mills is still doing every night at 10 oíclock.

MILLS: W1UVEA, hereís K4HU. Yes Iím reading you very well.

[Ham radio sounds]

RICHMAN: After all this time, Harry Mills says he still feels the same way he felt when he first heard Frank Conradís voice coming out of the radio.

MILLS: To me itís difficult to describe the fascination of it. I know I use it all the time. How does it happen? Canít see the fella. There are no wires going from here to there. But you can talk to him. It was a phenomenon that interested me from the beginning. I presume that itís safe to say Iíve never gotten over it.

[Ham sounds]

MILLS: So with that Iím going to say goodnight. Thanks for the use of your loudspeaker. So goodnight Bob and goodnight Guy. W1TRF, K4HU.

BOB: Okay, very good, goodnight.

GUY: Goodnight.

[Music]

ANNOUNCER: Joe Richman produced our story about Conradís Garage for Lost and Found Sound.



© Joe Richman/Radio Diaries, 2001