The Off-Key Bard
History

This Day in History — KDKA Broadcasts the 1920 Election Returns

On this day in 1920

On November 2, 1920, Westinghouse broadcast Harding's landslide from a 100-watt transmitter in East Pittsburgh to an audience of perhaps a thousand.

The Off-Key Bard enters a small shed atop a Westinghouse factory building in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on a November evening in 1920. The room is filled with electrical equipment, vacuum tubes and wires. There is no recording studio, no audience beyond the glass, and no broadcasting console. A handful of men are preparing to send something into the air: the results of a presidential election.

For the first time, a growing audience of Americans will be able to hear election results without waiting for tomorrow's newspaper.

On November 2, 1920, Westinghouse broadcast the returns of the presidential election between Warren G. Harding and James M. Cox from its East Pittsburgh works. The station became famous as KDKA, though the election-night broadcast itself was reportedly made under a temporary call sign, 8ZZ. The broadcast is widely treated as a landmark in the rise of commercial radio, and the IEEE Milestone citation calls KDKA "a world pioneer of commercial radio broadcasting." It was not the first time anyone had broadcast speech or music, and its claim to a first is contested. Its lasting importance is that it helped turn radio from a hobby for experimenters into a regular service for the public.

A Garage in Wilkinsburg

Frank Conrad, born in Pittsburgh on May 4, 1874, spent about fifty years with Westinghouse. He was also an active radio amateur. In 1916 he set up an experimental station, 8XK, on the upper floor of a garage beside his home in Wilkinsburg. On October 17, 1919, he broadcast selections from phonograph records to local amateurs, and he soon had a regular schedule. According to the IEEE citation, he played records for two hours on Wednesday and Saturday evenings.

Listeners wrote and phoned to ask for songs. On September 29, 1920, the Joseph Horne department store advertised that its staff had heard an "air concert" from Conrad's station. Westinghouse vice president H. P. Davis saw the ad and moved quickly to build a more powerful Westinghouse station. The reasoning was commercial. If a company offered regular programs people wanted to hear, more people would buy radio receivers.

Election Night

Westinghouse received a Limited Commercial license with the call letters KDKA on October 27, 1920, a week before the election. The sources differ on what was used on election night. Wikipedia reports that the station operated under 8ZZ, assigned by telephone as a temporary authorization, for a few days before switching to KDKA, while later accounts often say KDKA was used from the start.

The transmitter ran at 100 watts, on a 360-meter wavelength, and its shed sat on the roof of the K Building at the East Pittsburgh Works. Conrad had been expected to broadcast the returns from 8XK, but he instead stood by at his garage as a backup in case the East Pittsburgh transmitter failed.

The staff was small. Leo Rosenberg, from the publicity department, was the announcer. Donald G. Little, who helped build the transmitter with Conrad, was the chief engineer, and William Thomas was the station operator. R. S. McClelland and John Frazier ran the telephone lines from the Pittsburgh Post newsroom, where the returns arrived. A. E. Braun, president of the Pittsburgh Post and Pittsburgh Sun, arranged for his papers to supply them. Recorded music filled the gaps, and the station asked listeners to report reception.

Accounts of the schedule differ. The IEEE citation says the broadcast ran about eighteen hours, from 6 p.m. to noon the next day. Little, writing in American Heritage in 1955 and relying on memory, recalled it running from about 8 p.m. to after midnight. His story has other vivid details: the phonograph's tone arm went missing, so he improvised a clamp to hold the microphone against it, and at a nearby club a receiver and loudspeaker showed that the audience wanted more returns and less music.

The returns gave an easy story. Harding won 37 states to Cox's 11, with 404 of 531 electoral votes and about 60.3 percent of the popular vote, the largest popular-vote margin since widespread popular elections began in the 1820s. Cox's running mate was Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was also the first presidential election in which women could vote in 48 states under the Nineteenth Amendment, ratified in August 1920, although Georgia and Mississippi did not allow women to vote in this election.

How Many Listened?

Nobody knows. Wikipedia's article estimates about 1,000 listeners. Little thought there were only 100 to 200 amateurs in the Pittsburgh area, most of whom built their own sets, and mail was heavy after the broadcast. A later Westinghouse claim that the broadcast was a "national sensation" is contradicted by a review that found only a few local newspaper reports at the time.

The Claim to "First"

KDKA is often called the world's first commercial radio station, and the claim is disputed. Charles "Doc" Herrold began experimenting with audio radio in San Jose in 1909 and started weekly broadcasts in July 1912, which stopped when the United States entered World War I in April 1917 and resumed in May 1921. In Detroit, the Detroit News's 8MK, later WWJ, began daily broadcasts on August 20, 1920, and broadcast primary results on August 31, 1920. Lee de Forest's station 2XG broadcast the 1916 presidential election results. Reginald Fessenden claimed to have broadcast music on Christmas Eve 1906, but extensive research has found no contemporary confirmation. Historians generally credit KDKA as one of the earliest lasting, commercially organized broadcasters, and Wikipedia suggests that "commercial" probably meant only that the station was run by a commercial enterprise, since both KDKA and WWJ were initially free of advertising.

What Came Next

On January 2, 1921, KDKA broadcast a service from Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh, its first remote broadcast. On August 5, 1921, it carried a Pirates–Phillies game from Forbes Field, described as the first major league baseball broadcast. (KDKA did not broadcast the Dempsey–Carpentier fight live that July. RCA's WJY did, and KDKA repeated telegraphed ringside reports.) Power rose to 500 watts in August 1921 and 1,000 watts two months later. Westinghouse's WBZ in Springfield, Massachusetts, received a license on September 15, 1921, the first to state that it would be used exclusively for broadcasting.

The Department of Commerce formally established a broadcasting service effective December 1, 1921, and by the end of 1922 there were more than 500 licensed stations.

Paying for It

The early stations had to find a way to pay for programs. Manufacturers and department stores used broadcasts to sell receivers, and some stations played records in exchange for on-air mentions. AT&T announced in February 1922 that it would sell airtime, which it called "toll broadcasting." On August 28, 1922, New York's WEAF aired what is widely considered the first paid radio commercial, for the Queensboro Corporation's apartment development in Jackson Heights, Queens.

The first network began on January 24, 1923, when WEAF sent a concert to WNAC in Boston over telephone lines. RCA created the National Broadcasting Company in 1926, and it debuted on November 15, 1926. The Columbia Phonograph Broadcasting System launched on September 18, 1927, and became the Columbia Broadcasting System after a 1929 merger.

Growth brought chaos. Earlier wireless laws had broken down, leaving the airwaves in disorder, and the Radio Act of 1927, signed on February 23, 1927, created the Federal Radio Commission to issue licenses and manage clashes between stations. Congress replaced it with the Federal Communications Commission under the Communications Act of 1934. Radio's reach was on display when Orson Welles's War of the Worlds broadcast on October 30, 1938.

Technology kept changing. Amplitude modulation was the dominant form of commercial radio for decades, and Edwin Howard Armstrong developed FM in the early 1930s to reduce interference.

Why the Night Mattered

An audience of a few hundred people, many of them amateurs with homemade sets, heard election returns in a shed on a factory roof. The significance lay in what it suggested. One transmission could reach every properly tuned receiver in range, at the same moment, with no wire running to each listener. That gave manufacturers a reason to sell receivers and gave stations a reason to keep broadcasting.

A voice went out across the night,
Through unseen waves beyond the light.
Election news through air would roam—
And bring the wider world back home.

The equipment was primitive, the audience small and the studio a shed. The commercial possibilities were not, and within a generation radio had become one of the central institutions of American communication and entertainment.

Sources

← Back to the Desk — History