SHORTWAVE
STATION KGEI AT THE
GOLDEN GATE INTERNATIONAL EXPOSITION, 1939-40
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SHORTWAVE
STATION KGEI AT THE |
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www.theradiohistorian.org Copyright 2021 - John F. Schneider & Associates, LLC (Click on photos to enlarge)  A map of the Golden Gate International Exhibit on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. KGEI was located in the Electronics and Communications Building, which is the long structure to the left of the tall “Tower of the Sun” near the bottom of the image. The KGEI antenna was situated atop the ferry building at the lower left, where visitors arrived by boat from San Francisco.
A view of the completed W6XBE installation, occupying a portion of the General Electric exhibit. Speech
amplifier and drivers for the KGEI 20 kW transmitter. (Museum of Innovation and Science)
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The Need For a West Coast Station: But by the mid-1930’s, shortwave technology had progressed to the point where commercial broadcasting was a possibility. Shortwave receivers were now being produced in enough quantities that a viable audience existed. General Electric decided that Latin America was the most practical target for a commercial venture, and so dozens of hours of programs in Spanish and Portuguese were soon being beamed southward. W2XAD and W2XAF, operating on 9,530 and 15,330 kHz with 25,000 and 40,000 watts respectively, sent over 500 hours of programs each month to the South American continent. Other shortwave broadcasters, including NBC, CBS, Westinghouse, and Crosley, also targeted South America, with some signals also being aimed at Europe. But there were still no U.S. shortwave broadcasters west of the Mississippi River, and so American programs could not be heard anywhere in the Asian Pacific.1 In 1935, an American diplomat stationed in Shanghai began a letter-writing campaign urging the creation of an American station serving expatriates in the Pacific. Addie Viola Smith’s letters caught the attention of General Electric, and they began to discuss plans for a West Coast station. As it happened, an elaborate World’s Fair was being planned to open in San Francisco in 1939. The Golden Gate International Exposition was to be held on Treasure Island, a new man-made island in the middle of San Francisco Bay, and G.E. planned an elaborate commercial exhibit showcasing its consumer and industrial products. The decision was made to incorporate a shortwave station into the exhibit as a demonstration of General Electric’s transmitter and power vacuum tube technology. The station would also serve as a worldwide goodwill voice for the fair by transmitting daily programs originating from the fairgrounds. An application to the FCC was quickly approved, and the experimental call sign W6XBE was issued. NBC cooperated with GE in the construction of the station, and gave its permission for the rebroadcasting of programs from the NBC network through its San Francisco area stations, KPO and KGO. The construction of W6XBE began in 1938. A 20 kW transmitter was shipped westward from Schenectady and was installed in a concrete vault in the interior of the fair’s Electricity and Communications Building. The front panels of the transmitter were mounted flush with the exterior wall of the vault, and the interior contained the transformers and other supporting equipment. A circulating water system was installed to cool the final amplifier tubes. A large plate glass window gave a view to the array of high voltage rectifier tubes that supplied the plate voltage. Amazingly, a guard rail would be the only barrier that separated the transmitter’s front panel from the throngs of fair visitors that would be crowded into the exhibit every day. A broadcast studio was constructed adjoining the transmitter, connected through a control booth to the master control room, which doubled as a small announcer’s booth. All three rooms would be visible to visitors through plate glass windows. Two wire antennas for the 11- and 19-meter bands were suspended from 70-foot masts on top of the ferry terminal building, located on the western shore of Treasure Island. Open-wire feed lines ran along the rooftops to the nearby Electricity and Communication Building. These antennas were designed by G.E.’s Dr. E.F.W. Alexanderson2. They emitted a figure-8 pattern with two 30-degree beams - the northwestern beam was aimed along the Arctic Circle towards Asia, and the southeastern beam focused on South America. The Effective Radiated Power (E.R.P.) inside each beam was stated to be 200,000 watts. For all of the attention paid to the technical installation, little thought was given to what the new station would program. E. T. “Buck” Harris, a G.E. public relations manager and former San Francisco newspaperman, dared to ask the question – “What did the company plan to broadcast?” The next thing he knew, he was on a train headed for San Francisco with the new title of Station Manager. Harris was instructed to put together four hours of daily programs for Latin America and three hours for Asia. He hired a small staff consisting of an English and Spanish-language announcer and an engineer. News services would be provided from a teletype printer installed by the INS (International News Service, a Hearst company) in exchange for free publicity received in the G.E. exhibit. The first regular transmission from W6XBE took place on the opening day of the exposition, February 18, 1939. An official dedicatory program to celebrate the opening of the station was aired on March 2, when GE and NBC executives joined local politicians and the foreign consuls of 19 countries on that date to broadcast their greetings to the world. Reception reports were received from all countries of the Americas, Alaska, the Far East, India and South Africa. The General Electric station operated on a daily basis during the fair, transmitting on 15,330 kHz from mid-afternoon into the evening to Latin America, and on 9,530 kHz in the early morning hours to Asia. (6,190 kHz was added in September.) More than 4 million fair attendees visited the exhibit during 1939, viewing the live broadcasts through studio windows and marveling at the imposing transmitter with its room full of glowing tubes. In August of 1939, the FCC assigned commercial licenses to all shortwave stations, replacing the experimental licenses they had been using. The result was that W6XBE adopted the commercial call sign KGEI – standing for “General Electric International”. G.E.’s interest in the station continued to be the demonstration of its technology to the public, and the program content was of secondary consideration. The initial focus of KGEI was once again on transmissions to Latin America. Programs in English, Spanish and Portuguese were broadcast daily, with popular NBC network programs also being relayed. Brief “rip and read” news and stock market broadcasts were presented from the INS teletype service in English and Spanish. Less attention was paid to the programs being sent to Asia, which because of the time difference were being sent between 4:00 and 7:00 AM Pacific Time. At that hour, the fair was closed and the NBC network and local stations were silent, so KGEI broadcast English-language music programs of secondary quality originating from transcription recordings. This frustrated the station’s Shanghai-based benefactor, Viola Smith, who wrote to G.E. that “the program content … was disappointingly mediocre, and far less interesting than many of the South American programs. If W6XBE has to rely on electrical transcriptions, can they not be of something worthwhile, rather than the insipid musical numbers that are now being played?” Eventually, a number of NBC network programs were recorded and played back for the Asian broadcasts, but these were all in English. While the programs succeeded in satisfying the wishes of the American expatriate community overseas, they did nothing to build an audience of Asian nationals, nor to promote American interests in the region. The Golden Gate Exposition officially closed on September 29, 1940, and the majority of the fair buildings were scheduled to be demolished as the island was being turned into a military base. But G.E. had planned all along to keep KGEI on the air after the fair closed, and so continuing its close relationship with NBC, the company applied to the FCC in December, 1940, to construct a new plant adjoining NBC’s 50 kW KPO AM transmitter on the San Francisco Bay salt flats in Belmont. A transmitter building was constructed there with bomb-proof three-foot-thick concrete walls. A new 50 kW transmitter was shipped from Schenectady, and curtain antennas were erected for the 19, 25 and 49 meter bands, aligned to cover Latin America at 126 degrees and Asia at 306 degrees. New KGEI studios were installed in the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill in KGEI had barely operated six months from its new location before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The U.S. government, caught with its broadcasting pants down because it did not control or operate a single government radio station, responded by taking over all ten privately-owned U.S. shortwave stations. As the only U.S. signal heard in the Pacific, KGEI’s Asian beam suddenly acquired immense strategic importance. On December 15, 1941, KGEI became the first shortwave station to operate under government control when the Office of War Information (OWI) took control of the station and began producing all of its own programming. This was the genesis of what would eventually become the Voice of America3. KGEI was now on the air twelve hours a day, broadcasting in Japanese, Chinese and Tagalog, and various Chinese and Filipino dialects. In The Philippines, the KGEI broadcasts were rebroadcast on local AM frequencies to a population that was under attack by the Japanese. General Douglas MacArthur utilized the station to broadcast 142 military communiques from his beleaguered position on the Bataan Peninsula. When he finally retreated to Australia, his famous “I will return” speech was broadcast over KGEI and relayed back to the Philippines. Post Script: So it was that KGEI, a shortwave station conceived in peacetime as a simple commercial technology demonstration, became a critical American information lifeline to besieged populations and U.S. soldiers fighting in the Pacific. Its signals were soon compromised by Japanese jamming, but a crash government building project eventually added 17 additional powerful shortwave transmitters from California to Hawaii. After the war’s conclusion, General Electric continued to operate KGEI until 1959. It was then sold it to the Far East Broadcasting Company, which operated the station until finally shutting it down in 1994. But to this day, KGEI is fondly remembered in the Philippines and elsewhere, and is recognized worldwide for the important role it played in communications in the Pacific during World War II. For More KGEI Photographs: KGEI Photo Gallery This article originally appeared in the June, 2021, issue of The Spectrum Monitor FOOTNOTES: 1 Westinghouse operated shortwave station KFKX in Hastings, Nebraska starting in 1923, but moved it to Chicago in 1927. 2 Alexanderson was the renowned inventor of the Alexanderson Alternator, the most important high-power transmitter technology of World War I. 3 It would be another six weeks until the first government broadcasts from New York could be beamed towards Europe. REFERENCES:
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