EUGENE
F. McDONALD:
BROADCASTING PIONEER
By John Schneider, W9FGH
www.theradiohistorian.org
Copyright 2017 -
John F. Schneider & Associates, LLC
(Click
on photos to enlarge)
WJAZ transmitter in Mt. Prospect, IL, 1925.
QSL card from WJAZ, dated 1926.
This is a view of Zenith's Chicago FM station W51C in 1940. Zenith built the 5 kW driver and 50 kW water-cooled power amplifier. The FM modulator (at left) was supplied by REL, and the high voltage power supply (far right) came from Westinghouse. The combo announcer's control room was in this same transmitter room (visible at far left). The antenna was a four-bay half wave spaced crossed dipole with a gain of 3.0.
Eugene
McDonald was one of radio’s first great power brokers. He was an early
broadcaster and the first
president of the NAB; he built Zenith Radio Corporation into a
manufacturing giant; was a pioneer in the development of shortwave,
television and
FM; and played a key role in radio’s licensing of ASCAP music and the
creation of the
Federal Radio Commission.
McDonald was born in Syracuse in 1888 and had soon made
a fortune as one of the
first to offer automobile financing. He joined
the Navy in World War I and rose to the rank of Lieutenant Commander.
In 1920, he heard his first
radio broadcast and was instantly fascinated. This
led him to buy into an existing receiver manufacturer in 1923, joining
Ralph Matthews and Karl Hassel in the operation of Chicago Radio Labs,
in 1923. He became its General Manager, and created the “Z-nith” brand
from the company’s amateur station call sign, 9ZN. McDonald formed the
Zenith
Radio Corporation on June 30, 1923, as the marketing arm for the
company's Z-nith products. It was not until
several years later that the two merged so that both manufacturing and
marketing could be carried out by Zenith Radio Corporation.
Under
McDonald, Zenith quickly grew to
become a major manufacturer, and the company's leader became well-known
for his charismatic leadership style and ruthless competitive spirit.
Despite the sale of the station, Zenith reserved the WJAZ call sign and
made plans to build a new high-power station by the same
name. The transmitter would be located outside of
the Chicago area, in a less populated area that would result in fewer
interference complaints. In the interim, Zenith operated a roving
“portable” broadcast station, WSAX. The entire station was
built on a one-ton truck chassis. It was completely self-contained and
battery operated, with a 100-watt transmitter, generator, and 53 foot
telescoping antenna masts. The audio panel controlled three
microphones with 300 foot extension cables, allowing the truck to be
parked outside of auditoriums for live concerts and events.
In 1925, it went on a nationwide tour of Zenith dealers, broadcasting
from Pike’s Peak, Jack Dempsey’s training camp, Gay’s Lion Farm in
California, and dozens of small towns along the way.
McDonald was a principal organizer of the 1925 MacMillan Arctic
Expedition, and Zenith provided shortwave transmitters and receivers
that kept the expedition team in regular contact with the
U.S. WJAZ broadcast family messages to members of the
expedition each Saturday at midnight, and the expedition’s return
messages were sent out using the Zenith shortwave
transmitter. The project clearly demonstrated shortwave’s
superiority for long-distance communication.
McDonald strongly opposed the payment of copyright royalties to ASCAP
by broadcasters. (Yes, this is not a new issue!) In 1923, he
joined with other commercial broadcasters to form the National
Association of Broadcasters, and McDonald became its first president.
Their goal was to negotiate a better ASCAP rate schedule for
radio. A second goal was to press for more uniform regulation
of the radio spectrum than the weak 1912 Radio Act provided.
As the head of the NAB, McDonald was a natural target for
ASCAP. WJAZ regularly broadcast the Edgewater Beach Hotel’s
ballroom orchestra, and so ASCAP refused to renew the hotel’s
performance license unless it also took out a license for
broadcasting. This became a test case that spawned a two-year
unresolved battle in Congress. In the end, the NAB relented
and negotiated a settlement with ASCAP that governed radio’s payment of
royalties for over a decade.
Zenith used its portable
station, WSAX, to make test broadcasts from different communities, and
finally settled on a new location for WJAZ in Mt. Prospect,
Illinois. By mid-1925, the new 5,000 watt WJAZ was
ready to go on the air. But in the interim, the Chicago radio
spectrum had become overcrowded, and there were no frequencies left.
The Federal Radio Commission finally authorized
WJAZ to share 930 kHz with KOA in Denver, but was allotted a
mere two hours a week on Thursday nights. Incensed, McDonald
chafed at WJAZ’s frequency-sharing limitation, but despite weeks of
pleadings and negotiations, Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover refused
to grant better operating conditions for the Zenith station.
McDonald publicly challenged Hoover’s authority and his "one-man
control of radio", calling him the self-appointed “radio
czar”. Hoover held his ground and welcomed a “test case”, and
McDonald soon provided this to him. On January 18, 1925,
without authorization, he moved WJAZ to 910 kHz, a Canadian reserved
channel. McDonald and WJAZ were immediately branded a
“pirate” station by Hoover other broadcasters, but McDonald responded
by issuing publicity postcards showing his staff in the control room
wearing pirate costumes.
In January, 1926, the government took McDonald to court in a landmark
case, United States v. Zenith, where McDonald challenged Commerce’s
authority to regulate the radio spectrum. In its April
decision, the district court indeed ruled that, under the Radio Act of
1912 – written long before broadcasting had been contemplated -
Commerce did not have the authority to assign frequencies or hours of
operation, or to deny a license to any applicant!
What followed was a two-year radio free-for-all, during which dozens of
stations freely chose their own frequencies and transmitter powers, and
Commerce was obliged to issue a license to any applicant. The
extreme interference and the subsequent listener complaints this
generated finally compelled Congress to replace the outmoded radio
regulations. On February 18, 1927, it passed the Radio Act of
1927. This created the new Federal Radio Commission, which
was given the power and a congressional mandate to bring order to the
radio spectrum. (After passage of the Communications Act of 1934, the
FRC became today’s FCC).
Due to the controversy over this court case, McDonald stepped down from
his role as president of the NAB, but he continued to be an active
participant in the organization for many years.
Unfortunately for Zenith, the new FRC did not treat WJAZ kindly, as it
moved it to the undesirable 1480 kHz frequency, where it shared time
with WHT and WORD. Finally, in 1931, the FRC cancelled the licenses of
all three stations, awarding the frequency to WCKY in Covington,
Kentucky, who had pleaded that Northern Kentucky was underserved by
radio. (Although WCKY later abandoned Kentucky and moved to Cincinnati.)
McDonald and Zenith stayed out of broadcasting for eight years,
concentrating on the radio receiver business, but they returned to
broadcasting in 1939 with the construction of two experimental
stations. The first was W9XZV, the first Chicago television
station using the new all-electronic standard, which operated on
Channel 1 until 1953. The second was W9XZN, one of the
country’s first experimental FM stations. In 1940,
it became W51C, equipped with a 50,000 watt custom-built transmitter
and boasting a 100-mile coverage radius.
It transmitted from the top of the Field building at
135 South La Salle Street,
on a frequency of 45.1 MHz.
W51C broadcast sixteen hours
daily at 45.1 MHz in the old FM band playing “only good music” from
specialized high-fidelity transcription discs, ranging from classical
and Latin music, to Gilbert and Sullivan. W51C’s
only advertising was one announcement each hour promoting Zenith
products. Program guides were sold to the public on a
subscription basis. When W51C moved to the present FM band,
it became WEFM, which stood for “Eugene F. McDonald”. In the 1970s,
Zenith sold WEFM to General Cinema Corp., and it is today known as WUSN.
Under Eugene McDonald, Zenith grew into a major radio manufacturer in
the 1940s and began producing television sets in 1948. His
many contributions to radio helped shaped the industry we know
today. “Commander”, Eugene F. McDonald, Jr., died in Chicago
in 1958. In 1967, he was posthumously inducted into Broadcast
Pioneers Hall of Fame.
- “A
Tower in Babel” by Erik Barnouw
- “Radio
Manufacturers of the 1920s” by Alan Douglas
- “The
Beginning of Broadcast Regulation in the Twentieth Century” by Marvin
R.
Bensman
- “The
World of Ham Radio, 1901-1950: A Social History” by Richard A. Bartlett
- “The
Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires” by Tim Wu
- “Governing
with the News: The News Media as a Political Institution” by Timothy E.
Cook
- “The
Concise Encyclopedia of American Radio”, edited by Christopher H.
Sterling and
Cary O'Dell
- “Encyclopedia
of Radio 3-Volume Set”, edited by Christopher H. Sterling
- “Antique
Radio Classified”, December 1997:
“Zenith--The
Earliest Years: The Chicago Radio Laboratory” by Harold Cones and John
Bryant
- “Literary
Digest”, Nov. 8, 1924, pg. 23
- “Zenith
Radio Corporation” by Dr. Richard Hattwick. Copyright 2002, The
American
National Business Hall of Fame
- Museum
of Broadcast Communications:
http://www.museum.tv/eotv/nationalassob.htm
- Wikipedia
– Zenith Radio Corporation history;
Eugene F. McDonald biography
NOTE: This article appeared in Radio World Magazine, July, 2017
www.theradiohistorian.org
John F. Schneider & Associates, LLC
Copyright, 2017