SOME LESSER-KNOWN ENGINEERS AND SCIENTISTS
IN EARLY RADIO HISTORY
By John F. Schneider, W9FGH
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SOME LESSER-KNOWN ENGINEERS AND SCIENTISTS By John F. Schneider, W9FGH
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www.theradiohistorian.org Copyright 2022 - John F. Schneider & Associates, LLC (Click on photos to enlarge) Engineer Oscar Hanson oversees the network line
distribution of President Calvin Coolidge’s 1925 inauguration over the WEAF
“Red” Network, one year before the inauguration of the National Broadcasting
Company.
 Jack Poppele attends to the transmitter at WOR in New York City, 1922.
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Most radio and electronics enthusiasts know the work of the important engineers, inventors and scientists who helped develop the science of radio. Much has been written about Marconi, de Forest, Armstrong, Tesla, Fessenden, and other key contributors. Nonetheless, there are many other lesser-known individuals whose contributions to the art and science of radio communications and broadcasting were also significant in the development of radio. Let’s take a look at a few of those contributors whom you may not know as much about. OSCAR B.
HANSON Oscar Bryam “O.B.” Hanson was among the most noteworthy of radio
broadcasting’s first generation of engineers.
He was the country’s leading expert on the design and construction of
broadcast studios. O. B. Hanson was born in Huddlesfield, England, on February
11, 1894, and emigrated to New York City after his schooling. He attended the Marconi School (later the RCA
Institute) in 1912, and then went to sea as a shipboard wireless radio
operator. In 1917, he joined the Marconi
Company as its Chief Testing Engineer. When broadcasting first appeared in 1921, Hanson joined
station WAAM in Newark, NJ, as its sole employee – wearing both announcer and
engineer hats. The following year he
moved up to WEAF, the prominent AT&T station in New York City, where he was
the assistant to the plant engineering manager.
While at WEAF, he participated in the development of the country’s first
radio networking experiment, connecting WEAF with other stations throughout the
Northeast corridor. In 1926, RCA acquired WEAF and its fledgling network from
AT&T. WEAF was merged into the operations
of RCA’s station WJZ, and the WEAF “Red” Network evolved into the National
Broadcasting Company (NBC). It was
suddenly the biggest and most prestigious broadcasting operation in the
country, and Hanson was appointed Chief Engineer. It was a position he would hold until 1943. Because the WJZ studios at Aeolian Hall in New York City
were inadequate for such a large operation, arrangements were immediately made
to construct a new, larger facility at 711 Fifth Avenue. Hanson was given the task of designing this
elaborate eight-studio complex. He originated
a number of new concepts for studio acoustics and sound isolation, including
the “floating studio”, which was isolated on shock mounts from the building’s frame. NBC moved into the new building in October, 1927. However, the network grew so quickly that even
this facility was inadequate within just a few years. Again, Hanson was given the responsibility to
design an even more massive complex in the new Rockefeller Center complex, to
be called “Radio City”. Opening in the
fall of 1933, his implementation of the ultimate broadcast studio consisted of 27
studios spread out across nine floors. One
of his innovations was a circular control room that could simultaneously oversee
four studios, which permitted complex productions having the actors in one
studio, an orchestra in another, sound effects in a third, and crowd effects in
the fourth. His auditorium Studio 8-H
was the world’s largest. The fifth-floor
master control room featured a 27-foot-long control desk that interfaced all
studios with the numerous network program lines and which required four
engineers to operator. Foreseeing the future
deployment television, all studios were pre-wired with shielding and cabling
for lighting and cameras. Today, Hanson’s
Radio City facility is still in use as the NBC network’s primary television
production facility – a testament to his vision and planning. In addition to Radio City, Hanson built all of the other NBC
radio studios around the country – at Merchandise Mart in Chicago, WTAM in Cleveland,
and purposely-constructed art deco studio headquarters in Hollywood and San
Francisco. When television began its
embryonic operations in 1939, he was put in charge of all television operations
for RCA and NBC, designing the first studios for WRCA-TV (later WNBC-TV), and managing
the conversion of many existing radio studios for TV use. In addition to his studio construction work, Hanson designed
mobile units and portable transmitters for both radio and TV remote
broadcastings. In his later years, he
oversaw the adaptation of NBC’s TV facilities for color television. O.B. Hanson was named a vice president of NBC in 1937, and
of RCA in 1954. He was a Fellow of the
Institute of Radio Engineers (I.R.E.) and was active with the Society of Motion
Picture Engineers (S.M.P.E.) and the Acoustical Society of America. He held numerous patents in the fields of
radio, TV, and acoustics. Hanson retired in 1959 but remained with NBC as a consultant
until his death in Norwalk, Connecticut on September 26, 1961. RAYMOND F. GUY If O.B. Hanson was NBC’s star studio engineer, Raymond
Frederick Guy was his counterpart on the transmission side. He was sometimes called the “Dean of
Broadcast Engineers”. Internally, NBC
staff amusingly called him their “R.F. Guy”. Guy was born in 1898 in Hartford, Connecticut. Radio was his passion from early life, He was a ham radio operator at the age of 12,
licensed as 2WO (later W2AK). He went to
sea as a ship’s radio operator in 1916, served in World War I, and joined the
Independent Wireless Telegraph Company in 1920.
After receiving a degree in Electrical Engineering from Pratt Institute in
1921, he was hired by Westinghouse in Newark to be the first operator of its
new broadcasting station, WJZ. As the
only employee, his responsibilities included being an announcer, engineer,
talent scout, bedtime story teller, piano mover and diplomat, as required. Often, he would announce the program’s talent
in the studio and then race up four flights of stairs to attend to the rooftop
transmitter. When RCA acquired WJZ in
1923 and moved it to New York City, Guy went with it as WJZ’s director of field
activities. He utilized the first
mobile transmitters to cover boat races on Harlem and Hudson Rivers, and received
the first trans-Atlantic broadcast, picking up 2LO London at Belfast, Maine, and
relaying it by wire to WJZ and WRC for rebroadcast. And he helped establish one of the first
networks, using Postal Telegraph and Western Union lines to connect WGY,-WJZ,
and-WRC. In 1926, Guy worked with Westinghouse to install a 50-kW
transmitter for WJZ at Bound Brook, New Jersey – just the second station in the
country to reach that power level. He was
then also given responsibility for all products developed, sold or used by RCA
for broadcasting, from microphones to towers. Finally, in 1929, he was named
the head engineer of the NBC Facilities Group, in charge of the construction
and maintenance of dozens of NBC’s radio (AM, FM, shortwave, remote links) and
TV broadcast transmitters. During his
more than twenty years in that post, he designed and built nine major
transmission facilities, including NBC’s 200 kW shortwave plants. He constructed several experimental TV
stations for RCA beginning in 1928, and in later years built the first UHF TV
stations. In a 1952 interview, he said,
“UHF, with all its problems, was not half as tough as the shortwave operations,
where each station changes its direction of fire, frequency and antennas at
intervals daily; other changes are required seasonally, and still others to
follow the 11-year sunspot cycle. It was
an engineer’s nightmare, requiring a fine mixture of information and guesswork,
and, for each change, a week’s isolation from the rest of the world with paper,
pencil and charts. Because of the vagaries
of short waves, coverage never could be fully reliable” During World War II, Guy served the government as a consultant
to the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (COI) and the Office of War
Information (OWI). . After the war, he
was a member of the Radio Planning Board, which dictated the postwar
allocations of spectrum frequencies. In
that position, he represented the country at international radio conferences in
Montreal, Mexico City, and Havana. Guy was a member of the Society of Professional Engineers,
American Standards Association, and Veteran Wireless Association. He was president of both the Institute of
Radio Engineers (IRE) and the Radio Pioneers Club. He passed away on July 10, 1976 in Fort
Lauderdale, Florida. JACK POPPELE Jack Robert Poppele, Jr., was another who rose from the humble
beginnings of radio broadcasting to become one of the industry’s most prominent
engineers. Born in Newark, NJ, in 1894,
Poppele built his first wireless set at the age of twelve and, after attending
the Marconi Wireless School, went to sea for the obligatory tour of duty as a
ship’s radio operator. He then served in
the Army Transport Corps during World War I. After the war, Jack Poppele found work at the radio counter
at Bamberger’s Department Store in Newark, selling radio receivers and
parts. There, he convinced the
management that Bamberger’s should build its own radio station in order to give
their customers something to listen to.
That station, WOR, went on the air February 22, 1922, with 250 watts –
the 13th broadcasting station to be licensed in the U.S. Poppele became WOR’s announcer and engineer,
continuing his work at the radio counter when the station was not on the
air. He frequently worked with the different
store department managers to promote the store’s products on the air, and in
1925, after one such successful promotion, he married Pauline Bacmeister, head
of the Housewares Department. As WOR grew in importance as a New York regional station,
Poppele oversaw the relocation of the transmitter from the store rooftop to
Kearney, NJ, in 1928, along with a power increase to 5,000 watts. In 1936, he managed another move and power
increase – this time to Carteret, NJ, with 50,000 watts. The antenna in Carteret, designed under his
direction, was one of the first directional broadcast antennas, focusing WOR’s
signal towards the cities of New York and Philadelphia. (See the Spectrum Monitor, February,
2019.) WOR also became the flagship station of the new Mutual
Broadcasting System, and Poppele served on its board of directors. And, as police departments began to build
radio systems for patrol dispatching, he served as a consultant to both the New
Jersey State Police and the Newark Police Department. During World War II, he served on Board of
War Communications, where he helped develop a radio synchronizing system to
create enemy deception for radio ranging. WOR was always at the forefront of developing new broadcast
technologies, and Poppele was a leader in those efforts. In the 1930’s, he oversaw WOR’s extensive
experiments in facsimile newspaper transmission. When FM broadcasting was first allowed in
1939, he installed a 1 kW experimental transmitter at Carteret. The next year, he moved it to the WOR studios
in New York and initiated full-time operations with 10 kW. In April of 1941, that station became W71NY,
operating at 47.1 MHz (now WEPN-FM). WOR was also an early participant in television
broadcasting. In 1943, it joined forces
with the DuMont TV station W2XVT, producing its programs on certain days of the
week., and then opened WOR-TV (now WWOR-TV) in October of 1949. By now, Jack Poppele had risen to become the vice president
and secretary of the Bamberger Broadcasting Service. When he finally left WOR’s employment in 1952,
it had grown from a one-man operation to a staff of 400, including 80 engineers
and technicians. Shortly after leaving
WOR, he was named the director of the Voice of America, where he served two
terms until 1956. In the last years of
his career, Poppele was active as a consulting engineer, manufactured equipment
for broadcasters under the name Tele-Measurement Corporation, and in 1960 owned
and built station WAUB in Auburn, NY. Poppele was a founding member of the FM Broadcasters
Association, and a founding member and director of Television Broadcasters Association,
which he served as president from 1945 to 1951.
He was a senior member of the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE), a
fellow of the Radio Club of America, and a member of the Society of Motion
Picture Engineers (SMPE). The IRE bestowed
on him the David Sarnoff Award in 1974, the Allen B. DuMont Award in 1984, and
the President’s Award in 1980. Jack Poppele died October 7 1986, at Orange, New Jersey. His personal papers were donated by his
family to the Antique Wireless Association in Bloomfield, NY. DR. ALFRED N. GOLDSMITH Dr. Alfred Norton Goldsmith was one of RCA’s key research
engineers, and oversaw much of the engineering activities at NBC during its
formative years. Goldsmith was born in New York City on September 15,
1888. He studied under Professor Michael
Pupin at Columbia University and received his Ph. D. in Electrical Engineering
there in 1911. After teaching at City
College and serving as a consultant to the General Electric Co., he joined the
Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company in 1917 as its director of research. He continued in that position after RCA
acquired the Marconi Company, where he formed RCA Labs and became its vice president
and general manager. He remained in that
position until 1931, when he left RCA to become an independent consultant, but continued
as an advisor to RCA for the rest of his life. He often served as the technical “face” of the
company in its dealings with government and the public. Goldsmith authored many books, articles and technical works over
the course of his career. He was a
member of the Federal Radio Commission’s Consulting Engineers Committee, where
he advised agency on spectrum allocation policy. A prolific inventor, he was awarded 122
patents. He designed an early radio receiver
for consumers having only 2 control knobs and a built-in speaker. He created the first commercial combination radio/phonograph. He was an acknowledged pioneer in sound
motion pictures, medical electronics and other areas of electronics. He also contributed significantly to the
development of television, obtaining a patent in 1941 for a “flickerless”
system of TV broadcasting. His most significant
invention was the shadow-mask color picture tube, which employed a screen of
color phosphor dots and a perforated plate to display a sharper image. In 1912, Dr. Goldsmith oversaw the merger of the Wireless
Institute with the Society of Wireless Telegraph Engineers, forming the prestigious
Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE). He
was the first editor of the IRE Proceedings, a position he held for 42 years. He was named a Fellow of the IRE in 1915; secretary
in 1918; and then president 1928. He was
a member of its board of directors for 51 years. After the IRE merged with the AIEE to become
the IEEE in 1962, he became a fellow, director and editor emeritus of the new
organization. Dr. Alfred Goldsmith died on July 2, 1974, in St.
Petersburg, Florida.
RAYMOND ALPHONSUS HEISING Raymond Alphonsus Heising was a pioneer in the development
of vacuum tube telephony transmission.
He was born in Albert Lea, Minnesota on August 10, 1888, and displayed a
talent for inventing electrical devices from an early age. Working nights in a railroad tower during his
college years, he installed a warning device on the tracks so he would be
forewarned of an approaching train. He
received his Electrical Engineering degree from the University of North Dakota
in 1912, and a Master of Science from the University of Wisconsin in 1914. After graduation, he accepted a job with the
Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he would remain until his retirement in
1953. At Bell Labs, Heising specialized in transmitter design. He oversaw the planning and construction of
the US Navy radio station NAA in Arlington, Virginia, and worked on the
development of a multi-channel trans-Atlantic commercial wireless telephone
service. During World War I, he designed
a radio telephone system that would be used by submarine-chasing vessels, and
in 1917 made the first radio telephone communication from an aircraft. His major technological contribution was an advanced method
of voice-modulating radio transmitters – a technique he conceived only six
weeks after graduating from college. Prior
to 1916, the standard method of modulation was to connect a microphone between
the transmitter and antenna where it would act as a variable resistance. The difficulty with this method was
dissipating the heat generated in the microphone, and researchers of the time focused
on developing methods of cooling the microphone. But for his part, Heising conceived of
connecting the microphone to the grid of a “modulator” vacuum tube, with both the
RF and modulator sections of the transmitter being fed by a common power source
through a current-regulating choke. This
allowed the use of a variety of microphones and other audio sources, higher
modulation levels, and improved fidelity.
His Heising “constant current” system of modulation was quickly adopted
as the industry-standard modulation method, and it continued to be used in
voice transmitters until the development of Class “B” high level plate
modulation by Loy Barton in the 1930’s.
In recognition of this important patent, he received the Morris Liebmann
Memorial Award from the IRE in 1921. Other important Heising inventions were the Class “C” RF power
amplifier and the diode-triode detector.
At Bell Labs, he experimented with radio propagation, ultra-shortwaves
(VHF) and piezo-electric crystals.
During his time with Bell Labs, Heising published numerous technical
papers and was awarded more than 100 patents.
After his retirement in 1953, he continued to work as a consulting
engineer and patent agent. He and his
wife Theresa had three children, and they all became engineers. Raymond Heising received an Honorary Doctor of Science
degree from the University of North Dakota in 1947, and the Armstrong Medal from
the Radio Club of America in 1954. He
was named a fellow of the IRE in 1923, served as its president in 1939, and was
the recipient of the Founder’s Award in 1957. Raymond Heising died on January 16, 1965, in Summit, NJ. WILLIAM C. WHITE William Comings White was one of the driving forces behind
the development of commercially-successful vacuum tubes for both transmitters
and receivers. White was born in Brooklyn, New York on March 24, 1890. His father, an engineering graduate of
Columbia University, encourage White’s childhood electrical experiments, and he
built his first wireless receiver in 1903.
He was an amateur radio operator before licenses were required, and
demonstrated wireless transmission and reception in his high school physics
class. After graduating with an
Electrical Engineering degree from Columbia University in 1912, he joined the
Research Lab of the General Electric Company in Schenectady, NY, where he
remained employed for his entire career. Upon joining General Electric, he was assigned to assist his
older cousin, the eminent physicist Dr. Irving Langmuir. Under Langmuir, he initially conducted
experiments with mercury arc rectifiers and tungsten filament lamps, and applied
for a patent on an invention during his very first summer at GE. One of Langmuir’s and White’s assigned missions was to
investigate the operation of the newly-invented de Forest Audion triode vacuum
tube. White described the Audion as “a
low voltage device, operating at 20-30 volts -- it was not well understood and
very erratic in its operation.” Through
their experiments, Langmuir and White were able to improve the Audion by
increasing its internal vacuum – removing gases from the internal metals, which
allowed the use of higher voltages for greater amplification and stability. As White described it, once the operation of any device was
understood, Dr. Langmuir would lose interest in it and move on to other
projects, leaving staff members like White to turn them into useful products
that could be manufactured and sold.
During 1913, White built a series of improved triodes that were used as
detectors and amplifiers of radio signals.
His triodes were also used for voice transmission –first by modulating
the output an Alexanderson alternator, and in 1914 by building the first voice
transmitter operating entirely with vacuum tubes. In 1915, White installed phone transmitters
in two Navy ships, allowing the captains could communicate directly with each
other. World War I generated a massive government demand for vacuum
tubes, and in 1918, GE received an order for 80,000 tubes. White helped develop techniques for the mass
manufacturing of these tubes, benefitting from GE’s expertise in the
manufacture of light bulbs in great quantities. After the war, White focused on designing higher-powered
tubes (50 and 250 watts), reducing costs, increasing their maximum usable
frequencies, and lengthening their life spans.
GE was making tubes for the amateur radio market at the time, and after
1920 those tubes found their way into early broadcast transmitters. In 1922, GE opened its own radio station, WGY
in Schenectady, and White made its first transmitter tubes by hand in his
laboratory. He also worked on developing
tubes for the emerging broadcast receiver market, with the goal being to
increase their life span and reduce battery power consumption. This resulted in the UV-200, UV-201, and
UV-199 receiver tubes, manufactured by GE and sold under the RCA Radiotron label.
In the summer of 1922, William White worked with his GE team
on a project at RCA’s Rocky Point longwave station, assembling and testing a 10-kW
tube transmitter for experimental trans-Atlantic radio signals. At the time, all of RCA’s long-distance
communication was being done on VLF frequencies using the expensive and
complicated mechanical Alexanderson alternators. But in White’s 1922 experiments, the receiver
operators in Europe couldn’t tell the difference between the signals from the Alexanderson
Alternator and the tube transmitter.
From that date on, no more alternators were built and vacuum tubes
became the standard device used for all radio transmission. In 1930, White left the GE Research Lab and was assigned to
head the new Vacuum Tube Engineering Department. It was created to meet the demand for
increasingly-higher-powered transmitter tubes. It had earlier been discovered that glass bulb
tubes were not practical above 5,000 watts due to their heat dissipation
limitations, and so White and his team had been worked on developing
water-cooled power tubes of ever-increasing power. This led to the design of the successful and
widely-used UV-807 10 kW tube. Then, in
his new position with the tube engineering department, White oversaw the
development of the UV-862, a 100-kW tube for extremely-high-powered
transmitters. White then became materially
involved in the construction of the giant 500 kW transmitter for station WLW in
Cincinnati, which used twenty of those tubes, and he made numerous trips to
that city. White also designed a special
high-power rectifier tube specifically for use on the WLW project. Other tube technologies that White oversaw were the
development of the mercury vapor rectifier tube and the thyratron. He also helped develop advanced receiving
tubes at a time when they were becoming more specialized, resulting in an exponential
increase in model types. This article
originally appeared in the July 2022 issue of The Spectrum Monitor REFERENCES: HANSON:
GUY:
POPPELE:
HEISING:
WHITE:
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