Reprinted with permission from the F.A.C. Thompson Collection, University of Kentucky Special Collections and Archives.
Reprinted with permission
from the F.A.C. Thompson Collection, University of Kentucky Special Collections
and Archives.
Club members Stuart H. Gates and James E. Wilkins operating 9YC. (circa 1922) The photograph was probably taken by F.A.C. Thompson an active club member, avid photographer, and member of The Kentucky Kernal staff.
From this station the first radiotelephone message ever officially heard in Lexington was received on Sunday night, October 3, 1920. It was a greeting from the General Electric Company in New York. They also witnessed the first test broadcasts from KDKA in Pittsburgh and regularly monitored traffic from Key West and New Orleans, and internationally from Germany, France and Panama. The station also provided students with accurate time-of-day information from the Naval wireless station in Virginia and scores from the 1920 World Series before they made the Associated Press wire.
In the Spring of 1922 the station got its first radiotelephone transmitter. It was said to have the "best equipment in the state," and to have been "heard in every state east of the Great Plains." Also in 1922 the station started broadcasting news from The Kentucky Kernel office to UK Alumni via a Friday night radio program called the Radio News Service. When Dean F. Paul Anderson spoke on KDKA a special hookup was run to the second floor physics lecture hall where students and townspeople gathered to hear the address.
Copyright © 1997 Harold
G. Peach, Jr. All rights reserved.