October 27, 1920: In 1916, from a garage in the suburb of Wilkinsburg in Pittsburg, PA, an engineer from Westinghouse Electric broadcast music in wireless by using an amateur 8XK radio. This is where it all began. The broadcast was reported widely by the media and the news attracted the attention of the head honchos at Westinghouse, who then decided to build a real radio station. The Westinghouse Radio stations needed a license to broadcast. The U.S. Department of Commerce granted the license to broadcast for the KDKA station. As a permit has been issued officially, they not directly operate KDKA while they waited for the license to broadcast to be sent to the radio station. On November 2, 1920, the radio station aired for the first time when they broadcasted the result of Harding/Cox election. The broadcast reached up to 1,000 listeners from various backgrounds.
The name of the Westinghouse
Electric engineer was Frank Conrad. He was an assistant chief engineer at
Westinghouse. He lacked an academic degree, but he was a
radio genius. Westinghouse built KDKA with the purpose of increasing the sale of its radio receiver product, and they succeeded. KDKA was claimed as "the world's first commercially licensed
radio station". Following the success of Condrad's broadcast program,
Westinghouse increased the power output up to 100 watts on a wavelength of 360
meters. With this power output, the transmitter’s signals could reach homes
several hundred miles away.
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