WGY Radio is marking its 100th anniversary this week, a milestone celebrated with a new exhibit of more than 50 historical photos at miSci | Museum of Innovation & Science in Schenectady that opened on Jan. 22.
When listeners first heard voices crackle across the airwaves, it was almost impossible to overstate the significance.
“To hear somebody’s voice and how personal it is, I think it must have been incredible to experience this,” said Diane Donato, a news anchor at WGY 810 AM.
The Times-Union reports for the past century, WGY has been at the vanguard of the radio industry, racking up an impressive number of firsts, from forerunners to remote broadcasting to the first to conduct a two-way transmission to England.
The station was also the first to broadcast the World Series in 1922 when the New York Giants defeated the New York Yankees.
And on a more whimsical note, WGY introduced the concept of an international cat and dog fight: The dog and cat fight involved Skip, WGY's unofficial mascot in the 1930s. Skip was located in WGY's Schenectady studios and the cat in Australia.
WGY's shortwave stations did fairly regular broadcasts and communications with Australia.
"Apparently Skip got excited one time when the mic was live and started barking, and that scared a cat in the Australia studio, which started yowling and hissing," Hunter said, "hence the first international dog and cat fight."
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| WGY Transmitting Room - 1925 |
WGY launched in 1922, the brainchild of General Electric engineers. Until that point, news was disseminated through telegraphs and newspapers, hardly an immersive experience.
In a way, the state’s first radio station got its start as a marketing arm of GE, the technology and manufacturing giant that dominated Schenectady. Walter Baker, a member of GE’s radio engineering department, initially floated the idea to his superior, who dismissed the technology as a passing fad.
“He thought it was a flash in the pan,” said Chris Hunter, vice president of collections and exhibits at MiSci.
Baker went over his head to the public relations department, who agreed that a radio station could be a valuable vessel for self-promotion after commissioning a study on the company brand.
Once WGY began broadcasting from the now-demolished Building No. 36 at GE headquarters at the foot of Erie Boulevard, company brass had a general idea of a potential audience: A survey of Albany, Schenectady and Troy revealed 50 percent of households already owned early pre-tube crystal radios.
“There were people just waiting for content and they were the ones to provide it,” Hunter said.
The early days of radio were marked by experimental programming, including radio dramas, which quickly stuck.
The programming was billed as a groundbreaking entertainment experience. Producers used a combination of voice, music and sound effects to stimulate the imagination.
The result, Hunter said, was a “theater of the mind” concept not entirely unlike contemporary podcasts, which attract listeners through increasingly sophisticated and sleek production techniques.
The first radio drama was a three-act play, “The Wolf,” which landed in August 1922. After that came a series of 43 locally produced dramas, which typically ran in a serialized format once per week.
By this time, WGY was gaining a toehold with audiences, and its coverage area stretched into northern and central New York, as well as Massachusetts and Vermont.
“It was very exciting, particularly for people in rural areas,” said Rick Kelly, co-author with John Gabriel of “Capital Region Radio: 1920-2011.” “To hear another human voice flying through the air was really a revelation for people back in the 1920s.”
Before federal regulations, anyone could purchase a transmitter and start broadcasting. Many did — including department stores and other businesses who invested in the technology for self-promotion. The result was often a cloud of noise that somewhat resembled today’s contemporary ubiquitous television commercials — or even spam.
The national mood was optimistic in the early 1920s. The nation was emerging from the dueling crises of World War I and the 1918 influenza pandemic, which combined killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.
“People had just gone through a world war and pandemic and were looking to have some fun,” Hunter said. “Radio came along at the perfect opportunity.”
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