Pittsburgh Group Working To Establish National Broadcast Museum

Garage Was Location of First Commercial Broadcast

More than 100 years ago, Westinghouse engineer Frank Conrad founded the commercial broadcasting industry inside of a brick garage on his Wilkinsburg property, using bare wires, crackling spark coils and homemade vacuum tubes.

According to The Pittsburgh Magazine, his innovative experiments are what led to the nation’s first commercial broadcast on Nov. 2, 1920, transmitted from Westinghouse’s former K building via KDKA, with Leo Rosenberg announcing returns in the Harding-Cox presidential election that reached 1,000 listeners.

Pittsburgh’s role in the birth of commercial broadcasting paved the way for technologies that we take for granted today. 

A group of local officials, broadcasters and historians has been working for years to establish a National Museum of Broadcasting in Pittsburgh, and recently identified the museum’s location – a vacant Mellon Bank building in East Pittsburgh that sits a few hundred yards from the site of the first KDKA broadcast. 

Future site of Broadcast Museum

The group is working to purchase the building and is seeking investors from local corporations and organizations to help get the project off the ground.

Donations may be made by contacting the board here. Rick Harris, historical preservationist and museum board secretary/treasurer, estimates the overall cost being in the millions. The board is hoping to raise $100,000 over the next year or two to purchase the building.

Bill Hillgrove, longtime Pittsburgh Steelers and Pitt Panthers broadcaster, serves as president of the nonprofit museum’s board, and is joined by Harris and board members: Ron Klink, former KDKA anchorman and congressman; Harry Jessell, former editor-in-chief of Broadcasting and Cable Magazine and co-founder and former editor of TVNewsCheck; Susie Barbour, communications director for Westinghouse Service Uniting Retired Employees, public relations professional and former Pittsburgh radio personality; and Rosemary Martinelli, seasoned public relations, marketing and journalism professional who teaches at Penn State Greater Allegheny.

“This former bank building is several hundred feet from where the first broadcast took place at the former Westinghouse K building in the East Pittsburgh Works. I think this is an appropriate place to have the museum since it’s so close to the original site,” says Harris.