Field Recordings, 1938-1939

In 1938, New Jersey station WOR sued WLW for allegedly interfering with their broadcasts, as WLW's transmitter was then broadcasting at 500,000 watts. The discs in this series represent the efforts of the WLW engineers to prove their station's evening broadcasts did not interrupt the airwaves transmitted by WOR.

According to former WLW engineer Bill Alberts, they made two field recording trips. The first was conducted from October to December of... 1938, and occurred between Cincinnati and eastern Maine. The second was conducted between January and March in 1939, which took them from southern Ohio all the way to Pensacola, FL. In March, 1939, however, the FCC made their final decision to cut WLW's transmitter power back to 50,000 watts. Therefore, the field recordings were not needed, although the engineers had discovered that WOR's transmissions actually interfered with those of WLW, but no final report was ever written on the project. These discs document the state of radio technology and widespread broadcasting practices in the eastern United States in the late 1930s. For more information on the project, see the “Dooley Document File” for Bill Alberts's 1939 field notes (Folder #8) and a transcription of the interview Laura Schnitker conducted with Bill Alberts in Leesburg, VA, on February 21, 2006 (Folder #9).

Program descriptions were taken from original sleeve label. Each side of the disc alternates between two programs, one on WLW and the other on WOR. Every five minutes beginning at the top of the hour, the engineer switched the antenna to the other station to test for interference.

Each disc has been numbered individually. This series contains discs #785-965, and #1037-1096.