For Every Room in the House: The Story of Armstrong Cork Co. in Print, Radio and Television

Posted by on Dec 15, 2022 in | Comments Off on For Every Room in the House: The Story of Armstrong Cork Co. in Print, Radio and Television In 1860 Thomas Morton Armstrong, a young son of Scots Irish immigrants from Londonderry, in what is now Northern Ireland, used $300 he had saved from his job as a shipping clerk to purchase a small cork-cutting shop in Pittsburgh. The company was originally named for Armstrong’s business partner, John O. Glass, who suddenly died in 1864. Armstrong’s brother Robert purchased Glass’ share and the...
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Harry Houck, Edwin Armstrong and the Superheterodyne Receiver

Posted by on Dec 15, 2022 in | Comments Off on Harry Houck, Edwin Armstrong and the Superheterodyne Receiver Harry Houck (1897–1989), a pioneer of radio technology, was born and raised in New Cumberland, Pennsylvania. At the age of 14, he built his first ham radio rig and began transmitting and receiving messages. He graduated from Harrisburg Technical High School in 1916 and then joined the U.S. Army shortly after the United States entered World War I on April 6, 1917. In February 1918 Sergeant Houck...
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Editor’s Letter

Posted by on Dec 15, 2022 in | Comments Off on Editor’s Letter As Pennsylvania Heritage moves into its 49th year of publication with this issue, we present three features about Keystone State phenomena that are marked by longevity and progression through the years. One of the highlights of the first wave of the movement for women’s rights in Pennsylvania was the 1897 founding of the Plastic Club for women artists in Philadelphia. At the time, most women who...
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KDKA, Pittsburgh

Posted by on Dec 30, 2020 in | Comments Off on KDKA, Pittsburgh For those of us living in the 21st century, it is hard to imagine a world without radio, television and the internet. The free flow of information, music and entertainment programming across the country and the world is taken for granted in modern society but was a revolutionary development 100 years ago, when KDKA made communications history with a radio broadcast from Pittsburgh in 1920. The...
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Pennsylvania’s First Television Station: “Loving What We Were Doing”

Posted by on Nov 29, 2013 in | Comments Off on Pennsylvania’s First Television Station: “Loving What We Were Doing” No champagne corks popped at Philadel­phia’s old Philco plant on October 17, 1941, to celebrate. The achievement failed to rate even a few lines in local newspapers as reports of the increasingly grim drama unfolding in Eu­rope took chilling precedence. Like so many of the seemingly minor events that herald major changes in our way of living, America’s first commercial network...
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Live From Pittsburgh

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Live From Pittsburgh It was the evening of Tues­day, November 2, 1920. In Pittsburgh’s cold, rainswept streets, patient crowds stood waiting for the Harding-Cox presidential election returns to be posted on newspaper bulletin boards. Meanwhile, across town in a makeshift shack atop one of the Westinghouse Company’s factory buildings in the city’s Turtle Creek section, Leo H. Rosenberg began...
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Some Questions for Examining Pennsylvania’s Black History

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Some Questions for Examining Pennsylvania’s Black History Civil rights activist Julian Bond was born in Nashville, Tennessee, in January 1940. When he was five years old, his father, Dr. Horace Mann Bond, was named the first Black president of Lincoln University, Chester County, the country’s oldest private African American college. Bond’s family lived on the campus of Lincoln University until 1957, when Dr. Bond was appointed dean of the...
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Sparking a Rock ‘n’ Roll Revolution: An Interview with Dick Clark

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Sparking a Rock ‘n’ Roll Revolution: An Interview with Dick Clark For many baby boomers – members of that much-touted generation who came of age in the fifties and sixties – rock ‘n’ roll provided a defining point in their adolescent lives. Few will ever forget the first time they jitterbugged to Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley and the Comets, or took to the dance floor with The Twist by Chubby Checker. Many cherish the memory of...
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Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll It’s strange how you can be in on the ground floor of a cultural revolution and not know it at the time. But that’s how it was with me and the birth of rock and roll – in Lebanon and West Chester. Admittedly, I was an observer; a chronicler, if you will. The story begins just after the end of World War II when a new radio station, WLBR, was opening in Lebanon. WLBR was a...
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Radio Station KDKA

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Radio Station KDKA On Tuesday evening, November 2, 1920, about one thousand people in the Pittsburgh area listened to the results of the presidential election of candidates Warren G. Harding and James M. Cox on “wireless” receivers. Transmitted by a one hundred-watt station that would become KDKA, this was something new-radio broadcasting. And radio would revolutionize communication just as the...
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