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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Delaware County: Where Pennsylvania Began

Posted by on Nov 30, 2013 in | Comments Off on Delaware County: Where Pennsylvania Began Delaware County is part of the densely populated belt around Philadelphia, stretching from the city’s western boundary to the circular Delaware state line. Covering approx­imately 185 square miles, it is the third smallest Pennsylvania county yet the fourth largest in population. Its southern boundary is formed by the Delaware River, from which the county takes its name. The site of early...
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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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Black Steelworkers in Western Pennsylvania

Posted by on Nov 29, 2013 in | Comments Off on Black Steelworkers in Western Pennsylvania Blacks constituted a sizable core of workers in the iron and steel industry of western Penn­sylvania between 1900 and 1950. Most had migrated to the Pittsburgh vicinity from the agricultural South during the two World Wars in hopes of improving their economic plight by obtaining jobs in area mills and foundries. However, racial discrimination prevented the majority of them from advancing beyond...
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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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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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“Atoms for Peace” in Pennsylvania

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on “Atoms for Peace” in Pennsylvania In 1957, Shippingport, along the Ohio River in far western Pennsylvania, became home to America’s first commercial nuclear power plant under President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” program. Just two decades later, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) converted the Beaver County plant to a light water breeder reactor that successfully demonstrated the feasibility...
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Photograph at Shippingport Atomic Power Station

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on Photograph at Shippingport Atomic Power Station A photograph labeled “Installation of the Final Closure Head,” taken at the Shippingport Atomic Power Station, Beaver County, on October 10, 1957, is part of an important new accession documenting the construction and evolution of the world’s first full-scale atomic power plant devoted exclusively to peacetime use received by the Pennsylvania State Archives (PSA) on April 14, 2009. The facility...
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Aiming for the Stars: The Forgotten Legacy of the Westinghouse Astronuclear Laboratory

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on Aiming for the Stars: The Forgotten Legacy of the Westinghouse Astronuclear Laboratory Before his death, renowned science fiction writer, inventor, and futurist Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) confidently declared the space age had not yet begun, and would only commence when reliable nuclear-powered space vehicles become available to drastically reduce the cost of moving humans and heavy payloads from the surface of the earth to the farthest reaches of the solar system. It is a...
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