WBUR aired a FZ special yesterday evening, featuring an interview with Barry Miles (and a snippet of the infamous gig with Lennon/Ono!). It’s now available online. (OT: stupid question I’m sure, but why do all American radio-stations have a “W” in their name?)
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Meta
…at your service…
In the 19th century, ships, telegraph stations, etc., adopted call signs to aid in signaling, a practice that continued when ships and the shore stations serving them began to use radio. At first users picked their own signs, but that led to duplication. In an effort to get organized, the 1906 Berlin International Wireless Telegraph Convention declared that all ship and shore stations should have unique call signs consisting of three letters. The U.S., no doubt bridling at the thought of being told what to do by a bunch of foreigners, declined to ratify the convention until 1912, with the result that we had stations with two- or even one-letter call signs, plus many duplicates.
Fed up with this, the head of the federal Bureau of Navigation, Eugene Tyler Chamberlain, decided that an 1884 statute empowered him to assign marine-radio call letters and he proceeded to do so. Ships on the Atlantic and gulf coasts were assigned calls beginning with K, and those on the Pacific coast and Great Lakes were assigned calls beginning with W. No one knows why these letters were chosen, although Thomas speculates somewhat wanly that perhaps W stood for west. A weakness of the scheme, Thomas points out, was the existence of the Panama Canal, which permitted ships in the Atlantic to sail into the Pacific and vice versa, thus making a mess of the whole system. Still, it was progress.
In 1912 Congress empowered the Bureau of Navigation to license land stations. Official documents issued in 1913 boldly declared the government’s intention of following the maritime practice of assigning W calls to stations in the west and K calls to stations in the east. Unfortunately, the instructions seem to have gotten a little scrambled on the way down to the clerks at the front desk, who proceeded to do things the opposite way, assigning K calls to land stations in the west and W calls to stations in the east. (One supposes that the Great Lakes = W thing threw everybody off.) Evidently deciding to go with the flow, the brass stated in the next year’s bulletin that the Pacific coast would get W for ships and K for land stations, the Atlantic and gulf coasts would get K for ships and W for land stations, and the Great Lakes would get W for everything.
But the clerks weren’t done yet. In 1920, Thomas says, “perhaps caught up in a burst of egalitarianism,” or else laboring under a misapprehension as to where the applicants were, they began assigning calls starting with KD to everybody, including the now famous KDKA in Pittsburgh. This lasted only a few months before the old W/K policy was resumed. What happened is not known, but one suspects a memo stating in essence, all right, you morons, enough is enough.
There’s more–really, I could go on like this for hours. According to Thomas, the original K/W divide was not the Mississippi River, as at present, but state boundaries starting with the Texas/New Mexico line and working north. (The thinking evidently was that Texas should get W calls because it was a gulf state.) The Mississippi was established as the divide in 1923. Not to excuse Little Ed, but you can’t blame him for getting confused.
Courtesy Cecil Adams
Holy Eastcoast Versus Westcoast Rivalry Not To Mention Panama Batman! A big can of worms if ever I saw one! Thanks for enlightening me pup… :)
I’m wondering if the B. Miles FZ biography is already available in Belgium ( being myself a belgean).
I’ll have a look next week in Waterstones / BRU.
Don’t think so bernard, but you can get it pretty cheap (17 euro + shipment) at amazon UK – not in time for christmas though…
I think the “W” stands for Wavelength, and I THINK that might have been the reason.
ADDENDA:
What you might think about Miles’s book you have to sympathize with his predicament dealing with an obviously VERY lame and culturally-challenged interviewer. NO writer should have to put up with someone like this, but even in this post-literate age, Especially in this post-literate age, this, boys and girls, is the norm., boys and girls!
I’m a little lit right now—but I’m among friends, right? Barry—to answer your question—for some reason, a long time ago, the radio lords in America decided that all the stations to the right (East) of middle America (the Mississippi?) were to be identified with a “W.” And all the stations to the left (West) were to be preceded with a “K.” Someone told me this a long time ago—but, as bad as my memory is, I’m sticking with that story, dammit! Um, yeah, that’s what I remember…something like that…