Wireless Pioneer

“We of the state broadcasting service want to use this portion of our schedule to tell you about a man, a man but for whose work in radio, we might not be speaking to you over these facilities, yet a man unknown to most of you as listeners; not a broadcaster, not a performer, instead a worker behind the scenes, a planner, a builder, an engineer, but more than that, a man of vision and high purpose.”

So began a January 15, 1951, broadcast from Wisconsin’s first state radio station, WHA. The program memorialized Edward Bennett, an engineer and professor who spent thirty-four years developing radio technology on the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison. After joining the electrical engineering department in 1909, Bennett initiated wireless telegraphy experiments that led to radio station 9XM, later known by the call letters WHA and today as Wisconsin Public Radio. As technical director and manager of WHA beginning in 1929 and a member of the University Radio Committee until his retirement in 1943, Bennett helped shape both the technology and the direction of early radio. He did this while training the next generation of radio engineers and working tirelessly to secure WHA’s place on the radio dial as commercial and educational stations vied for frequencies.

In the fledgling days of wireless telegraphy, Bennett envisioned the social and service aspects of the radio for “human betterment, or human injury.” Bennett always kept clearly in mind the possibilities of radio’s service to “the people.” He believed radio so essential to safeguarding democratic processes that he proposed a new amendment to the Bill of Rights: “A well informed and purposeful citizenry being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the states to have and to use broadcasting facilities shall not be infringed by law, or by administrative regulations.” Bennett stands tall in a long line of Wisconsin radio pioneers including Earle M. Terry, William H. Lighty, and Henry Lee Ewbank. Their twin ideals of promoting democracy and developing new technology continue to shape Wisconsin Public Radio one hundred years after its founding in 1917.

An Electrical Engineer Emerges

Edward Bennett lived during the time when the discovery of electromagnetic waves transformed worldwide communication. He was born October 26, 1876, at the end of the Centennial Exposition where Alexander Graham Bell introduced the telephone. Voice transmission, known as telephony, was a great improvement over the forty-four-year-old telegraphy, with its Morse code dots and dashes. Both technologies needed wires to work; wireless transmission remained in the future. Bennett initially lived in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, industrial area on the south side of the Monongahela River in his mother’s Welsh neighborhood. Just down the street, his father worked as a master mold maker at the Crystal Glass Factory, owned by Bennett’s English-immigrant grandfather.

In 1886, George Westinghouse, embroiled in what has been called the War of the Currents, opened his first factory just across the river from the Bennett home. The war pitted Westinghouse’s alternating current (AC) electrical transmission technology against rival Thomas Edison’s direct current (DC). Five years later, Westinghouse installed the first AC industrial