On the Air in Cedar Rapids

The last week of July marks the 100th anniversary of the first commercial radio broadcast in Cedar Rapids, when pioneering radio station WJAM began broadcasting from a small studio at 322 Third Avenue on the near west side of the city.

The studio was actually a tiny garage in which radio innovator Douglas Perham had set up his primitive 20 kilowatt transmitter, which at the time, would broadcast over any other stations using the same wavelengths (hence the station’s call sign letters, WJAM).

Perham had been born at Duarte, Calif. on May 22, 1887, and quickly exhibited an acumen for the burgeoning field of electronics. He established his own electronics laboratory experimenting with electrical transmission in 1902 at the age of fifteen (the same age at which Arthur Collins would later make history in Cedar Rapids for building a receiver in the attic of his parent’s home that served as the main means of communication for the Navy’s McMillan Antarctic Expedition in 1925).

Six years after starting to tinker with the delicate gas tubes and electrodes, Perham was a leading technician at Federal Telegraph in Palo Alto and co-developer, along with electronics legend, Lee DeForest, of the Audion Tube, a glass tube containing invisible vapor and metal strips wrapped around a nail that amplified radio signals, allowing radio waves to broadcast over great distances.

The pairing of DeForest and Perham was a fateful event, as DeForest had been born in Iowa (Council Bluffs in 1873) and Perham would ultimately meet Pearl Heinz, a native of Cedar Rapids, and move to her hometown with her at during World War I. When the war concluded, he installed a transmitter and amplifier of his design into the family home, and on July 30, 1922, interrupted the broadcasts of WOC (the closest radio station) which had been founded the year before as World of Chiropractic radio by B.J. Palmer, President of the Palmer School of Chiropractics.

WOC may have been the first commercially licensed radio station west of the Mississippi River, but WJAM was the first to initiate the tradition of being sponsored by a newspaper, which in this case, was The Cedar Rapids Gazette. Perham’s staff at the radio station was pretty much himself, so when he was out of town or lecturing at electronics conferences across the country, WJAM went silent.

By 1928, as radio stations became more commonplace from coast to coast and the forerunner of Silicon Valley in northern California developed into the leader in electronic technology, Perham sold the rights to WJAM to businessman Harry Shaw, owner of the Waterloo Morning Tribune, who promptly changed the station’s call sign to WMT to more accurately represent the monogram of his newspaper.

Perham then returned to Palo Alto and served as a senior electronics technician for Federal Telegraph, and ultimately, a chief engineer for Varian, one of the elite of electronics production in the early 20th century. Along the way, he purchased vintage and contemporary vacuum tubes, radios, and transceivers that became the largest collection of its kind in the world.

The displays grew to be so vast that by the mid 1950s he opened his own museum in New Almeden, California. Specialists in electronics, avionics, and electrical engineering flocked to the facility as the Holy Grail of their profession.

Perham died in 1967, and after a thorough documentation of all his artifacts. More than 2,500 pieces and 1,200 volumes of books and ephemera were given to Foothill College in Los Altos, outside of San Francisco, and formed the nucleus of the school’s Early Electronics Museum.

In the late 1990s, as electronics progressed far beyond vacuum tubes to solid state and microchips, the college Board of Directors decided to divest itself of the collection and transferred all of its assets to the History San Jose Museum in San Jose. There, among many other cherished artifacts of the genesis of the electronics age, you can see an original Audion Tube that transformed the industry, and, most importantly, the models of equipment that made possible the first radio broadcast in Cedar Rapids.

Through it, you can learn the airs of Eastern Iowa’s first radio stations on the air.

David V. Wendell is a Marion historian, author and special events coordinator specializing in American history.