Harvard Wireless Club > Alumni/ae Forum

Guy Black, '41, W4PSJ (Silent Key) in a letter to the HWC dated March 6, 1990:

few recollections may help you to fill in what is available on the club's history. In my college years, 1937-41, the Club was only a elusive memory, though there were rumors that it had quarters in the basement of Weld Hall. However, there was available a course offered by the Institute of Geographical Exploration in communication for geographical explorers. Bill Coburn, formerly employed at National Company in Malden, was employed to teach this course, which he did in the radio station in the center of the Institute's building. There was a massive old Collins transmitter there, and towers on each end of the flat roof of the building. You can guess who signed up for this course!

Talk about sinecures! Bill's personal interest was VHF, and he used the antenna running between the towers to support a collinear array for the 56 Mhz band (the predecessor of the present six-meter band) to transmit a wide-band FM signal. That was frontier stuff in those days and seemed to take up about 90 per cent of Bill's time. I never heard of any actual communications with explorers from the station. The high-voltage power supply of the Collins rig was diverted for use with Bill's home-brew 56 Mhz rig. How the Institute became established and how it was administered is a story in itself, now so old that it could hardly embarrass the University's administration.

Radio communication was very much stressed by the Physics Department in those days. The roofs of the old Jefferson lab and adjacent buildings had a large assembly of wire antennas that were the transmitting end of an ionospheric sounding link with receiving equipment near Springfield. The FCC license in the Cruft lab specified a peak power of 1 KW and an average power of 0.5 Watt. I remember Howard Aikien, later of computer fame, modeling the flow of electrons in a vacuum tube by using a circular sloping surface with water entering at the elevated center analogous to the cathode location in a vacuum tube to flow to the outer edge of the circle representing the anode location after passing a barrier of peaks and valleys representing the grid wires and spaces in between.

Another practice in the Physics Department in those days is amusing to recall: there was a signaling system, established before the introduction of intercoms, consisting of standard Morse telegraph keys screwed to the door frames of offices and elsewhere around the building. Secretaries and staff would transmit the call sign of an individual when he was wanted, which would be heard throughout the building on sounders similarly located. To be a Physics Lab secretary in those days you had to know Morse code!

I never heard how Bill Coburn managed to get W1AF as his personal call when he left Harvard, but I'm glad you have it back.