Happy College Radio Day! In honor of the annual celebration of student radio (this year on October 2), we invite you to explore the college radio collections in the Internet Archive’s Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications (DLARC). Some of the latest additions include materials that shed light on college radio’s earliest days.
In the first decade of the 20th century, radio clubs started to form on college campuses. In 1906, students at Harvard University offered to send wireless messages across “the yard” as part of the activities of the Weld Phonepterograph Company, which founder Robert Gowen described as “the first college radio club” in a 1923 article for Radio News. Robert Rydzewski digs into the story of this largely forgotten club at Harvard in a 2023 article for The Antique Wireless Association Review, which can also be found in DLARC. Other clubs followed and while they focused primarily on what we think of as amateur or ham radio, these groups were also responsible for some of the first student-created radio broadcasts and student-built college radio stations in the 1920s.
