100th Anniversary of Radio Broadcasting on PEI - Background Material

100^th Anniversary of Radio Broadcasting on PEI

Background Material

by Ian Scott, March 2021

An international broadcast of music received by a local group in Charlottetown, provided proof that the emerging technology of long-range radio transmission had arrived; it marked the dawn of broadcast media.  

On March 11, 1921 gathered in the Provincial Technical School at the Rena MacLean Memorial Hospital on the Fanningbank estate, with Keith Rogers, their instructor, were a group of students that received a broadcast of concert music. Young veterans of the Great War in the prime of their lives, some carrying the scars of war, some beginning new jobs turned dials and then succeeded at tuning in a musical broadcast from similar students at Union College in Schenectady, NY.

A week later, local dignitaries gathered for a repeat performance, this time with special greetings included for the PEI audience from the New Yorkers.

Wireless already existed in Charlottetown with teenage “hams” like Rogers on Morse code keys from at least 1907. Internationally, wireless Morse code saved 706 passengers from the sinking Titanic in 1912. The discovery that sounds could also be sent across vast distances using radio waves launched a new era of broadcasting.  

The first scheduled broadcast happened in Pittsburgh the prior year as fledgling stations launched – ones that could even reach an island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

Keith S. Rogers at Camp Petawawa age 19

For Keith Rogers the interest in radio began as a young militia member with Morse code over homemade transmitters at the age of 15. By 17 he was issued a license for a wireless station at the Charlottetown Armoury in 1909, the same year he worked as wireless operator aboard the icebreaker Minto. At Camp Petawawa, age 19, he and his squad built the first portable wireless Morse code equipment for the Canadian Army. Portable meant two horses to carry, and four men to move it.

Keith Sinclair Rogers

Rogers like his father worked in the family insurance business and followed his dad as commanding officer of the No. 12  Signalling Unit, a local militia group. WW I saw his young family posted to Halifax NS, with regular forces as signals officer at Citadel Hill. After surviving the 1917 Halifax Explosion, his wife and two daughters, were sent home while Keith Rogers remained in Halifax.

On PEI, Government House was turned over to the war effort, as a convalescent hospital for veterans with construction of the Rena MacLean Memorial Hospital next door for additional beds. As the post-war focus turned from convalescent to rehabilitation, it housed the Provincial Technical School.

Keith Roger at war end, was beginning to see the potential for wireless as a civilian means of communication. An amateur radio operator, with military experience, his skills were soon put to use by the Provincial Technical School at Fanningbank teaching a course on electricity and wireless radio, where he also formed a radio club. It was Friday – as the group turned their dial and located the signal from far away - the broadcast from students at the first college radio station, Union College in Schenectady, NY.  Union College campus station, WRUC, exists today - available worldwide, streaming on the internet.

Several months after the 1921 broadcast, Rogers began broadcasting locally with announcements and phonograph music. The Charlottetown Radio Association was formed to gain a club license in 1923 so members could broadcast using that license. Walter Burke started broadcasting church services from Trinity Church in Charlottetown on Jan 25th 1925, as the second church in Canada to do so. Rogers was in business selling radio receivers to the public, and wanted to add broadcasting to the operation so in 1925 the first commercial radio license in Eastern Canada was issued to his radio business with the call letters CFCY. He planned for TV broadcasting on PEI, and his family completed that after his death, with CFCY-TV signing on July 1, 1956. His life’s work of connecting people through the airwaves of “the Friendly Voice of the Maritimes” was realized and these stations continue today with Maritime Broadcasting the current owners of CFCY/Q93 and CBC purchasing the television operations.

Broadcasting united Islanders in new ways as they shared the music of Don Messer and his Islanders with all the country. It  relayed educational programs, farm broadcasts, radio drama, music, news and weather (not to mention Hockey Night in Canada), to the region. Long-range forecasts made a huge difference to farmers cutting hay, and were a matter of life or death to fishers hauling traps long before alternates emerged.

From early church broadcasts to the current level of content available through myriad broadcast platforms, the Island has been an active participant in a new era that began at Fanningbank, one hundred years ago today. 

Honouring 100 years of broadcasting on PEI at a ceremony held at Government House in 2021

See more about the event with pictures.
See CBC coverage including video from the event.