100th Anniversary of Radio Broadcasting on PEI - A Talk by Ian Scott

100th Anniversary of Radio Broadcasting on PEI

A talk give by Ian Scott at Government House, Charlottetown, PEI

April 14, 2021

The MC for the event was broadcaster Kathy Large,
 a granddaughter of Keith S. Rogers.

Your Honour, Ladies & Gentlemen

It is a great honour to be here today at the location of a ground-breaking event, one century ago; the day when an international broadcast received here, provided proof that the emerging technology of long-range radio transmission had arrived.

The event we are celebrating, we now understand, was the dawn of broadcast media and all that has followed.  

Ian Scott

Betty Rogers Large or her sister Marianne both 2^nd generation broadcasters might ask us at this point to, “Put on your pretenders boys and girls.” And if you will, we can almost imagine the excitement building as the group on March 11, 1921 gather in the Provincial Technical School at the Rena MacLean Memorial Hospital on the Fanningbank estate, with Keith Rogers, their instructor, as they hear that first broadcast come faintly and haltingly, and then as clear as a whistle. Young veterans of the Great War in the prime of their lives, some carrying visible and invisible scars of war, some beginning new jobs as they turn dials on homemade equipment and eventually succeed at tuning in a musical broadcast from similar students at Union College in Schenectady, NY. 

Keith Sinclair Rogers (1892-1954)

A week later – the excitement builds as local dignitaries included the mayor, premier, most of the Provincial Cabinet,  several judges and business owners gather for a repeat performance this time using a gramophone horn so they don’t have to share headphones. Harder to connect this time -- but  with special greetings included for the PEI audience from New York it was a success. That same week, was equally exciting for the Rogers family as they welcomed the arrival of their son, a welcome brother for their two girls.

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. Dots and dashes out of thin air were amazing enough, but it was a bold discovery that sent sounds through the air across vast distances.

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.

For Keith Rogers it began as a young militia member 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, (just across Government Pond.) 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 equipment for the Canadian Army. Portable meant two horses to carry, and four men to move it.

Keith S. Rogers at Camp Petawawa

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, 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 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 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 himself 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 the air on July 1, 1956. His life’s work of connecting people through “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 alternatives emerged.

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

The Honourable Antoinette Perry
Lieutenant Governor of Prince Edward Island

See CBC coverage including video from the event.