This week marks the 100th anniversary of the world's first intercontinental radio transmission. On September 29, 1915, a U.S. naval radio station in Arlington, Virginia initiated a transmission to another naval radio station on Mare Island in San Francisco, California, which then relayed to Honolulu, Hawaii.
The demonstration was a joint public-private venture coordinated through defense contracts with the American Telephone & Telegraph Co. (AT&T) and the Western Electric Co., using equipment installed at radio stations under Navy jurisdiction.
This photograph from Hagley Library's David Sarnoff papers (Accession 2464.55) collection, taken a few years later in 1921, shows the RCA executive David Sarnoff at the company's Transoceanic Station at New Brunswick, New Jersey. The station was built by the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America in 1914. During World War I, it was used by the U.S. Navy, and was the primary station tasked with transmitting and receiving radio signals between the United States and Europe. After the war, ownership of the station was transferred to RCA, who kept it in operation until 1957.
A number of notable figures can be spotted in this image. Pictured, from left to right: three unidentified men, David Sarnoff, Thomas J. Hayden, Ernst Julius Berg, S. Benedict, Albert Einstein, John Renshaw Carson, Charles Proteus Steinmetz, A.N. Goldsmith, A. Malsin, Irving Langmuir, Albert W. Hull, E.B. Pullsbury, Saul Dushman, Richard Howland Ranger, George Ashley Campbell, C.H. Taylor, and unidentified man. One of the unidentified men might be Ernst Alexanderson. Others may be station engineers like Hayden, who is next to Sarnoff.
The David Sarnoff papers (Accession 2464.55) collection was assembled by Sarnoff to celebrate his career. However, the papers also include the extensive photographic, publicity, and administrative files created by his staff at RCA and a substantial audiovisual component. This collection forms the initial core collection of the David Sarnoff Library collections (Accession 2464). These collections were the holdings of the David Sarnoff Library, founded in 1967 as part of the David Sarnoff Research Center. When the library closed in 2009, its archival collections were donated to the Hagley Library.
To browse a selection of material from these collections in our Digital Archives, just click here.