Background
Frank Conrad was born on May 4, 1874 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. He was the the son of Herbert Michael Conrad, a railroad mechanic, and Sadie (Cassidy) Conrad.
Frank Conrad was born on May 4, 1874 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. He was the the son of Herbert Michael Conrad, a railroad mechanic, and Sadie (Cassidy) Conrad.
Already skilled in the use of tools, Frank left school after completing the seventh grade and, at sixteen, was apprenticed as a bench hand at the original electrical manufacturing plant of George Westinghouse in Pittsburgh. The University of Pittsburgh granted him an honorary doctorate of science in 1928.
Conrad's extraordinary mechanical aptitude and inventiveness soon became apparent. After making improvements on the feeding mechanism for arc lamps, he was transferred to the test department of the Westinghouse company, and in 1897 he made his first important engineering innovation, the "round-type" electric meter, prototype of the modern watt-hour meter still in wide use. This success led to his appointment in 1904 as general engineer for special development, in which capacity he systematically redesigned all switchboards, meters, and rheostats in general use.
Beginning about 1910, Conrad became responsible for developing a complete automobile electrical system.
He became interested in radiotelegraphy in 1912, when a bet that his watch could keep better time than a colleague's motivated him to build an amateur home receiver and monitor the official navy time signals. After the outbreak of World War I, Conrad conducted radio research at Westinghouse, at first for the British government and later for the army Signal Corps, working with Westinghouse vice-president Harry Phillips Davis. For this purpose, Conrad built transmitting and receiving stations at his home and at the company's East Pittsburgh plant. He developed the only reliable airplane radio to be widely employed in the war. Conrad continued his radio experiments after the war, and late in 1919 he began broadcasts of recorded music from his home station, 8XK, in Wilkinsburg. The enthusiastic response of fellow amateur operators led him to institute regular programs in the summer of 1920. He transmitted the first "commercially sponsored" broadcast when a local music store from which he borrowed records asked to be acknowledged on the air. That September a Pittsburgh department store began to advertise "amateur wireless sets" which would receive Conrad's programs. Their popularity impressed Davis with the commercial possibilities of radio broadcasting, both for mass communication and to create a market for receiving sets. The result was that Davis and Conrad established Westinghouse's pioneer commercial radio station, KDKA in Pittsburgh, presenting their first regular broadcast on November 2, 1920--a report of Harding's landslide victory over Cox in the presidential election. KDKA stressed diversified programming and over the next year initiated the broadcasting of church services, sports events, news, and market and farm reports. Conrad's technological innovations earned him a promotion to assistant chief engineer of the Westinghouse company in 1921, a post he held until his death. Placed in charge of all radio work, he contributed to the commercial development of shortwaves, then largely confined to amateur use, and demonstrated their usefulness in sending signals over long distances. KDKA erected a shortwave antenna in the fall of 1923; at an international conference in London the next year, Conrad astonished fellow delegates by picking up news from Pittsburgh on a small set with a curtain-rod antenna in his hotel room. Conrad later investigated ultra-high-frequency transmission and developed radio equipment for Westinghouse. Altogether, he was granted over two hundred patents for his ideas, many of them outside the radio field; among them were designs for circuit breakers, electric clocks, home refrigerators, mercury vapor rectifiers, electrical measuring instruments, and lightning arrestors. Conrad's achievements were widely recognized.
Conrad remained professionally active until his death. In 1941, while traveling to Florida, he suffered a coronary thrombosis and died in Miami at the age of sixty-seven.
Many features of later automotive wiring practice, such as push-button remote starter control, automatic cutoff for the starting motor, and voltage-regulated generators, were included in his original design. Outside professional circles, Conrad's fame derived mainly from his pioneering efforts in radio broadcasting, which earned him a reputation as "Father of American Radio. " He received the coveted Liebmann Prize of the Institute of Radio Engineers in 1925 and two years later was elected the group's vice-president. The American Institute of Electrical Engineers bestowed on him its Edison Medal (1931) and Lamme Medal (1936). In 1953 Conrad became the fourth man elected to the Radio Hall of Fame, following Thomas A. Edison, Guglielmo Marconi, and Reginald A. Fessenden.
He married Flora Elizabeth Selheimer of Wilkinsburg on June 18, 1902. They had three children: Francis Herbert, Crawford Joseph, and Jane Louise (Mrs. George Edwin Durham).
