Back in 1919, listening to radio was more like a science experiment than entertainment. There were no professional radio stations, and most radio receivers were homemade. But almost every night, 12-year-old Harry Mills would lie in bed and listen to amateur radio operators signal back and forth in the dots and dashes of Morse code. Then one night he heard something different.
It was Frank Conrad testing radio equipment in the 1930s. Mills had stumbled onto the experimental transmissions coming from Westinghouse engineer Frank Conrad's garage, 35 miles away near Pittsburgh. It was one thing for Mills to hear Conrad's voice. But he soon heard Conrad playing phonographic music records. "It was astounding," Mills says. "I didn't know you could do that…To add the music, it opens up a whole new world."
Thomas Edison said: "To invent, you need a good imagination… and a pile of junk." That may help explain why so many important industries were born in a garage: Henry Ford's first automobile, Walt Disney's early cartoons, the first Apple Computer.
Then there's Frank Conrad's garage on the corner of Penn Avenue and Peebles Street, on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. Some people say that's where the modern broadcasting industry began. In 1920, Conrad's weekly broadcasts from his garage led to the founding of KDKA, widely considered the world's first commercial radio station.