Westinghouse Shortwave Radio Pioneer Station

In nineteen twenty-three, Westinghouse engineers opened an experimental radio facility on this site in the Pittsburgh area and began transmitting signals at frequencies far higher than anyone had seriously used before. The project was led by Frank Conrad, a self-taught inventor who had already helped put Pittsburgh on the map in nineteen twenty by broadcasting music from a garage in Wilkinsburg and inspiring Westinghouse station KDKA.

At the time, most engineers believed high-frequency shortwave signals were weak and impractical. Conrad's team proved the opposite. Shortwave signals, they discovered, could bounce off the upper atmosphere and travel around the globe with far less power than standard broadcast frequencies required. The experiments here helped establish shortwave radio as the backbone of international communication for the next several decades, carrying news, music, and propaganda across oceans in a world that had no satellites and no internet.