I Tappa Key and Auburn's First Hams
Pioneer Alabama amateur radio pivots around the electrical
engineering department at what was then called Alabama
Polytechnic Institute (API) in Auburn. In 1912 API alumnus, Miller
Reese Hutchinson, an electrical engineer who served as assistant
to Thomas A. Edison, gave a spark gap transmitter and crystal
receiver to API. In that same year Congress approved the Radio
Act, and universities throughout the nation applied for licenses.
For their station, API students erected a 150-foot steel pipe on
the east end of Broun Hall and strung an antenna to the second
floor where the set was located. Hutchinson arrived on June 2,
1913, for the dedication, reading the first message transmitted,
a note to at his New Jersey laboratory:
"This wireless formally christens the two-and-a-half
kilowatt apparatus which I have this day presented to
the Alabama Polytechnic Institute in commemoration of
the first homecoming of the alumni. The president, the
faculty, the alumni, and the student body join me in
expressing love and esteem to the father of electrical
development."
Auburn's station was licensed 5YA to operate on 1800 meters and
was manned by faculty and students. The engineering department
developed a course in wireless telegraphy to teach interested
amateurs code and radio science. As operators' skills improved
and better equipment located, 5YA's range extended and was heard
as far away as Indianapolis, Indiana.
During World War I, 5YA, like all non-military radio stations,
was dismantled because the government feared spies and saboteurs
would use radio waves to the allies' detriment. However, the
army issued two portable sets and buzzer devices to API to train
approximately 200 men as wireless telegraphers during the war.
Among Auburn's wartime radio instructors was youthful Victor
Caryl McIlvaine, a native of Tampa, Florida, who had built a
radio set, taught himself code, received both amateur and
commercial operator licenses, and worked for the Marconi Company
as a ship radio operator in the Gulf of Mexico. API also hired
him to teach electrical engineering courses, and McIlvaine, who
did not have a degree, took advanced engineering courses.
When the radio ban was lifted in 1919, McIlvaine decided to
complete his degree and to build a new station using 5YA's
antenna and spare parts from the engineering department and his
own equipment. The resulting conglomeration was 5XA, the first
experimental station in the 5th radio district.
5XA was located in a small building near the campus's main gate
and had a single wire long-wave antennae attached to the water
tank behind Wright's Drug Store (Toomer's Corner). Operators
continually sought to improve the station's equipment but
received no financial aid from the college.
The number of local radio amateurs grew, and these hams were
keenly interested in their hobby, managing to keep 5XA almost
continuously on the air, including at night. Albert E. Duran
remembered that when members sent code that it "made beautiful
music and generated a lovely odor of ozone. While someone was
sending, you could read the sparks on a power pole at the main
gate."
In 1920 Auburn's first amateur radio organization, the I Tappa
Key Club, was established. Meetings were scheduled erratically,
depending if members' mothers had sent care packages or
McIlvaine's wife Eleanor (her brother Jack M. Dickinson was a
ham) had baked cookies for them to enjoy. Electrical engineering
professor A. St. C. Dunstan, known to his friends as "Bull,"
served as advisor, and his son Arthur--"Little Bull"--joined
while still in high school. Club members sent radio-grams free of
charge for Auburnites and college personnel.
In the 1920s voice radio was introduced to Auburn, initiating
collegial and governmental regulation of programming and
possibilities of commercialization, but I Tappa Key Club's
station 5XA continued to be operated by an enthusiastic group of
amateurs using a myriad of equipment and tapping out messages
just for the fun of it.
*** Written for the AURC/EAARC Newsletter by Dr. Elizabeth D.
Schafer, Loachapka, AL Historian
