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Colin Bruce Kennedy was born in
Teeswater, Ontario, Canada, on February 6, 1885. His
primary education was obtained in the Canadian Public
Schools. |
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He learned telegraphy while working as an errand boy for
a small-town drugstore which was also the telegraph
office.
Leaving home when about fourteen years of age, he spent
the next ten years as a telegraph operator in many
cities throughout Canada. The last two of these years he
was in charge of two radio stations on the west coast of
Vancouver Island in the Canadian Government wireless
service. |
His next seven years were spent with the Federal
Telegraph Company at Palo Alto, California, as a radio
operator, station engineer, and research and development
engineer. This included the entire period of World War I
during which the company built many large and small
radio transmitters for the Government.
In 1919, he organized and became the President of the
Colin B. Kennedy Company.
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Although originally established for the
manufacture of radio receiving equipment for experimenters, at
the advent of radio broadcasting, the company was among the
first to produce receivers for home use. This business continued
until 1933 when economic conditions forced a suspension of
operation. |
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Mr. Kennedy continued in the radio field, predominantly
in a merchandising capacity. In February, 1942, he
entered the service of his country, becoming a civilian
employee at the Signal Corps
inspection depot in Chicago. Upon his death on June 16,
radio has lost another of the pioneering spirits whose
vigorous and constructive work in the early days did
much to advance the art and the science.
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The Kennedy factory in San Francisco
made high quality
commercial receivers and home radios. A solid mahogany or walnut cabinet,
silver plated knobs
and polished formica panels are indicative of the quality and
care that went into the building of Kennedy receivers. Kennedy regenerative receivers were so well-respected
that they were still being sold in 1925 when most
regenerative receivers were considered obsolete. |
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The earliest
radio broadcast from Los Altos, near San
Fransisco, hit the
airwaves in 1921 from experimental station 6XAC,
owned and licensed by Colin B. Kennedy himself,
as a way to test the radio receivers he was
selling. It gained attention in the Oct. 24, 1921
edition of
the San Francisco Bulletin, in which a story referred to
a "radiophone station" in Los Altos which "has
broken all records by sending messages 2,000
miles overland to Great Bend, Kansas." The
station proved so successful in getting
responses to its test broadcasts that Kennedy
was granted a commercial broadcasting license.
Station KLP continued broadcasting until early
1923.
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Kennedy's
broadcasts originated from his treasurer's home. Emile
A. Portal had learned the technical aspects of radio
broadcasting in 1912 from Charles (Doc) Herrold, an
early though unheralded broadcast pioneer from San José.
To keep his listeners advised, Portal sent out weekly
postcards listing KLP programs for the week.
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