On December 12, 1901, Italian scientist Guglielmo Marconi stood on a hill overlooking St. John's, Newfoundland, and received the first radio message ever to cross the Atlantic Ocean. That fateful message was just a few Morse pulses—the letter 'S', in fact—but it changed the face of the twentieth century. This month marks the 114th anniversary of Marconi's milestone, so we've asked Jeopardy!'s Ken Jennings to get on the air and clear the air about some of the most appalling misconceptions from radio's first century.
The Debunker: Does the Mississippi River Divide All the 'K' Radio Stations from the 'W' Ones?
This may mystify Millennials, but TV and radio stations haven't always been able to call themselves anything they wanted. Wait, let me go back further. There used to be a thing called "local TV and radio," and broadcasters used three- or four-digit letter combinations to ID their stations. Growing up in the western United States, all our local stations started with a 'K'; it was only by watching Mr. Rogers and other PBS shows from back east (and, obviously, WKRP in Cincinnati) that I realized that other, weirder parts of the country used 'W' as their station prefix. My parents explained that 'K' was used west of the Mississippi River and 'W' in the east. They meant well, but it turns out that's not exactly the case.
The current U.S. system dates back to the 1910s, when the federal Bureau of Navigation assigned the K prefix to ships transmitting in the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico, and the W to the Great Lakes and Pacific. I know, that's backward! Somehow the clerks applying this system to land stations in 1913 got their coasts mixed up, and began assigning W's in the east and K's out west. At first the dividing line was the Texas/New Mexico border, the better to keep all the Gulf states together. In 1923, it was moved east to the Mississippi River.
But there are still plenty of radio stations that don't follow the Mississippi rule. Some are leftovers from the old Texas/New Mexico border, like WBAP in Forth Worth. Others, like KDKA in Pittsburgh, are relics of a brief period in 1920 when all stations got the K prefix regardless of longitude. Ten current stations moved cities but kept their call letters. A few broadcasters, like WACO-FM in Waco, got the other letter by special request, and some were just goofs. (KTGG in Michigan is apparently a K-station because a government clerk mistakenly thought the postal code "MI" was short for "Missouri.") And all bets are off in Minnesota and Louisiana, which are divided by the Mississippi. There's little rhyme or reason to the K/W scattering there. In other words, in these, the waning days of broadcast TV and terrestrial radio, it's mostly true that the mighty Mississippi divides K-America from W-America. But only if you ignore the hundreds of exceptions.
Quick Quiz: In Canada, all three-letter codes for airports begin with what letter of the alphabet?
Ken Jennings is the author of six books, most recently his Junior Genius Guides, Because I Said So!, and Maphead. He's also the proud owner of an underwhelming Bag o' Crap. Follow him at ken-jennings.com or on Twitter as @KenJennings.