Early Play-By-Play Radio Broadcast of a College Football Game
N 30° 36.667 W 096° 20.393
14R E 755020 N 3389521
An appropriately placed TX historical marker is alongside Kyle Field commemorating the broadcast of a home game between Texas A&M College and t.u. played on November 24, 1920.
Waymark Code: WMZYRX
Location: Texas, United States
Date Posted: 01/25/2019
Views: 5
Without squabbling about the details of the beginning of the radio, by 1920 it was still a young technology and still crude and unwieldily in its operation. The fact that this plan to broadcast a football game got the support it did is amazing. World War 1 had just ended only two years before, so the leftover equipment from Bolton Hall, where electrical engineering was taught, must have had a few transmitters suitable for civilian radio transmission with the proper adjustment made to it. Since A&M had been designated an Army Training Base and had been teaching the Signal Corps electrical engineering courses during the war, it makes sense that creative minds ventured to test out this new technology of wireless radio transmission. What better venue to test it on than the Turkey Day home game against their major rival!
Another consideration is that the two students credited in this historical marker as well as a marker on Bolton Hall, states that William A. Tolson and Harry M. Saunders were the primary figures involved in the wireless broadcast for that day. The information on Bolton Hall's sign states Tolson was in the Class of '23 and Saunders was in the Class of '22. Assuming they were bright students and graduated in 4 years, then Tolson would be a Freshman and Saunders a Sophomore in Nov. 1920! Yet these two were the public face (or voice) of this project. Now wonder Texas A&M has become such a successful institution of higher learning when they attract this caliber of student.
Another interesting caveat is that station 5XB that broadcast out of Bolton Hall may not have been the first radio station to air a wireless radio program, but it was the first to broadcast a sporting event's play-by-play. By the end of 1920, the radio stations were required to be licensed and were given new call signs in the manner we know them today, either beginning with K or W followed by three other alphanumerics. X5B became WTAW in 1922.
WTAW radio station was the 5XB station:
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