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 March 1, 2006 The True Father of Audio
Rogers Sr. was born in 1900 and, like many techno types of the day, became fascinated by a newfangled thing called radio. Author Ormond Raby, in a 1969 profile of Rogers in Electron magazine, quotes a Rogers family servant as saying that, in 1911 when Rogers was 11, "The boy’s bedroom was so covered with wires and gear that it was almost impossible to step around it." Sounds like my own room half a century later. Edward Rogers’ youth was focused on radio -- he was an avid radio amateur. One story has it that he was fooling around with his radio gear at the family cottage at Pointe au Baril on Georgian Bay, the eastern portion of Lake Huron, when he picked up a transmission describing the sinking of the Titanic, before the news had been released. But Rogers was much more than a mere tinkerer. He came up with a technique for powering a radio that not only revolutionized the field but made possible the kind of sound that fascinated me in my teens the way radio had captivated him. For the first quarter-century of its existence, radios could be operated only by direct-current batteries, these mostly the heavy, potentially dangerous lead-acid types. Although more and more homes were being wired for electricity, the alternating-current frequency (25 to 60Hz, depending on where you were) tended to feed through into the audio and render it unlistenable. Even after dry cells had replaced the car-type wet batteries, dry cells were still very large -- they had to supply prodigious amounts of power to heat the filaments in radios’ vacuum tubes. Such batteries were still available as late as the 1960s; my family used them to power radios at our own cottage (also at Pointe au Baril), where there was no power at the time. They were about the size of a modern DVD player or cassette deck. In 1924, Rogers went to Pittsburgh to check out a tube that had been developed there to power radios with house AC current. He bought rights to the unsuccessful design and set out to make it work, and in June 1925 received a patent on the circuit that would revolutionize radio -- and audio. Two years later, in Toronto, Rogers founded the world’s first batteryless radio station, CFRB (the RB stands for Rogers Batteryless), which is still one of Canada’s leading stations. According to Raby, Rogers then turned his attention to television and radar, and died tragically at the age of 38. But anyone who has ever fired up the ol’ stereo to check out the latest CD or satellite radio broadcast owes a debt to Ted Rogers Sr. ...Ian G. Masters
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