10/12/2026
Ever wonder why Powel Crosley Jr. and Cincinnati's Crosley Company were chosen to lead the Voice of America's Bethany Relay Station development efforts during WWII? Consider the story below their trial run: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/19Ncj6teos/
On May 2, 1934, President Franklin Roosevelt pressed a key and a radio station north of Cincinnati came on at five hundred thousand watts.
Ten times the power of any other station in the country. It is the first and only commercial radio station in the United States ever licensed to broadcast at that level, and the state historical marker in Warren County says so in those words.
WLW had been climbing for a decade to get there. Five hundred watts in 1923. A thousand in 1924. Five thousand in January 1925, the first American station at that level. Fifty thousand in 1928, the year it moved its transmitting operations out to Mason.
Then April 17, 1934 brought permission to run experimentally at half a million, and two weeks later Roosevelt opened it formally.
The hardware is hard to picture until you put numbers on it.
The transmitter was a custom joint venture of RCA, General Electric and Westinghouse. It stood about fifteen feet high and sixty feet wide and ran on twelve power amplifier tubes. Cooling it took roughly ten thousand gallons of water a minute, drawn from a pond seventy feet square. Two separate thirty-three thousand volt feeds came in from Cincinnati Gas and Electric.
Running it took an engineering staff of sixty-three, with as many as seventeen operators at a time, plus a hundred ninety performers.
What it did to the neighborhood is on the state marker, in the marker's own careful phrasing. Locals reported hearing broadcasts on barbed wire fences, milking machines, rainspouts, water faucets and radiators.
Going the other direction, the station fielded requests from daytime listeners in Hawaii and from Buckingham Palace. A 1936 FCC survey rated it the most preferred station among rural residents across thirteen states. They called it the Nation's Station and for five years it was not a boast.
Here is what people get wrong.
The assumption is that something broke. The signal turned out to be dangerous, or the equipment burned itself out, or the experiment failed and they shut it down.
None of that happened. The transmitter was working fine on February 28, 1939.
WLW lost superpower in Washington, not in Mason.
The authorization had never been permanent. It was experimental and had to be renewed every six months, which meant the whole thing sat on a rolling license that could just not be renewed. And pressure built.
WOR in Newark, two slots up the dial at 710, complained about interference and sued. Canada complained on behalf of CFRB in Toronto, which sat at 690. In 1938 the Senate passed a resolution recommending the FCC cap station power at fifty thousand watts, on monopoly grounds.
In 1939 the FCC declined to renew. On March 1 the order took effect and WLW went back to fifty thousand watts for its regular programming. Not quite all the way, though. After midnight, under the experimental call sign W8XO, it kept running at half a million watts until the end of 1942.
They had tried to be good neighbors about it, too. After Toronto complained, two shorter towers went up southwest of the main tower, there for one purpose: turning the signal down in the direction of Canada. Towers built to aim a little quiet at Toronto, and they did the job.
It did not work well enough.
And there is one more detail that quietly undercuts the whole bigger-is-better legend, from the inside.
The Blaw-Knox diamond cantilever tower at Mason went up in spring 1933 at eight hundred thirty-one feet. A few years later engineers took the top section off, bringing it down to roughly seven hundred thirty-six feet, because at full height the signal was cancelling itself out at the fringe.
They cut their own tower down on purpose. The tallest version was not the best version.
The National Endowment for the Humanities puts the cost of the whole five-hundred-kilowatt system at about half a million dollars, spent on an experiment that ran five years and was never allowed to become permanent.
The tower is still standing, at roughly the height they cut it to. It is one of six Blaw-Knox diamond cantilever towers still in use by American radio stations, and WLW still broadcasts from it every day.
Photo: Joanna Poe, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped, text added).
