Literally, a manmade island, Columbia Island was created and became the home of WABC for some 25 years Note: The station referred to in the following article is now WCBS. Radio "Island" Comes to Life
WABC's New Transmitter Is Called an Engineering Dream
Built on a Man-Made Rock in Long Island Sound
This article appeared in the New York Times on Oct. 12, 1941. Fifteen miles northeast of Manhattan a
tiny island of steel, concrete, copper and glass has grown out of the waves of Long Island Sound. From the midst of this man-made pile of metal and masonry a 410-foot steel tower projects upward. Adorning the top is a steel "hat" 85 feet square, wider by 10 feet than the base from which the tower sprouts. Crowning the hat like a wispy feather is a device resembling the antenna of a huge insect. Ships that pass up and down Long Island Sound on clear days sight the tower many miles away, farther at night, because of the winking lamps around the brim. Next Saturday, shortly after 10 P. M., at the touch of a button--"Columbia Island," as it is now called--will spring into ethereal activity for the first time as the new key station of the Columbia Broadcasting System--the newest, perhaps the most revolutionary, broadcasting unit ever devised. Salt water is supposed to be the ideal "earth" medium over which to project radio waves. Columbia Island, new home of WABC, is surrounded with it. Large steamers may sail within a few feet of the strange-looking new outfit; made so, chiefly, because of a monstrous vertical lattice aerial. Except for this tower, which might pass for the fighting top of a battleship, the balance resembles a swanky, streamlined yacht club with business-like pier and boarding float. Even the concrete abutment on which the building and mast rest is streamlined--curved outward like a clipper's bow to toss high waves back upon themselves. Everything about the station has been calculated to a nicety, even to the right-angled kinks deliberately built into the electrical "pipes" that convey WABC's 50,000 radio watts from water-cooled tubes to lattice aerial. These kinks are lightning arresters in disguise. If a bolt strikes the tower it is expected to leap off the electrical pipe at the first corner--certainly the second or third--and flash to earth over spark gaps to the heavy copper roof of the building and ninety copper cables extending radially outward into deep water. The men who operate the station actually live within a grounded metal shell, under which are living quarters for engineers, workshops, electrical units to supply tube voltages, an auxiliary Diesel-electric generator that roars into use the instant a fault occurs in under-water electric cables from shore, and everything else that modern radio engineering can devise to keep a station on the air in spite of apparatus failure or fury of elements. If a subsurface cable springs a leak an internal gas, at high pressure, keeps the water out. The radio plant is virtually two in one. Although almost entirely automatic in operation the eye of an engineer, sweeping a dozen control-room electrical meters, may detect failure in any part of the system. By pressing one of a series of buttons a train of events is started to eliminate the trouble--perhaps 100 of the plant's 500-odd selective electrical relays may open or close, cutting in or out of the circuit as many as half of the station's 500 vacuum tubes. From water-line to tip of vertical lattice "radiator," every adornment has a purpose at the WABC plant. The wispy, feather-like object that tops the 410-foot tower--scarcely visible from below--is a receiving antenna for two microwave emergency channels between transmitter and studios at 485 Madison Ave., Manhattan. If land circuits from studio to New Rochelle and under-water path to Columbia Island fail, the microwave circuit cuts in an instant later and neither listeners nor engineers may be the wiser. The direct-by-air link operates on 330 and 335 megacycles (less than a meter) from a special sending station atop the Manhattan studios. Because of the wide frequency difference between the WABC broadcast channel (880,000 cycles) and the ultra-short-wave link (330,000,000 cycles), no interference results despite the fact that incoming studio program waves arrive at Columbia Island in the midst of powerful 50,000-watt waves leaving the vertical radiator to serve millions of set-owners. One of the features of the 342-ton vertical radiator is the part that spreads outward at the top like an umbrella. Commonly referred to as the "hat," this part perches on four large insulators. When supplied with broadcast power "a little out of phase" or electrical step with the main tower on which it rests, the WABC waves in space are made to "hug the earth" and become more effective in producing strong signals for receiving sets. Four huge insulators at the base of the main tower legs support the whole. Each insulator is designed to carry more than 3,000,000 pounds; the whole tower will perch upon three legs, if need be, and withstand 120-mile winds. Supporting the aerial tower are four large steel-concrete blocks each weighing 2,500 tons--twenty-two feet square. Outside is a 3,000-ton sea wall and between tower blocks and sea wall is 8,000 tons of sand and loam fill upon which grass and shrubs will grow in the Spring. The magic of the new WABC, however, is not all above the waterline; drillers were put to work to find a source of fresh water for drinking purposes and cooling the tubes. It was struck 910 feet down. Incidentally, WABC after Saturday will serve a potential audience of 14,000,000 listeners, according to CBS engineers. Radio equipment was designed by the Federal Telegraph Company of Newark, affiliate of the International Telephone and Telegraph Co.
