CFRC - FM 101.9 - Kingston, ON

Queen’s University has one of the longest continuous histories in radio of any association in the world, besides the Marconi Companies. The first demonstration of wireless telegraphy at Queen’s was given by the first Professor of General Engineering in the Kingston School of Mining, James Lester Willis Gill (B.A.Sc. 1896; ... See more M.Sc. 1904, McGill), at a spring convocation lecture in 1902. Formal teaching of wireless telegraphy in the Department of Electrical Engineering began in 1912-13 session. Later, Professor Gill conducted experimental wireless distance test around Kingston, carrying the receiver in the back seat of his automobile. The Queen’s wireless telegraphs were licensed and used in training WWI army signallers at the Barriefield War Camp in 1915-17. After returning from the war in the fall of 1919, Prof. Gill founded the Wireless Club at Queen’s and provided them with some code equipment. In the late spring of 1922, a new generation of young professors, Douglas M. Jemmett (M.A. ‘11; B.Sc. ‘13) and Robert L. Davis (M.A. ‘21, MIT), designed and built experimental wireless telephone (AM radio) station 9BT in Fleming Hall, so that the Wireless Club could join the boom in public broadcasting of sports and live concerts. The only documented broadcast of 9BT was a post-game summary of a Queen’s Tricolour-Hamilton Rowing Club exhibition football game on October 7, 1922. With the donation of $500 by Dr. W.R. Jaffrey (Meds ‘13), Professor Jemmett purchased a motor generator set to upgrade the signal to listenability and CFRC- Canada’s Famous Rugby Champions - made its debut with the play-by-play of a Queen’s-McGill football game on October 27, 1923. For the next decade, CFRC was on the air for a few hours a week during the school year, broadcasting football, hockey (including women’s hockey) and basketball games, the occasional extension lecture, studio concerts, and convocations. Young Lecturer Harold H Stewart (Elec. ‘26) built a new and modern crystal-controlled AM transmitter for CFRC in 1930-31, but it was destroyed in the fire that gutted Fleming Hall in the early hours of June 6, 1933. The transmitter was rebuilt and formal connections were made with the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission in 1934. CFRC became a full CRBC network member in a commercial partnership with the Kingston Whig-Standard, with the inaugural broadcast taking place on June 29, 1936. CFRC took feeds from the CRBC, soon to become the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, but also produced a great deal of its own programming with local talent. The station helped bind the community to Queen’s University in a new way and was Kingston’s first listening post on the rest of Canada. One of CFRC’s triumphs took place on a summer day in 1938 when we supplied a feed of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s convocation address from old Richardson Stadium to every radio network on the continent.

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