W2XR

This station was started by John V. L. Hogan, who began his career as a teenage assistant to Dr. Lee DeForest. He pursued many experiments in his Radio Inventions Laboratory at 140 Nassau St. in Manhattan and later at 31-04 Northern Blvd., above a Ford garage in Long Island City.
 

By the late 1920's, Hogan had joined the parade of technical experts and tinkerers trying to send mechanically scanned images through the air. Radio Pictures, Inc. received a license in 1929 for an "experimental broadcasting station" with the call sign W2XR,
W2XR officially went on the air March 26, 1929. Hogan's television and facsimile pictures were broadcast at 2100 to 2200 kHz.

In 1933, the Federal Radio Commisson (FRC) authorized double-wide 20kc channels at 1530, 1550 and 1570 kilocycles, just past the top of the broadcast band at the time. Hogan decided to accompany his television pictures with classical records on 1550kc. Many of the better radios could tune the frequency, and Hogan began to win an audience unaware of, or uninterested in, video. The TV experiments were soon abandoned in favor of achieving high-fidelity audio transmission.
 

This would evolve into one of the nation's premier classical music stations (WQXR) and make it the only radio station in New York to have begun life on television.