WRNY (defunct)

WRNY was an American AM radio station that operated in New York City, New York from 1925 to 1934. It was started by Hugo Gernsback's Experimenter Publishing Company to promote his radio and science magazines. It was one of the first stations to have regularly scheduled experimental television broadcast starting in August 1928. Experimenter Publishing went bankrupt in early 1929 and the station was purchased by the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company to promote aviation.

Hugo Gernsback was born in Luxembourg and studied electrical engineering in Germany. In 1904 at age 20, Gernsback emigrated to America to sell his automotive battery design and to start a mail order radio and electrical components business. The Electro Importing Company catalog soon grew into a magazine, Modern Electrics. The Experimenter Publishing Company was started in 1915 and by the early 1920s was publishing Radio News, Science and Invention, and Practical Electrics magazines. Gernsback had always included fiction stories in his magazines and in 1926 launched the first magazine devoted to scientific fiction, Amazing Stories. Experimenter Publishing also published numerous technical and general interest books.

KDKA in Pittsburgh was the first commercial radio station in the United States having made its first broadcast in November 1920. By 1925 there were over 500 broadcast stations in the United States. KDKA was operated by Westinghouse Electric to help sell radio receivers. In addition to radio equipment manufacturers, many publishers were starting stations. Experimenter Publishing applied for and was granted a radio station license to transmit at 1160 kHz with the call sign WRNY. Over the next three years they would use 800 kHz, 1070 kHz, 970 kHz, 920 kHz and finally 1010 kHz. Its state of the art studio was in a hotel room on the 18th floor of the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City and the 500 watt transmitter located on the hotel roof. The first broadcast was on June 12, 1925, and was covered by The New York Times. The opening speaker was former Senator Chauncey Depew followed by the "father of radio", Lee De Forest. The evening concluded with two hours of live musical entertainment. Experimenter Publishing used the radio station and the magazines to promote each other. Radio interviews with scientists or other radio notables would be reprinted in the magazines. Projects or articles from Gernsback's magazines would be discussed on WRNY. The station call letters, WRNY, appeared on each magazine cover.

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