Alberta Inventors and Inventions

It is now 60 years since CKUA first went on the air. Twenty years ago, Joe McCallum's CKUA & 40 Wondrous Years of Radio provided a delightful account of the early days of radio and CKUA's role as one of the earliest radio stations. Over the years, the reminiscences of various people about happenings associated with the station have appeared in The Trail and the New Trail, for example, "The Coming of Sound" by H. P. Brown in the Summer 1952 issue of New Trail. As the station's first control operator (and the last living member of the original staff), it seems timely for me to set down some of my own reminiscences of those early days, and of the pioneering venture that was CKUA.

CKUA started on an extremely limited budget, but with lots of energy and enthusiasm on tie part of the studio and station staff. Harold (''H.P B.'') Brown, the announcer and studio manager, was a genius at operating the station on a shoe-string budget. With a minimum expenditure of hard-to-get funds, but with a generous contribution of talent from University faculty and well- known Edmonton musicians, the station was able to produce some remarkably high-quality broadcasts that filled a real need in providing educational programs for the people of the province. The list of academics and musicians who contributed their talent and expertise to CKUA would surely read like a Who's Who of that day. It is my intent to recount a few anecdotes relating to some of the programs and participants of those early days.

William Rowan and the Yellow-tailed Crows

One of the most popular lecturers on CKUA was Dr. William Rowan, professor of Zoology at the University Of Alberta. Whereas most academic research is carried on in laboratories or professorial offices away from the view of the general public, Dr. Rowan's experiments dealing with bird migration were different. During the fall and winter of one year in the early 1930s, people crossing the North Saskatchewan River via the High Level Bridge were treated to a curious spectacle. Below them on the south bank of the river were two, met large, chicken-wire enclosures, each containing a hundred crows. In one enclosure, the birds were exposed to the normally decreasing hours of daylight as fall changed to winter; in the other, a system of artificial illumination subjected these particular crows to increasing hours of "daylight" as winter came on. The object of the experiment was to verify or disprove the theory that seasonal migration north or south was determined by increasing or decreasing hours of daylight, rather than by increasing or decreasing temperatures.

The plan was to release all the birds in early winter and find out whether they flew north or south. The crows would be suitably tagged, and hunters requested to return the tags to the University (with the promise of prizes for the lucky numbers). There remained one problem: among the hundreds of thousands (millions?) of crows in central Alberta, how to spot the prize ones? This problem was solved by having Trudeau's Cleaning and Dye Works dye the tails of the experimental crows a bright yellow! With these ingenious preparations, a satisfactory return was achieved, and it proved possible to affirm the correctness of the theory - that crows subjected to lengthening hours of "daylight" flew north while the others flew south. With this f lair for the spectacular, it is little wonder that Professor Roman's CKUA lectures attracted a wide audience.

Recollections of CKUA