If you've had a chance to peruse our Web site information about KPH you know that it began like in the Palace Hotel (thus the call PH) in San Francisco in 1904 or 1905. Some wags say that the ops stood around with nothing to do because there were virtually no ships equipped with wireless on the west coast at the time! True or not, we had a little problem in San Francisco in 1906 and KPH was lost when the Palace Hotel and much of the rest of the city burned after the earthquake.
The next home for KPH was on Green Street in San Francisco. This street name will resonate with historians of broadcasting because it was on Green Street that Philo T. Farnesworth, inventor of electronic television, had his lab. But KPH was located at the west end of Green Street (we don't yet know exactly where), closer to the Pacific Ocean.
The western parts of San Francisco were still sparsely settles but not apparently sparsely enough to accommodate a coast station with and the crashing din of its rotary spark. So KPH had to move again.
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| Operating position at KPH Hillcrest. Note the Model 106 receiver and the outboard tube audio amplifier to the right. Note also the grip of a revolver in its holster nailed to the leg of the operating table |
The next home for the station was a little more appropriate. It was perched atop Hillcrest, a hill overlooking the Pacific in Daly City, a city just south of San Francisco. And there it stayed until the early 1920s when the receive site moved to the former Marconi (now RCA) trans-Pacific receive site in Marshalls (now Marshall) and the transmitter, still a rotary gap, was moved to the Bolinas transmitter site.
Hillcrest is just a short drive from San Francisco. Did anything remain of KPH? That's the question Richard Dillman and Mike Johnson set out to answer. They had a photo of the exterior of the KPH shack with Lake Merced and the Pacific in the background. And a topo map of Daly City seemed to identify Hillcrest. So they beat a path to the south and soon arrived at the present day Hillcrest. They were crushed by what they saw.
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| Entry to the gated community atop Hillcrest |
Hillcrest was now a gated community. Which of course should have been expected for a location with a beautiful view of the Pacific. But the MRHS explorers were True Believers and thus not the sort to give up easily.
After a little bushwhacking along a contour of the hill to the north they came upon truly sacred ground - the actual site of the KPH Hillcrest shack. Take a look at the photos below.
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| KPH Hillcrest ca. 1916, located in a depression dug from the side of the hill. Note Lake Merced just above the roof line and to the right of the antenna mast and the Pacific Ocean in the background. |
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| Mike Johnson stands at the site of KPH Hillcrest. Note Lake Merced and the Pacific Ocean in the background and the foundations on which the original shack rested. |
Mike and Richard felt just like Hiram Bingham when they found the site of KPH Hillcrest. It was deeply moving to stand at the actual site where pioneer operators sent their signals from the rotary gap to operators across the Pacific. And really, this is the sort of thing the MRHS is really about: the discovery and documentation of the artifacts of our maritime radio heritage.
