Category: Schenectady

So, here’s a version of the 1928 song that was played in the first two-way radio communication between the United States and England, a piece of history for which Schenectady was on both the sending and the receiving end.

1928: SCHENECTADY, Feb. 21–Radio broadcast listeners to-day heard for the first time a two-way radio telephone communication between the United States and England. They also heard the rebroadcast in the United States of a phonograph record after the music had made a 1,000-mile round trip across the Atlantic. The broadcast was an experiment on…

Imagine a world in which the only long-distance communications were coded telegraph or the very expensive, one-to-one medium of long-distance telephone. No music from another town was ever heard unless the orchestra came to your town; no lecturer’s opinions were given unless he found a local podium. All news from parts unknown was written…

While we’re on the topic, a little more about Ernst F.W. Alexanderson, who today is primarily remembered for his early role in the development of television. In fact, his home on Adams Road in the GE Realty Plot was the site of the first home reception of television, in 1928. But the focus on…

After the return of Verner Alexanderson, kidnapped son of Schenectady radio scientist Dr. E.F.W. Alexanderson, it appeared that the kidnappers had vanished into Canada. Apparently, police never stopped looking for them, because in 1924, almost exactly a year after the boy was snatched from his home in the GE Realty Plot, police arrested a…

It would only be three days after the 1923 kidnapping of Verner Alexanderson from his Schenectady home, and his father’s first-ever radio broadcast plea for help, that Verner would be found unharmed, hundreds of miles away, outside of Watertown. “Verner Alexanderson, kidnapped Schenectady lad for whom a nationwide search was conducted for 72 hours…

Hoxsie wouldn’t want to leave you with the impression that Schenectady had all the crime in the tri-cities in the early decades of the last century. Far from it. But it definitely had some of the most interesting. The Electric City had the mysterious torso of 1914, the killing of Captain Youmans and the…

Schenectady police continued to work the case of the mysterious torso that was discovered in the Mohawk River in the summer of 1914. (Her head turned up on the Fourth of July.) Detectives thought they had found a clue on June 26, when they found a bloodstained shirtwaist near Ballston Lake. As with the…

On June 21, 1914, Schenectady police were still puzzling out the mystery of the woman’s torso found in the Mohawk River days before. Police were working on the theory that Miss Sarah Meader of Quaker Springs, Saratoga County, might be the girl; her uncle said she had not been seen since May 25, when…

Schenectadians who had been shocked to learn, back on June 19, 1914, of the discovery of a woman’s torso in a weighted burlap sack submerged in the Mohawk River just downstream of where the new sewage treatment plant was being built, beyond Freeman’s Bridge, must have been relieved to learn a day later that…