WPSX-TV was led by Marlow Froke, director of the Division of Broadcasting at Penn State, as a unit of Continuing Education. Eric Walker, then-president of the university, "will enable Penn State to expand its educational services". "The establishment of the station," said Dr. The "X" in the original call sign WPSX-TV denotes that the station was an extension of Penn State. Because the Wagner Annex studio was not yet completed, video playback machines, film and slide chains, and audio tape equipment were installed at the transmitter site in conjunction with a "mobile recording unit". The 539-foot (164 m) tower was built on Rattlesnake Mountain to comply with the FCC "legal triangle" that required 170 miles (274 km) to separate co-channels. This conference led to the creation of national educational television broadcasting and later to the creation of PBS.Īfter Congress passed the Educational Facilities Act on May 1, 1962, which provided federal funding for the construction of educational television stations, Penn State was granted a transmitter construction permit in September 1964 and became the first educational television station in Pennsylvania to be licensed to a university, and the 101st such station in the U.S.Ĭonstruction of the tower and transmitter site began on Penfield Mountain, seven miles (11 km) north of Clearfield. Penn State hosted a conference on April 20, 1952, at Nittany Lion Inn where the federal government announced its decision to set aside bandwidth to support non-commercial educational television stations. university to experiment with closed-circuit television delivery in the 1940s. When radio became popular in the 1920s, the institution tried broadcasting courses and was the first U.S. It was the first American institution of higher education to offer agricultural correspondence courses in 1892. Penn State has a long history of using new media to extend access to education.
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