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Engineers needed a continuous signal for wireless experiments. Instead of taking turns speaking into a transmitter they played recorded music – essentially creating a musical broadcast that could be picked up by anyone with a receiver. W. Harold Warren, pictured here, took advantage of the Deal broadcast placing radio receivers into his roller chairs – allowing his customers to listen to phonograph music while being pushed down the nearby Asbury Park boardwalk.

Deal served as the transmitting station for the first year of commercial ship-to-shore service. For this short period Deal was staffed by operators from the Long Lines Department of AT&T. Later Ocean Gate opened, taking over ship-to-shore transmission. Deal Test Site closed in 1953 with most operations moving to the Bell Labs location in Holmdel.

Image Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center.

Within a year of purchasing the Foxhurst Farm in Deal, NJ, engineers had erected three 165-foot antenna  towers for testing wireless communication which still stand today. The lab building was erected in 1921 and it included dormitories for the engineers. By 1925, a staff of eight people manned the lab. The local mayor, Al Woolley, joked, “When Bell Labs moved into town, the average IQ in Oakhurst went up 15 points!”

Image Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center.

Completed in 1930, the Ocean Gate Station was dedicated to ship-to-shore communications after successes with experimentation at the Deal, NJ station in the late 1920s.

Image Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center.

Image Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center.

This operator is working in the AT&T Long Lines headquarters in Manhattan. Her horn-shaped transmitter is of similar design to one in a case in this gallery.

Image Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center.

In 1929, AT&T launched its commercial ship-to-shore telephone service with a call placed from AT&T’s President to the captain of the USS Leviathan located 200 miles out into the Atlantic. The call was sent from the transmitter at Deal with the return signal received at the Forked River station. The public could now make calls to their friends and family at sea for $21 to $33 for the first 3 minutes (around $320 today) and $7 to $11 for each additional minute.

Image Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Bain News Service, Publisher. 

Throughout the 1920s, Deal engineers worked on ship-to-shore voice transmission.  Deal would receive a call through the wired network and then transmit it via radio waves to a ship at sea. The ship would have a two-way radio to receive and respond to the message. A separate receiving station in Elberon would receive messages from the ship to avoid interference. The Elberon station would then relay the response through the wired network to the original caller.

Bell System Technical Journal

Image Courtesy of Prelinger Library in San Francisco, CA.

WOO, or “Whiskey Oscar Oscar” was the call sign for Ocean Gate. In the 1940s, the WOO Station broadcasted internationally for the Office of War Information. During World War II millions of calls were routed through Ocean Gate to ships. Considered a major strategic point during the war, it was protected by armed guard.

Located on Good Luck Point on Barnegat Bay the Ocean Gate station was surrounded by 175 acres of salt marsh. The first poles were erected between 1929 and 1938 and outfitted with curtain-style antennas. Later poles were arranged in rhombic configurations.

Photographed by Albert LaFrance.

AT&T provided single-sideband (SSB) radiotelephone service until 1999, when satellite service replaced the manned shoreside station model.  The last poles were removed after severe damage by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Today this site is part of the Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge.

This coastal harbor radio system came from the Ocean Gate transmitting station.  It would have been used to test signal distortion and sound quality of at-sea radio telephone transmission.

This Model 40B transmitter and receiver contains: a Western Electric 19c oscillator, a 2A sending panel, 1U amplifier rectifier, and a Source of 1000-cycle 1 mw supply.

Collection of AT&T Archives and History Center.

Members of the Bell Labs Radio Research Division. Shown in the first row from left to right: Art Crawford, Carl Feldman, Sam Reed, Joe Johlfs, Lewis Lowery, Russell Ohl, Bill Mumford, Karl Jansky, Merlin Sharpless, Archie King, Edmund Bruce, and Al Beck. In the second row from left to right: Carl Englund, Harald Friis, Douglas Ring, Otto Larsen, Carl Clauson, Morris Morrell, Carl Peterson, Maurice Collins, Dan Schenk, and Jim Morrell.

In the 1930s, Holmdel, NJ was still mainly farmland when AT&T purchased more than 400 acres of land to accommodate an ever-growing radio staff. Anyone working on radio research understood that they would need to work in rural areas. Many engineers found the Holmdel area so idyllic that they would spend the weekends there with their families picnicking and playing “informal games.”

Image Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center.