The Blaw-Knox tower: visual symbol of radio
In 1927 the Blaw-Knox engineering company, formed by a merger between two US steelworking firms founded some years earlier, started manufacturing towers for AM radio broadcast stations to use as antennas.
Blaw-Knox designers came up with an unique form for these towers: two tall pyramids with their common base roughly half-way up the tower, surrounded by a ring of guys, usually four but sometimes as many as eight. This design made the tower strong and relatively easy to construct.
The towers were always used as radiators, like huge whip aerials, mounted on a massive insulating base and with their guys broken up by insulators into non-resonant sections.
Unfortunately the laws of physics have it that diamond-shaped antennas are not quite such effective radiators in the horizontal plane as are simple parallel-sided masts. Messrs. Blaw-Knox made these too, but later found that their road-paving machines were much better business for them and it is these which as a division of Volvo they still make.
The diamond-shaped antenna however had become a very definite symbol of radio broadcasting and was much beloved by all. Some radio stations like WLW-AM, whose Blaw-Knox was installed in 1934, continue to use them today (along with the word ‘iconic’). Perhaps half a dozen remain in operation worldwide as reminders of the Age of the Dictators.
So firmly is the tall diamond established as a symbol of radio that it forms the basis of the logos of a number of well-known radio amateur organisations
It could be argued that this is all rather ironic as a Blaw-Knox tower was always a huge undertaking (“At Colossal Cost, and Enormous Expense!”), entirely beyond the means of the radio amateur; there is no record of any Blaw-Knox having ever been used for amateur purposes.
Despite which as part of a general upgrade of Club things our resident graphic designer Petra M7PAH is looking at creating a new logo for the Club and drawings for this so far are all somewhat diamond-shaped.