Frank Conrad - Vice-President, Institute of Radio Engineers - 1927

Frank Conrad was born in 1874 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 1890 he entered the employ of the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company in Pittsburgh as an assistant in the shops making registering trains for the Shallenberger ampere-hour meters. Mr. Conrad´s rise in the Westinghouse organization was rapid. He entered the laboratory after several years as an assistant in the shops. During this stage of his work he invented a number of forms of switches, lightning arresters, and breakers for use in alternating current work. He was closely associated with, and later in entire charge of the Arc Lamp Design Department. This was his first engineering work. Mr. Conrad´s connection with radio dates back before the days of any broadcasting. He became interested as an amateur in radio reception of time signals and later in radio-telephone transmission by means of vacuum tubes. He established an amateur radio telephone station which later resulted in the development of the Westinghouse Station, KDKA. In 1925, he was awarded the Morris Liebmann Memorial Prize of the Institute for his early work in connection with high-frequency (HF) transmission. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Radio Engineers, a Member of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, a member of the Society of Automotive Engineers, and a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Mr. Conrad was elected Vice-President of the Institute in 1927 and was the Chairman of the Committee on Admissions during 1927.