John Vincent Lawless Hogan

Who was John Vincent Lawless Hogan?

John Vincent Lawless Hogan, often John V. L. Hogan, was a noted American radio pioneer.

Hogan was born in Philadelphia, constructed his first amateur wireless station in 1902, began his career in 1906 as a laboratory assistant to Lee de Forest, and in 1907 participated in the first public demonstration of the audion tube. From 1908-10 he attended Sheffield Scientific School at Yale University, leaving without a degree to join Reginald Fessenden's National Electric Signaling Co. at Brant Rock, Massachusetts, where he served as a telegraph operator.

While working at NESCO and its successors, Hogan helped develop Fessenden's first crystal detector patent, a patent on single-control tuning, and in 1913 discovered the "rectifier heterodyne" which increased radio receiver sensitivity by a factor of one hundred. In 1913 led acceptance tests of the U.S. Navy's first high powered station at Arlington, and from 1914-1917 was chief research engineer, working primarily on high-speed recorders for long-distance wireless.

In 1921 Hogan became a consultant performing experiments in mechanical television, FM broadcasting, and facsimile transmission. By the late 1920s, he was broadcasting sound and pictures over his own experimental station, W2XR in New York City which officially went on the air March 26, 1929, having started his experimental transmissions of radio, facsimile, and television in 1928. During the 1930s his experiments with radio facsimile resulted in a machine capable of producing a 4-column newspaper, complete with illustrations, at the rate of 500 words per minute. He sold the station and its FM sister station to The New York Times in 1944.