William Storm Halstead (1903 in Mount Kisco, NY – September 1987 in

Los Angeles, CA Los Angeles, often referred to by its initials L.A., is the most populous city in the U.S. state of California, and the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Southern California. With an estimated 3,878,704 residents within the city ...

) was an American inventor who held more than 80 patents involving radio and television development. As a student at

Haverford College Haverford College ( ) is a private university, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Haverford, Pennsylvania, United States. It was founded as a men's college in 1833 by members of the Religious Society of Fr ...

Halstead was instrumental in creating the Haverford College Radio Club, and building and launching its AM radio station WABQ in 1923. It was only the second radio station in Pennsylvania, and was described at the time as having “one of the most unusual forms of aerials ever used by a radio broadcasting station.” (''See The New York Times reference and original article from December 14, 1934, below.'') See also

List of Haverford College people This List of Haverford College people includes alumni and faculty of Haverford College. As of 2010, Haverford alumni include 5 Nobel Prize laureates, 4 MacArthur Fellows, 20 Rhodes Scholarship recipients, 10 Marshall Scholarship recipients, 9 Hen ...

. In 1950, he pioneered stereophonic broadcasting. The process he developed allowed a station to use a sideband of its frequency to broadcast subsidiary programming. This process was called

multiplexing In telecommunications and computer networking, multiplexing (sometimes contracted to muxing) is a method by which multiple analog or digital signals are combined into one signal over a shared medium. The aim is to share a scarce resource� ...

, and once fully instituted removed the need for two stations, and thus two receivers at the listener's end in order to achieve a stereophonic effect. Japan credits Halstead with helping them to develop

Nippon Television JOAX-DTV (channel 4), branded as (NTV) or Nippon TV, is a Japanese television station serving the Kantō region as the flagship station of the Nippon News Network and the Nippon Television Network System, owned and operated by the , a sub ...

. He was so honored by Japan that a memorial service for him was held by the Japanese delegation to the UN at the

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in New York City in 1987. He also planned television systems in India, Jordan and Uganda. In addition he was instrumental in the beginnings of

Radio y Televisión Martí Radio y Televisión Martí is an American state-run radio and television international broadcaster based in Miami, Florida, financed by the federal government of the United States through the U.S. Agency for Global Media (formerly Broadcasting ...

which was developed during the Reagan administration and went on-air in 1983. Its mission was to fight communism in Cuba and it was based on the

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model. Two more forerunners among his inventions were a portable shortwave radio system for forest rangers and a cable system that allowed motorists at Los Angeles International Airport to get traffic and flight information on their car radios. In the 1950s, his wife Leslie Munro Halstead, became the first woman to hold the title of Vice President of a national advertising agency when she took over a role at Kenyon & Eckhart. In 1985, through mergers, it became Bozell, Jacobs, Kenyon & Eckhardt. In the 1990s, the firm shortened its name to Bozell Worldwide. William and Leslie Halstead had two children. Son

Dirck Halstead Dirck Storm Halstead (December 24, 1936March 25, 2022) was an American photojournalist. He was editor and publisher of '' The Digital Journalist,'' an online photojournalism magazine. Early life Halstead was born in Huntington, New York, on Dec ...

was a photojournalist and the founder, editor and publisher of '' The Digital Journalist''. Daughter Anne MacPherson is a freelance writer.

References

* * * 1903 births 1987 deaths People from Mount Kisco, New York Television pioneers Radio pioneers Haverford College alumni Engineers from New York (state) 20th-century American engineers 20th-century American inventors {{US-inventor-stub