Bartee Haile
Jean Lafitte’s last rival WRR, the first licensed radio station in Texas and the second in the entire nation, began broadcasting in August 1921 thanks to a genius inventor named Henry Garrett that everyone called “Dad.”
The Garretts emigrated from Ireland in the early 1860’s but rather than settling in America as planned they put down temporary roots in Canada to wait out the Civil War. That was where Henry, their second youngest son, was born in 1861.
After abbreviated stops in California and Nebraska, the Garretts made Dallas their permanent home in 1874. Henry’s father, an Episcopal clergyman, rapidly rose to the prestigious position of archbishop.
Henry decided a career in the church was not for him and chose instead to study electrical engineering. His first job out of college was as a manager of a start-up telephone company, but a patent infringement lawsuit filed by Alexander Graham Bell soon put them out of business.
Garrett’s wide-ranging interests kept him busy. The first of a lifetime of “firsts” was his installation of electric lights at the State Fair. He followed that achievement with a car dealership, the first in Texas, that sold Oldsmobiles, National Electrics and steam-powered Locomobiles.
At the turn of the century, he was a middle-aged bachelor still living at home with his parents. That changed when he met and married the love of his life. Their age difference, he was 41 and she was just 17, proved no obstacle and the couple wed in 1902.
Before he knew it, Garrett had a wife and two children to support. A steady income was suddenly his chief concern, and he found it as superintendent of the Dallas Police and Fire Signal System, a job he would hold for the next 42 years.
In 1920 “Dad,” as he was being called by then, installed a 50-watt radio transmitter with the call letters WRR at the central fire station. At first the purpose of this innovation was to transmit alarms to all the other stations. To entertain the owners of homemade crystal radio sets, Garrett connected the transmitter to a phonograph and played classical music from his personal record collection.
So he could listen to his favorite music while driving around town, “Dad” created something no one else in the world had – a car radio. He left this written account of the technological breakthrough:
“Everyone said it would never work. I rigged up a spark transmitter at the old fire station, threw a mess of wiring and radio parts into my sedan and drove up to White Rock Lake. At the old pump station, I mounted a home-made receiver in the front seat of the car. An aerial was tied to the top of the (pump) station smokestack.”
In short order, WRR evolved into a first-of-its-kind station with police bulletins, baseball scores and weather reports. After shuttling between downtown hotels, WRR established a studio on the fairgrounds where it remains to this day.
Garrett next turned his attention to a public safety crisis. The ever increasing motor vehicles on the streets of downtown Dallas had turned intersections into a deadly demolition derby. Casualties mounted daily from car crashes and pedestrians’ losing battles with oncoming traffic.
Garrett’s painstaking study of the problem yielded a life-saving solution. He devised an automatic “sign-flashing network with a switch and a sewing machine motor.” The radically new system warned motorists of approaching fire engines as well as telling them when to stop and go. Equally important the traffic lights also informed pedestrians when it safe to cross the street.
The coordinated traffic light system was in place and operational by 1924. Training the public, both behind the wheel and on foot, to obey the signals took time but a dramatic decrease in deaths and injuries was the priceless reward.
As word got out Dallas had come up with a safe and effective way to control traffic, cities and towns from around the country sent representatives for a first-hand look. Imagine their surprise when Big D officials told them that they could have the know-how at no charge.
That seemed only fair since “Dad” had given the idea for the traffic light network to the city for free. He did not make a dime from the idea, while spending a third of his salary for years making needed improvements to his most important invention.
In fact, of all his inventions Garrett patented only one – a carburetor that ran on water. But for some unknown reason he never got around to doing anything with it.
In a truly tragic twist of fate, Garrett’s wife died in a car wreck in 1931. He succeeded in saving so many lives but not the one that mattered most.
Henry “Dad” Garrett retired in 1948 but sadly spent his final four years in total darkness. Like his father before him, the remarkable man the city archivist once praised as “The Jules Verne of Dallas” went totally blind prior to his death in 1952 at the age of 90.
Read all about the early years of the oil frenzy in “Texas Boomtowns: A History of Blood and Oil” Order your autographed copy for $24.00 by mailing a check to Bartee Haile, P.O. Box 130011, Spring, TX 77393.
