The 1925 Cedar Rapids Gazette headline named a fifteen-year-old. By the time of Apollo, every astronaut's voice from space came through equipment his company built.
A Pirep featured story · KCID The Eastern Iowa Airport, Cedar Rapids, IA
On August 3, 1925, the Cedar Rapids Gazette ran the banner headline LOCAL BOY PICKS UP ARCTIC MESSAGE. The local boy was fifteen years old. His name was Arthur Collins, and from a radio room under the attic of his parents' house he was the only person in the United States able to hold contact with the schooner Bowdoin of the MacMillan Arctic Expedition at Etah, Greenland, 2,500 miles away, sustaining it on 20-meter skips through most of the expedition's 22 days. Atmospheric conditions had cut off the Navy's own station in Washington; the expedition's daily messages reached the U.S. Naval office because a high-school student in Iowa relayed them.
By 1931 he was building transmitters at home for the ham community. In September 1933 he incorporated as the Collins Radio Company and moved into the basement of the Metropolitan Building at 2920 First Avenue NE. The first big moment came the same year: Admiral Richard Byrd and CBS chose the eight-person company to equip the Second Antarctic Expedition, two tons of gear including the first radiophone transmitter ever taken on an expedition, and American living rooms heard voices from the bottom of the Earth. Collins was 24.
Then the work got serious. Just before the war the company invented the Autotune for commercial aviation: preset frequencies a pilot could call up with the flip of a switch, tuned automatically in about forty seconds, no radio operator required. It made Collins a key wartime supplier of ground, ship, and aircraft communications; the company grew from about 350 employees to 3,700, and more than 90,000 of its Autotune-equipped ART-13 transmitters flew in B-24s, B-25s, B-29s, and TBFs. After Pearl Harbor, the Corregidor station reached the outside world on Collins equipment; so did the USS Missouri during the surrender ceremonies in Tokyo Bay. In 1951, working with the National Bureau of Standards, Collins engineers bounced a signal off the moon from Cedar Rapids to Sterling, Virginia, the first moon bounce at ultra-high frequency.
By the 1960s, Collins Radio was supplying communications equipment for every NASA crewed program: Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab. The company built the equipment that carried voice communication for every American astronaut in space, from Alan Shepard's first flight to Armstrong on the lunar surface to the Apollo 13 distress call, and served as prime contractor for Apollo's S-band ground tracking network.
Arthur Collins was forced out of his own company in 1971 in a Rockwell-led reorganization. Collins Radio merged into Rockwell International in 1973, spun back out as Rockwell Collins in 2001, and became Collins Aerospace under United Technologies in 2018, today part of RTX. The Cedar Rapids campus is still a center of gravity for cockpit avionics.
When you fly into KCID, you are landing in the city where the radio that took Apollo to the moon was built.