WFAN (660 AM) is a commercial radio station licensed to New York, New York, carrying a sports radio format known as "Sports Radio 66 AM and 101.9 FM" or "The Fan". Owned by Audacy, Inc., the station serves the New York metropolitan area while its 50,000-watt clear channel signal can be heard at night throughout much of the eastern United States and Canada. WFAN's studios are located in the Hudson Square neighborhood of lower Manhattan and its transmitter is located on High Island in the Bronx. In addition to a standard analog transmission, WFAN is simulcast over WFAN-FM (101.9 FM), and is available online via Audacy. The current WFAN, and its sports format, is the second New York City station with that call sign and programming. The original WFAN was launched on July 1, 1987, on , as the world’s first radio station to adopt the sports radio format around-the-clock. The WFAN call letters and sports format were moved to the former WNBC at 660 kHz on October 7, 1988. WNBC's history dated to 1922, when it began operation as WEAF, licensed to Western Electric. Purchased by the Radio Corporation of America in 1926, it became the flagship of the NBC Radio Network, the first national radio network in the United States, later becoming WRCA and WNBC. Founding by the American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T) Early AT&T radio development AT&T had an early interest in radiotelephone development, although initially only as a method for establishing telephone links to locations where it was not possible to string wire lines. Lee de Forest's development of vacuum-tube amplification would prove invaluable for progress in a number of areas. In July 1913 the company spent $50,000 to purchase from the inventor the patent rights for telephone wire amplification, and in 1915 used this innovation to make the first transcontinental telephone calls. In October 1914, the company further purchased the commercial patent rights for radio signalling for $90,000, and in October 1915 conducted test radio transmissions from the Navy's station in Arlington, Virginia, NAA, that were heard as far away as Paris, France and Hawaii. AT&T's main competitor in the radio field would be the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), which was formed in 1919 as a subsidiary of the General Electric (GE). Because no single company held sufficient patents rights to operate radio systems without infringing on other company's patents, a series of