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At first, we were a little confused with your question. Here in California, you'd be hard-pressed to find a radio station that starts with W. As far as we know, they all start with K. But enough of the semantics, on with the search... We started our search by typing "radio station history," which led us to the Radio > History category. We perused the list of sites, checked those that looked relevant, but were ultimately disappointed. Most of the sites contained info on specific radio stations, the history of modern radio, or sound clips and files. We found nothing about call letters. Next, we chose to get very specific and searched on "call letter policy" (using quotation marks around the phrase). Two sites were
returned; the first titled United States Call Letter Policies, just what we were looking for. By reading over the document, we learned that the letters K and W originated early in the 20th century as part of a worldwide index of ship radio stations. K stood for ships on the East coast, W for ships in the Pacific. For some reason, when the letters were extended to land-based stations, they were reversed, with the Mississippi River eventually adopted as the dividing line. Ever since 1923, stations west of the river start with a K, those east of it start with a W. For more, check out the original 1913 document that details the international call-letter assignments.
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