The pass formed between Penobscot and Haystack Mountain a few thousand feet to the West was one of the few places a railroad could be envisioned in the 1830s when the fuel crises in eastern cities demanded easier transportation to the Northern Anthracite Coal Fields, which ironically, came to be exploited by the company with a near monopoly in providing coal from the Southern Anthracite region, Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company (LC&N, f.1821), which had built both the Lehigh Canal, but also the nation's second railway, the Summit Hill & Mauch Chunk Railroad.

The whole uplands north and west faces overlook the Wyoming Valley from the southeastern corner near Hazleton towards and through the greater south Wilkes-Barre area.

Much of the engineering and work on the WIZZ site was conducted by Major Edwin Armstrong, the inventor of several technologies including FM.

WVIA-TV, WVIA-FM, WNEP, WYOU, WBRE, and WOLF-TV are some of the major stations that broadcast from the high elevation there, but the peak was known for another reason in the nineteenth century, the saddle or pass on its western slope together with its other terrain features were the best place to build a railroad across the south and east faces of the bowl of the Wyoming Valley from the 'direct road' down the level water route to the Delaware Canal and Delaware River above and alongside the Lehigh Canal, cutting off nearly 100 miles from a rail trip to Philadelphia.

WNEP-TV's transmission tower broadcasting the analog signal on channel 16 collapsed on December 16, 2007,[2] due to severe ice, winds, and snow at the transmitter location on Penobscot Knob.