Lawrence, a friend of President Harry S. Truman, recruited Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company attorney Leland Hazard to help get the station off the ground.

Westinghouse wanted a TV station in the city to compete with the DuMont-owned-and-operated WDTV (which had a de facto monopoly in the nation's sixth-largest television market), and was impatient with the freeze on new licenses.

Although the corporation launched WBZ-TV in Boston in 1948 and purchased Philadelphia's WPTZ-TV (now KYW-TV) in 1952, it was unable to secure a TV-station license in its home market.

Hazard found this unacceptable, and asked Westinghouse CEO Gwilym Price if he should give up his quest for public television.

Westinghouse donated the tower it had purchased for the channel 13 license, enabling WQED to begin operations on April 1, 1954.

The station's call letters are from the Latin phrase quod erat demonstrandum ("what was demonstrated"), commonly used in mathematics.

Although KDKA-TV is now owned by Westinghouse successor Paramount Global, the station retains a close relationship with WQED.

The downturn was exacerbated by a scandal in which top executives were discovered to have been augmenting their income without informing the board of directors.

The period was chronicled in Jerold Starr's 2000 book, Air Wars: The Fight to Reclaim Public Broadcasting.

[22] WQED was the only full-power station in the Pittsburgh market to move its digital signal back to its analog-era channel.