As the last year of the war began, the American home front turned their attention to all the various commercial products that would once again be offered in the shops. New cars were a popular topic, but the one subject Americans were most curious about was television.
This is one of the most enjoyable early television articles: an eye-witness account of one the first T.V. broadcasts from the R.C.A. Building in New York City during the November of 1936. The viewing was set up strictly for members of the American press corps and the excitement of this one journalist clearly could not be contained:
In the semi-darkness we sat in tense silence waiting to see the premiere demonstration of television… Television! What would it be like?
We didn’t become addicts of I Love Lucy deliberately; it was a habit that engulfed our whole family gradually. the captivating thing about Lucy and Ricky is, we think, the fact that they hold a mirror up to every married couple in America. Not a regulation mirror that reflects truth, nor a magic mirror that portrays fantasy. But a Coney Island mirror that distorts, exaggerates and makes vastly amusing every little incident, foible and idiosyncrasy of married life.
Attached you will read a 1945 editorial written by the art critic Clayton Boswell, who articulately expressed the great hope that the art world had emotionally invested in color television:
This is what the art world has been waiting for – in the meantime struggling with the futility of attempting to describe verbally visual objects over the air. Now art on the television will be on par footing with music. And what radio has done in spreading the appreciation of good music will be duplicated with fine art…Then indeed will Andrew Carnegie’s dream of progress through education come true.
Without a doubt, the strongest impulse to buy the earliest televisions came from sports fans. The deep lust in their hearts to witness their favorite sporting events as it happened, free of a bar tab, was a strong one – and the television industry loved them right back. This glorious trifecta consisting of viewers, TV networks and team owners not only altered the way America watched sports, it totally transformed sports itself. Author Steven D. Stark put it nicely in his book Glued to the Set (1997):
Television has changed the sports landscape — changing everything from the salaries, number of teams, and color of uniforms, to the way that fans conceive of sports and athletes alike,
The short-lived soap opera These Are My Children was the brain-child of Irna Phillips (1901 – 1973) and it is no matter that the daytime drama lasted less than a year on Chicago’s WMBQ – the significance of the program rests in the fact that it was the first soap opera to be seen on American television screens:
Last week television caught the dread disease of radio: soapoperitis… ‘These Are My Children’, however is no warmed-over radio fare. To make sure of this, Miss Phillips and director Norman Felton built the first episodes backward… Whether [a] soap opera on television can coax housewives to leave their domestic duties [in order] to watch a small screen was a question yet to be answered.
Young mother Hollywood has had another baby… a child some day destined to take its place in the playpen and howl the living pants off the rest of the brood – movies, radio, music, big theater, little theater, dance and festival. How soon television becomes the fair-haired boy of the village depends upon a number of manufacturing and economic factors…
Read another article about this Westward expansion…
Countless scientists contributed to the phenomenon [of television]. Marconi gets credit, as do Farnsworth and Lee de Forest. But the real starting line was strung by an RCA scientist named Vladimir K. Zworykin in 1923, when he applied for a patent on a iconoscope…
Illustrated with 27 pictures, this article lists a number of historic and semi-historic events that were captured by the early TV cameras and seen by millions of souls who otherwise would have only had to read about them in their respective newspapers, if they cared to.
Those heady days of early T.V. broadcasting:
Television was about ready for immediate commercialization when Pearl Harbor forced the industry to mark time, but engineers agree that the war has hastened electronic developments to a point that could not have been expected for 15 years under normal circumstances.
This article is illustrated with a single television image of the Hollywood actress Ilona Massey exposing her highly charming decolletage for all the world to see. The image alone can be credited for having launched a dozen Congressional hearings concerning the matter as to what is a television programmers singular understanding of public decency? Yet this short column only discusses one hearing, the one that took place in the Summer of 1952 in which Elizabeth Smart of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union spoke frankly about the alleged amusement that the networks were providing. Another temperance group in attendance complained that the actors on beer commercials should not appear as if they were enjoying themselves…
Placing a teleprompter or cue cards below a camera lens seems like old-hat to us – but our grandparents thought that it rendered an amazing affect for televised addresses:
The new technique for speeches on TV – reading from larlge cards with lettering two inches high placed just under the camera lens – makes it possible for the speaker to look directly into the camera lens, giving the appearance of talking directly to the viewer.
Although this article was written at a time when the television screen was a mere eight by eleven inches square, culture critic Gilbert Seldes addressed the question as to whether or not movies and radio will be voted off the island in favor of the television broadcasting industry.
This 1939 article was written by a wise old sage who probably hadn’t spent much time with a television set but recognized fully the tremor that it was likely to cause in the world of pop-culture:
Of all the brats, legitimate and otherwise, sired of the entertainment business, the youngest, television, looks as if it would be the hardest to raise and to housebreak…
Click here to read about the early Christian broadcasts of televangelist Oral Roberts…
It isn’t a sports show; it’s entertainment for the same kind of people who listen to Jack Benny
– thus said the sportscaster Bill Stern (1907 – 1971) – who is remembered in our age as the announcer to broadcast the nation’s first remote sports broadcast and the first telecast of a baseball game.
Before there was an HSN or a QVC – before there was an Adam Freeman or a Mary Beth Roe, there was Your Television Shopper and Leave It To The Girls starring Maggie Johnson and Faye Emerson, respectively. The programs were two of several such shows that aired during the prepubescent days of television broadcasting – and like the shopping shows that came along fifty years later, they, too, moved products off the shelves at a surprising pace.
Click here to read how Hollywood costume designer affected popular fashion…
We were surprised to learn that the earliest television mavens recognized that television programming could be enhanced and customized when the signal is carried through telephone lines of individual subscribers – a perk that wasn’t made widespread for a few decades. The early concept was called Phonevision.
Technology blogs on the net have users who frequently post the question When will T.V. be able to ‘broadcast’ smells?: the ability existed as early as 1946 – but there was no interest – or so this article has lead us to believe:
Optimistic scientists visualized the day when television sets would come equipped with 200 to 300 different smells. (Aromas are automatically concocted by chemicals in the set, mixed by radio-remote-control from the studio.) Faint nostrils quavered at the thought of several odors on the same program…
The attached jazz-age magazine article is about the creation of what we have come to call video communication; that is to say, the electronic compliance between telephone and video screen working in complete harmony in order that both participants can view one another during the conversation – and although one-sided, this did take place as early as 1927 when future President Herbert Hoover, in Washington, addressed an audience in New York (they were not viewed by the former).
