Early Television

Television: God’s Gift To Politicians
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1951)

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.

Hollywood’s Enigma
(Photoplay Magazine, 1938)

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.

Anticipating the Television Juggernaut
(Stage Magazine, 1939)

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…

Sportscaster
(Quick Magazine, 1949)

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.

Shopping from Television
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1951)

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…

Movie Streaming was Invented in 1950
(Quick Magazine, 1950)

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.

Smellivision Arrives
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1946)

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…

Oh Boy! Two-Way Video Chatting
(Literary Digest, 1927)

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).

Milton Berle
(Coronet Magazine, 1951)

He was the biggest television star of the 1950s – Milton Berle (1908 – 2002):

An incurable extrovert of 43, Uncle Miltie is already a 36-year show business veteran and will probably go on forever. At the very least, his new 30-year contract with NBC will keep him in front of of the TV cameras until he is 72…

Scroll to Top