History of TV
1950's?
By the fall of 1950, "Mr. Television" (as TV star Milton Berle would come to be known) was hosting the Texaco Star Theater on NBC, dominating TV ratings and virtually owning Tuesday nights. CBS countered NBC with The Jackie Gleason Show. The series premiered on CBS on September 20, 1952. The show typically opened with a monologue from Gleason, followed by sketch comedy involving Gleason and a number of regular performers, including Art Carney. By far the most memorable and popular of Gleason's characters was the Brooklyn blowhard, Ralph Kramden, a bus driver featured originally in a series of skits known as "The Honeymooners." The skits were so popular that in 1955 Gleason suspended the variety format and filmed The Honeymooners as a regular half-hour sitcom—and television's first spin-off.
Why was David Sarnoff 's idea of point-to-mass product considered so revolutionary over the current point-to-point product?
...Sarnoff in 1915 proposed changing wireless radio from "point to point" to "point to mass" transmission
The term "television," first coined in 1907, actually referred to what technology?
...The first demonstration of the instantaneous transmission of images was by Georges Rignoux and A. Fournier in Paris in 1909. A matrix of 64 selenium cells, individually wired to a mechanical commutator, served as an electronic retina. In the receiver, a type of Kerr cell modulated the light and a series of variously angled mirrors attached to the edge of a rotating disc scanned the modulated beam onto the display screen. A separate circuit regulated synchronization. The 8x8 pixel resolution in this proof-of-concept demonstration was just sufficient to clearly transmit individual letters of the alphabet. An updated image was transmitted "several times" each second
The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet
A run of family sitcoms gave suburbanites a picture of how idyllic households should look; how parents could get along with their kids no matter what. One of those situation-comedies, however, that was not entirely of this ilk was The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet. The series ran from 1952 through 1966, for a whopping 435 episodes (a sitcom record lasting 42 years until broken by The Simpsons). In truth, it might also stand as America's first voyeuristic reality series of all time.
40's audiences
After the war, monochrome television production began in earnest, but there was already a problem. Television sets were really expensive. This fact frustrated most everyone but intrigued Los Angeles used car dealer Earl "Madman" Muntz. Muntz had found a way to cut the cost of the RCA or Dumont or Zenith television set by 70%, bringing the price of the average set down from $700 to less than $200. By the end of 1949, just 20 months after Muntz had gotten into the TV selling game, the retail television world had sold FOUR MILLION more televisions—a 900% jump in what the TV industry had done in the last twenty years combined. By the end of 1949, just 20 months after Muntz had gotten into the TV selling game, the retail television world had sold FOUR MILLION more televisions—a 900% jump in what the TV industry had done in the last twenty years combined. Polling data in 1948 indicated that virtually every TV set in America that was operating at eight o'clock on Saturday night was tuned in to Milton Berle—a ratings phenomenon never to be repeated again in the 20th century.
What was the sequence of events that led R.C.A., formed in 1919, to begin its ascent as a private American monopoly of radio transmission?
Before WWI, the glass tubes necessary to make a radio had been hand-blown, one at a time. Now, the military suddenly needed huge quantities of radio equipment to coordinate battlefield operations and ordered 80,000 units at once. Two corporations were unusually well suited to filling this order—GE and Westinghouse. Following the War in 1919, Congress created a gigantic private monopoly called the Radio Corporation of America—RCA. Then Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt gathered all the transmitting stations that had a stake in this new development and consolidated them under this one banner—GE, Westinghouse, AT&T and United Fruit. Broadcast fever was underway.
Joseph McCarthy.
By the 1952 presidential election, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) had become pervasively omnipotent in American society. So too had the junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy experienced a meteoric rise in national profile following a 1950 speech (The Wheeling Speech) he'd given to the Republican Woman's Club of Wheeling, West Virginia. There he produced a piece of paper that McCarthy claimed contained a list of known communists working for the State Department. Barely a month after McCarthy's Wheeling speech, the term "McCarthyism" was coined. The word became a synonym for demagoguery, defamation, and mudslinging. Over at CBS News, Ed Murrow had seen and heard enough. See It Now was the first of the prime time news shows to focus on the growing number of controversial issues in the 1950's. Murrow produced a number of episodes of the show that dealt with the "Communist Witch Hunts." On March 9, 1954, however, Murrow gave to the American people what has been referred to as television's finest hour. By using recordings of McCarthy interrogating witnesses and stumping speeches, Murrow displayed what he felt was the key danger to democracy—not suspected communists, but McCarthy's actions themselves. McCarthy's support and popularity began to fade. On December 2, 1954, the Senate voted to censure Senator McCarthy, making him one of the few senators ever to be disciplined in this fashion.
What was the significance of "The Sketch" made by a 15 year old Philo Farnsworth?
Farnsworth filed his 1934 suit against RCA, whom he felt sure was infringing on his work. This legal action became known as Patent Interference Number 64.027. At issue was nothing less than WHO had invented electronic television. In Farnsworth's corner, there was his tenth-grade chemistry teacher, Justin Tolman, who produced a sketch of the "television" drawings Farnsworth had left behind on the teacher's blackboard back at Rigby High School, in 1922. Additionally, Farnsworth had demonstrated his camera successfully in the fall of 1927, while Zworykin wouldn't have a working camera until 1931. In the end, the court held that television's "Priority of the Invention" would be awarded to Philo T. Farnsworth. The court had officially affirmed his controlling patent. At age twenty-nine, Farnsworth was now held to be the undisputed inventor of television.
If genius builds on genius, what was the technological path leading to capturing sound, starting with Morse and ending with de Forest?
Fessenden's work was designated by terms like "wireless telephone," "radiophone," and finally just "radio"—and all of it geared to one-up Marconi. Instead of sending a series of interrupted wave bursts (Morse code), Fessenden's idea was to send a continuous wave on which voice would be superimposed as variations of modulation. Like Fessenden, Lee de Forest was also dedicated to voice transmission and brought it to a new stage of development with his patented invention of the Audion Tube, in 1908. This glass-bulb detector (or receiver) of radio waves was also capable of amplifying and even generating radio waves.
When AT&T left the RCA combine in 1924, how did Sarnoff use AT&T's anti-Semitism against them to resolve their patent sharing issues which ultimately led to the acquisition of the National Broadcasting Company (NBC)?
In 1924, AT&T, one of the original four pillars of the RCA combine (along with GE/Westinghouse/United Fruit) began behaving strangely. It sold its RCA stock and resigned its position from the RCA Board of Directors. AT&T was leaving RCA for the broadcasting business and had strung together a network of stations to follow them. Until that moment, broadcasting had mainly been a local affair with programming among the different stations that was never synchronized. AT&T would use their own telephone lines to carry their new network of stations.
William Paley
In 1926, fortune struck as the Congress Cigar Company went public. Bill Paley's end of the public offering was one million dollars. Bill Paley's end of the public offering was one million dollars. Bill Paley had a sense of radio's potential and threw in with the businessmen, investing half of the $1 million he'd earned from the stock offering into UIB. Paley's investment helped the UIB merge with a struggling Philadelphia-based radio network composed of sixteen small radio stations called the Columbia Phonographic Broadcasting System.
FCC 1934?
In 1934, with the advent of television poised to enter the communication business, a recommendation was made for the establishment of a new agency that would regulate all interstate and foreign communication. On February 26, 1934, Congress passed the Communications Act of 1934, which abolished the Federal Radio Commission and transferred jurisdiction over radio licensing to the newly created Federal Communication Commission.
Twenty-One
In September, 1956, two guys asked those same questions and decided they'd up the ante. Conceived by the quiz show's host Jack Barry and his producing partner Dan Enright, Twenty-One was a 30-minute series they were certain would steal viewers away from CBS and The $64,000 Question. The two men had designed the game so that there was no prize-winning ceiling. The more rounds you won, the more money you won. The sky was virtually the limit. The initial broadcast of Twenty-One was played fairly, with no manipulation of the game by the producers. The result proved to be (in Dan Enright's own words) "a dismal failure." Show sponsor Geritol became furious with the results and threatened to pull their sponsorship of the show if it happened again. The result found that Twenty-One was not merely "fixed," it was practically choreographed. While Congress would quickly pass legislation prohibiting the fixing of quiz shows of any kind, no one involved in the scandals served a day in prison.
How was American Marconi able to expand under the Radio Act of 1912? What role did WWI play in the expansion of wireless technology?
Marconi's cache wasn't the only thing to grow. So did its coffers. The 1912 law not only required that "broadcasters" have a license to transmit, it also mandated continuous staffing of commercial shipboard radio stations. In an effort to ensure that the Titanic tragedy was never repeated, every American ship that sailed had to now "man the key" around the clock. American Marconi was in business with the majority of these U.S. shipping magnates and their operators, and with twice as much wireless service now being used, profits at Marconi rose proportionately. Before WWI, the glass tubes necessary to make a radio had been hand-blown, one at a time. Now, the military suddenly needed huge quantities of radio equipment to coordinate battlefield operations and ordered 80,000 units at once. Two corporations were unusually well suited to filling this order—GE and Westinghouse. Following the War in 1919, Congress created a gigantic private monopoly called the Radio Corporation of America—RCA. Then Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt gathered all the transmitting stations that had a stake in this new development and consolidated them under this one banner—GE, Westinghouse, AT&T and United Fruit. Broadcast fever was underway.
How did Nipkow's Disc allow advances in the transmission of images for electromechanical television?
Paul Nipkow proposed and patented the world's first mechanical television system (not television itself). Nipkow was the first person to discover television's scanning principle—something like the movement of eyes back and forth across a printed page. Nipkow designed a rotating disc camera called the "Nipkow Disc." The device consisted of a rapidly rotating disc placed between a scene and a light-sensitive selenium element. A beam of light shining through the spiral perforations as the disc revolved caused pinpoints of light to perform a rapid scanning movement over the object in front of it, This early "disc image" had but 18 scan lines of resolution as compared to the 525 scan lines the FCC's National Television System Committee required from 1950's through 2009.
Farnsworth's patent application was divided into three applications which covered what inventions?
RCA entered three transactions in rapid order that transformed his company into the media kingdom it was destined to become. The first of these transactions was with the automobile makers in Detroit, in 1928—to provide radio technology for the mammoth automaker. A second, far more complex deal involved the phonograph, in 1929. Thomas Edison had unveiled his latest creation, a phonograph record that held an unprecedented forty minutes of music on its vinyl surface. Sarnoff saw that vinyl surface as commerce and wanted the record business under his banner as well. Third, Sarnoff wanted to acquire the Film Booking Office (FBO), a minor film production and distribution company, which it did in 1928. RCA would invest $400,000 to help finance FBO's expansion into producing feature films. In return, FBO would merge with Keith-Albee-Orpheum, a company that was converting its chain of vaudeville theaters into movie houses that would soon be equipped with RCA sound systems. The new film company would be called RKO (Radio Keith Orpheum).
Rod Serling
Rod Serling, the top writer of TV's Golden Age, was already a multiple Emmy winner when he created The Twilight Zone at the age of 34. With TZ's opening narration titillating viewers into watching, it was safe to say there was nothing else like it on television. By 1959, Serling was television's most esteemed and popular writer, but was finding himself increasingly constrained by sponsors censoring his material. To navigate around this problem, Serling decided to create a fantasy series, reasoning correctly that sponsors would dismiss the stories as fanciful and not notice that Serling was actually commenting on issues of the day.
What bright idea of RCA's David Sarnoff turned a hostile competitive industry into friendly customers with the added perk of making RCA much richer?
Sarnoff had anticipated all of this and was ready with a plan. He was pretty sure that what AT&T was doing—using one monopoly to gain another—was illegal under U.S. anti-trust laws. RCA would goad AT&T into submitting to a private arbitration over the patent-sharing issue in an effort to keep their anti-Semitic image out of the public eye. In choosing private arbitration, both sides knew that the arbitrator's decision was final. There would be no appeal of any kind and that's exactly how Sarnoff wanted it. Sarnoff knew something the Harvard-bred CEO of AT&T had forgotten—that most of the arbitrators were retired lawyers, and that most of the lawyers in New York were Jewish. Moreover, these lawyers knew all about AT&T's anti-Semitic hiring practices. The AT&T-RCA hearing lasted several months, but in the end, the arbitrator ruled in RCA's favor on every count. The arbitrator found that AT&T had breached its 1921 patent-sharing contract with RCA and would be immediately exiting the broadcasting business by signing the agreement now in front of them. AT&T would sell RCA its flagship station WEAF and its "network" for one million dollars and grant RCA the rights to transmit on their phone lines for a nominal licensing fee. RCA's new acquisition became known as the National Broadcasting Company and initially consisted of the AT&T chain of stations.
You read part of Life Magazine's "Top 100 Events" in the last 1000 years. What kinds of specialists were asked to ponder this question? Do you feel any specialist was left off the list that would have contributed to this brainstorming process? Would you pick the printing press as the number one event? Why or why not?
The Gutenberg Printing Press
Executive Order 9835
The Order established political-loyalty review boards whose job it was to determine the "Americanism" of federal government employees. Treatment of those suspected of being "un-American" began sparking protests. The five-man House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which had been around in various incarnations since the early 1930's. By 1947, the Committee was busy conducting character investigations of "American communists."
Amos and Andy
The radio series that started it all for NBC was one brought to the NBC Blue Network in the summer of 1929 by the sponsors of Pepsodent Toothpaste. The series Amos 'n' Andy created and written by Freeman Gosden (as Amos) and Charles Correll (as Andy). Gosden and Correll were white but sounded black. The writing, while racially slanderous by today's standards, is still considered by black and white critics alike to be some of the funniest work ever to appear on radio or television. With the episodic suspense heightened by cliffhanger endings, Amos 'n' Andy reached an ever-expanding radio audience. The appeal of the two struggling title characters landed a broad audience, especially during the Great Depression. The fact that the title characters were black and that 70% of the audience tuning in to listen was white mattered not at all to the show's success.
Bill Paley
The way the broadcast paradigm had worked through the 1920's and much of the 1930's was that affiliates paid for network programming, collected a small percentage of the national advertising revenue that helped differ their costs, then went out and found their own local advertising dollars in order to make a profit. Paley changed broadcastings business model in a couple of ways. First, of course, CBS began providing a better inventory of shows. Secondly, CBS began viewing advertisers as the most significant element of the broadcast equation, and not the affiliates. CBS thus began providing programming to affiliates at a break-even costs, hoping to make up lost revenue with more advertising dollars derived from better programming. The plan exceeded expectations. Stations eager for a "discount" began leaving NBC for CBS. Advertisers needing an audience followed the CBS migration. In short, the CBS network received airtime from the affiliate, and the affiliate received shows from the network.
How did the tragedy of the Titanic contribute to the unfolding of the possibilities of global communication and a future key player?
Titanic sent out a distress call over its wireless telegraph that was initially received by only one ship in the area. The liner went down in less than three hours, claiming over 1,500 lives. The tragedy became one of the deadliest peacetime maritime disasters in history, and the impetus for the creation of The Radio Act of 1912—the first piece of regulatory communication legislation in American history. The law established, among other things, that in order to operate a radio frequency you had to obtain a license from the government.
30's mess of tv
Up through the end of 1946, television had been nothing less than a black hole sucking in 200 million dollars in research, development and promotion, and the dollars going out didn't look to be slowing down any time soon. Adding to the problem was the fact that by the end of 1946, only a few TV stations were on the air, and broadcasting hours were very limited. The worst part was only 44,000 American homes had a TV set, generating just under $5M dollars in TV sales. If you'd purchased a TV set when they first went on sale at the 1939 New York World's Fair, you'd have spent $400 on the set itself. Not so bad, you say, until one stops to remember that the mean annual income in America in 1939 was just over $1,400. Putting that dollar figure in 2012 terms where the median household income was around $50,000, you would have spent $15,000 on your television set.
The Goldbergs
he Goldbergs was only 15 minutes long and carried three times a week. It wasn't until moving to the DuMont Network in 1954 that the series became a half-hour comedy. A force to be reckoned with whether behind the camera or in front of it, Gertrude Berg won the TV Emmy Award for Best Actress in 1950. Later that year, while still at CBS, Berg was asked to sign a "loyalty oath," as was everyone else working on the series, including Philip Loeb. Actor Philip Loeb, who had played Molly's husband Jake from 1949 to 1951, was accused of being a Communist sympathizer—this after signing the CBS loyalty oath. Pressure was placed on Berg (who owned the series on television as she had on radio) to fire Loeb. When she refused, General Foods canceled their sponsorship and CBS dropped the show from its schedule. Philip Loeb, beset by depression, signed himself into New York City's Taft Hotel, where he overdosed on sleeping pills.
