100YearsOfTV

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September 7, 2027 will mark 100 years from the day when electronic television made its first appearance on Earth.  To generate interest in the Centennial,  this website and accompanying podcast is going to Count Down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television over 100 weeks until September 7, 2027.
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In 1904, New York Times publisher Adolph Ochs moved the newspaper’s headquarters into the newly constructed Times Tower at the intersection of Broadway, Seventh Avenue and 42^nd Street in Manhattan.  To mark the occasion, Ochs successfully petitioned the city to rename the area “Times Square^⁠1.”  

To celebrate the move and the new name, the Times sponsored a lavish New Year’s celebration on the square.  Some 200,000 New Yorkers packed the surrounding streets for music and festivities that were topped off with a brilliant fireworks display. Red, white, and blue rockets and flares illuminated Ochs’ new building starting at precisely midnight. 

When the city banned fireworks in 1907, Ochs devised a new centerpiece for the celebration. He commissioned a large, electrically-illuminated ball that would be lowered from a specially constructed pole on the roof of the Times Tower to mark the final seconds of the year.  

Starting at precisely 11:59 PM on December 31, 1907, workers lowered the 700-pound wood-and-iron ball, festooned with one hundred 25-watt light bulbs, from the top of the pole.  One minute later, the ball went dark and another large electrical sign reading “1908” lit up above Times Square.

In the 1920s and ’30s, Times Square became synonymous with New Year’s Eve. The square and surrounding streets drew first tens, then hundreds, of thousands of revelers, packed shoulder to shoulder in the cold, waiting for the glowing orb to descend. Newsreel cameras filmed the event for movie theaters. Radio stations broadcast the countdown live. 

With the exception of two years during World War II, The Times Square “ball drop” has continued every year since.

Starting in 1948, the tradition found its way to television. 

NBC’s first telecast from Times Square was part of a larger New Year’s Eve program hosted by Ben Grauer.  After years of covering events like presidential inaugurations and political conventions, Grauer’s was one of several voices that lent continuity to television’s migration from radio, along with such familiar voices as Lowell Thomas, Ed Sullivan, and Arthur Godfrey. 

That first 1948 telecast from Times Square was certainly modest by today’s standards.  Cameras were stationary and coverage was largely confined to a rooftop vantage point and street-level crowd shots.  For the still relatively small numbers of viewers with access to a television set, the broadcast provided what felt like direct participation in a massive public celebration – without the inconvenience of being stuffed into the crowded square.^⁠2

That first New Years Eve telecast marked the beginning of a new, annual staple in American culture. As television penetration increased throughout the 1950s, more stations picked up the coverage. NBC continued broadcasting the festivities into the early 1950s. CBS joined the spectacle with its own New Year’s specials.

The defining figure in televised New Year’s entertainment arrived in 1972, when Dick Clark ^⁠3launched New Year’s Rockin’ Eve on ABC.  Clark’s innovation was targeting a younger audience with pop music performances and slicker, state-of-the-art production values.  Dick Clark hosted the annual ritual for thirty years. Until suffering a stroke in 2004, Clark was the de facto Master of Ceremonies for America’s year-end festivities.

Other networks and hosts added their own imprint to the Times Square coverage. Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians were a fixture on CBS for decades, providing a more traditional, ballroom-style version of the event that appealed to older viewers.  Lombardo’s association with New Year’s Eve began on radio in 1929 with his orchestra playing Auld Lang Syne at the stroke of midnight.  He took his act to television in 1956/57, starting what amounted to a generational split in New Year’s viewing: younger audiences gravitated to Clark, while older audiences stayed with CBS until Lombardo’s death in 1977.

In the decades since 1948/49, television has been instrumental in turning the Times Square ball drop into a national ritual.  Over the years, the original ball has been replaced several times.  The current version was introduced in 2008.  The 12-foot geodesic sphere made of Waterford Crystal and LED lights, capable of displaying over 16 million colors and billions of patterns, is a far cry from the one-hundred 25-watt bulbs used in 1907/08. The coverage now includes aerial drone shots, roaming Steadicams, real-time countdown animations, and satellite feeds that beam the moment to millions of homes and screens around the globe.

Still, the essential image remains unchanged: a glowing ball in descent, a crowd cheering against the cold, and a moment of collective passage from one year into the next. 

¹ Prior to 1904, the area was called Longacre Square, named after Long Acre in London—a district known for its carriage trade. In the 19th century, New York’s Longacre had a similar character, filled with stables, blacksmiths, and carriage manufacturers.

By the turn of the 20th century, the area shifted from the carriage trade to theaters, vaudeville houses, and electrified billboards.  When The New York Times moved to its new HQ, the paper’s owners successfully petitioned the city to rename the area Times Square.

² To say nothing of easy access to a restroom. Once the event became a television ritual starting in 1948, many people chose to stay home – warm, and near a bathroom. This shifted Times Square from a local gathering to a televised spectacle, reducing the percentage of diehards on-site.

³ More on Clark when we get to American Bandstand

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[milestone_featured]

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September 7, 2027 will mark 100 years from the day when electronic television made its first appearance on Earth.  To generate interest in the Centennial,  this website and accompanying podcast is going to Count Down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television over 100 weeks until September 7, 2027.
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Before Survivor, before The Real World, before all The Real Housewives and The Celebrity Apprentice, there was Allen Funt. 

Allen Funt’s concept for a television show was deceptively simple: what would people do if they didn’t know they were being watched by a hidden camera?

From that simple premise, on August 10, 1948, Allen Funt brought an entirely new kind of program to the ABC-TV network. Candid Camera was unscripted, unrehearsed, and genuinely real.  Decades later, the genre Funt pioneered would morph into the “everybody knows there are cameras” format now known as “reality” TV. 

Like almost everything else on television in the 1940s, even Candid Camera had its origins in radio – a medium with no camera.  The original concept  was called Candid Microphone, and captured the spontaneity of ordinary people reacting to contrived situations. Unsuspecting subjects were caught off guard by talking mailboxes, elevators speaking gibberish, or a stranger asking them to hold an invisible dog on a leash.

Despite the absence of a visual element, Candid Microphone was a popular program, and Funt’s timing was perfect. He knew that to really sell the premise, people needed to see the reactions. Television arrived just in time for Funt to share the double-takes, baffled stares, and slow dawning recognition on a person’s face. When television came calling, Allen Funt was there to take the call. 

For once, the transition to television was relatively easy.  Funt’s formula didn’t require a lot of experimentation, trial runs, big budgets or big names. There would be no multi-camera studio setup, no sets, no performers, no orchestra or announcers.  All Allen Funt needed was a small, easily concealed 16mm film camera, a microphone, and preposterous situations to put people in. 

Funt’s crew hid their gear in stores, parks, offices – anywhere humans could be caught unsuspecting – and staged harmless pranks: a car with no driver, a receptionist who failed to notice a man turning green, a water fountain that sprayed sideways and a telephone booth that locked the caller in were among the predicaments that Funt whipped up for the hidden camera.  

Stealth, timing, and the wacky, unpredictable aspect of human nature were his currency. Confusion, disbelief and exasperation were the emotional payoff.

And when the prank had run its course, Allen Funt came out of the shadows with the punchline: “Smile! You’re on Candid Camera.”

Candid Camera‘s hook was its easy relatability. In a landscape still mostly dominated by theatrical pretensions, Candid Camera was loose, immediate, and genuine. The participants weren’t professionals, they were unwary innocents caught in the act of being themselves.  Anybody watching knew it could just as easily have been themselves trying to follow a street sign that kept changing directions, or walking past a statue that waved and winked at them. 

Allen Funt himself was part of the show’s appeal. Affable, deadpan, and unassuming, he introduced each segment with just enough mischief to let viewers in on the game. He was neither a clown nor a showman. His reassuring presence wrapped a compassionate atmosphere around the whole enterprise: the jokes were never cruel, the targets were never humiliated. Funt wasn’t out to victimize anyone, he was just trying to bring a little bit of the authentic and absurd of the human experience to television. 

After its 1948 debut on ABC, Candid Camera was a fixture somewhere on the TV dial until well into the 1960s.  It served as a recurring segment on The Garry Moore show before returning  to a stand-alone format, and Funt was often joined by co-hosts Durward Kirby and Bess Myerson.  At its peak, Candid Camera drew millions of viewers, proving that you didn’t need scripts, stars, or studio sets to make compelling television. 

It is no stretch to suggest that Allen Funt’s clandestine pranks set the stage for entire categories of television to come. Candid Camera was a direct ancestor of shows like Real People, America’s Funniest Home Videos, and Punk’d, as well as the explosion of “reality TV” that swamped the medium 1990s and 2000s. But unlike many of those later iterations, Funt’s show maintained a tone of gentle fun. There was no prize, no competition, no humiliation. Just the warm, quiet comedy of being recognizably human.

Evolving technology was a factor in the show’s ongoing appeal.  As equipment got smaller and more mobile, Funt’s ability to go unnoticed improved. Candid Camera liberated television from the confines of a sound stage.  It could go out into the world, find stories on the street, and bring them back into people’s homes.

In its singular way, Candid Camera tapped into something deeper than humor. It bridged the divide between public and private and poked holes in the discomfort of being watched. Long before so-called “reality” shows blurred the line between performer and audience, Candid Camera asked a critical question: how do we change when the camera is on?

Candid Camera was always more than a novelty or a low-brow bit of mischief. It was one of the first projects to crack open the fourth wall between the media and the real world. It invited the public onto the stage. And it planted the seed for a whole genre of television that still thrives today.

Allen Funt remained involved with the show for decades, handing off hosting duties to his son Peter in later years. The format was revived many times, including in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, proving that the core idea never really got old.

In the years before he died in 1999 at age 84, Allen Funt sometimes joked that the real reason some people dismissed the show was that they were always worried they might be on it. 

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Among the most classic Candid Camera segments is this one featuring the car that split into two parts.  There’s much more on the Candid Camera Gold YouTube Channel. 

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[milestone_featured]

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September 7, 2027 will mark 100 years from the day when electronic television made its first appearance on Earth.  To generate interest in the Centennial,  this website and accompanying podcast is going to Count Down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television over 100 weeks until September 7, 2027.
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Mendel Berlinger was in show business almost since his birth in 1908.  

Mendel spent his adolescence on vaudeville stages and burlesque houses and found roles as a child actor in silent films. He insisted for years that he’d been cast in The Perils of Pauline starring Pearl White in 1914 – a groundbreaking film that pioneered the ‘cliffhanger’ format of serialized storytelling that became popular in both cinema and television.  

When he was 12 years old, Mendel Berlinger decided his growing ambition required a more ethnically palatable stage name.  In 1920, he became Milton Berle, and continued to refine his stage persona on radio, in nightclubs, and in movies through the 1930s and ’40s.  His name was familiar when NBC started migrating much of its radio programming to television.  

Like so many of the prominent corporations of the era, The Texas Company – aka “Texaco” – was a client of the J. Walter Thompson ad agency, and an enthusiastic beneficiary of JWT’s  “one sponsor” radio programming model. NBC’s Texaco Star Theater began as a radio variety show in 1938.  It was originally hosted by Adolphe Menjou, and later by other stars including Fred Allen, whose sharp, satirical style made him one of the most famous radio comedians of the era.

JWT had a hand in talent selection for all the programs it created.  In the summer of 1948, when Texaco Star Theater began a trial run on television, Milton Berle was given a guest-host slot along with other well known comics like Henny Youngman and Morey Amsterdam.  But audience response to Berle was so overwhelming that NBC and JWT decided to make him the permanent emcee when the program started its regular run that fall. 

One Sponsor

JWT’s “one sponsor” model for television truly hit its stride with Texaco Star Theater.  The brand was seamlessly woven into the show with commercials and uniformed Texaco service attendants who cheerfully welcomed viewers and reinforced Texaco’s neighborly public image.

Berle’s elastic face, flamboyant costumes, and rapid-fire comedy were perfectly suited to the new medium. Television needed a breakout star, and it wasn’t long before Milton Berle started calling himself “Mr. Television.” 

Airing live on Tuesday nights, Texaco Star Theater became a national phenomenon.  Berle’s willingness to do anything for a laugh made the show television’s first “must-see TV.”  Often dressed in drag and engaging in physical slapstick, with jokes that were corny and just a little brash, “Mr. Television” came through the glass screen with a kinetic connection between showman and audience.  Milton Berle’s often manic stare into the camera lens made viewers feel like he was in their living room. 

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The power of “single sponsor” advertising is demonstrated in this opening of an early episode of Texaco Star Theater – because, of course, these guys are going to swarm around your car and sing for you while they pump the gas!

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The “Mr. Television” handle was no exaggeration. By 1949, Texaco Star Theater was drawing as much as 80% of the viewing audience – astonishing numbers, even in an era with few alternatives. TV sales doubled to more than a million units in 1949, a surge often attributed directly to Milton Berle’s popularity.  

Texaco Star Theater also served as television’s first launch pad for a whole new generation of entertainers.  Jackie Gleason and Tony Bennett first appeared before American audiences through Milton Berle’s TV cameras. 

Acts that had once toured the vaudeville circuit  found new life on television thanks to Texaco Star Theater.  The show provided exposure to entertainers who would go on to long careers even if their names have faded today. And the show’s variety format provided the blueprint for later hits like The Ed Sullivan Show and Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows. 

Texaco Star Theater ran until 1953, after which the show continued in various incarnations. Sponsors changed, the show was renamed, and The Milton Berle Show continued through 1956. 

Berle himself later acknowledged that his reliance on vaudeville gags and broad comedy lost their appeal as the medium matured, and his audience began to look elsewhere for amusement.  The reign of “Mr. Television” came to an end when NBC pulled the plug in 1956.  

Still, Milton Berle continued to be a fixture on television for decades.  He was a frequent guest on late night talk shows. He remained active on the comedy circuit, and was a top draw in Las Vegas well into the 1960s.  He toured nationally, did USO shows overseas, hosted specials and made cameo appearances, often poking fun at his own legacy.

Milton Berle made his final television appearance in July, 2000, when he appeared in an NBC special, Kenan and Kel: Two Heads are Better than None, at the age of 92.

When he moved on to the great television studio in the sky on March 27, 2002, at the age of 93, Milton Berle’s legacy was instrumental in proving that television was something more than an extension of radio. By the time he signed off from his own show, television had become its own new kind of art form, with its own rhythms, rituals, and stars. His embrace of the camera, his instinct for physical comedy, and his ability to hold an audience through the cathode ray tube laid the groundwork for the future of televised entertainment.

Drag routines, slapstick, and a dose of Catskills kitsch may have been what television needed to get a toehold with American audiences, and Texaco Star Theater helped establish the network variety show as a staple of the weekly schedule.  Over the decades that followed, stars like Red Skelton, Dean Martin, The Smothers Brothers, Sonny and Cher, and Carol Burnett followed in the trail blazed by Milton Berle. 

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Milton Berle reminisces on the impact of “Texaco Star Theater”

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[milestone_featured]

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September 7, 2027 will mark 100 years from the day when electronic television made its first appearance on Earth.  To generate interest in the Centennial,  this website and accompanying podcast is going to Count Down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television over 100 weeks until September 7, 2027.
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Leroy E. Parsons – “Ed” to his friends – began his professional life as a radio and refrigeration engineer in Fairbanks, Alaska in the late 1930s.  During World War II, he worked at a Naval electronics facility in Portland, Oregon, and also worked part-time at KGW, one of the oldest radio stations in the Northwest.  After the war, Ed and his wife Grace acquired KAST, a struggling radio station in Astoria, Oregon, and made it profitable within a month.

In 1947, the Parsons attended the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Chicago.  It was Grace who first saw a television at the convention and insisted they get one. 

The only problem was, when they got their new TV back to Astoria, it was too far away from any television stations to get a decent signal. 

Problem Solved

Radio station KRSC in Seattle was 125 miles away.  When Parsons learned the station would begin telecasting in the fall, he obtained permission to mount a large antenna on the roof of the Astoria Hotel, the tallest building in town. Then he ran a cable to his third-floor apartment across the street.    

When KRSC-TV started broadcasting on Thanksgiving Day,  November 25, 1948, Ed and Grace Parsons were the only people in the Astoria area who could tune in. 

When KGW-TV began broadcasting out of Portland – also 125 miles away – on December 15, 1948, Parsons upgraded his system with video amplifiers and other electronics to carry the additional signals.

In 1948, Television was still in its ‘”chicken and egg” phase – especially in areas far from the major urban centers. Consumers had no reason to buy TVs if there was nothing to watch, so there were only a handful of receivers in the Portland area when KRSC and KGW went on the air.  

In remote Astoria, the Parsons home soon became the community center for the novel experience of watching television. As interest swelled, Ed added connections to the hotel lobby and a local music store. In the months that followed, he expanded the service to dozens of homes and businesses.  He charged $125 for the installation and $3/month for the continuing service after that.  By July of 1949, more than 100 homes were connected to his hotel-rooftop antenna. 

Thanks to Grace Parson’s enthusiasm for the new medium and Ed’s engineering prowess, a new way of distributing television signals was born.  At first, it was called Community Antenna Television, or CATV. Over the decades that followed, his jury-rigged system became the prototype for what we now call simply “cable.” 

It is duly noted that Parson’s system was not the very first to redistribute television broadcasts by wire. That honor is more properly bestowed on John Walson, who set up a similar system in Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania.^⁠1  Another pioneering system is attributed to James F. Reynolds in Maple Dale, Pennsylvania.  But these systems retransmitted the broadcasts by “twin-lead” or “ladder-lead” cable.

Putting The Cable in “Cable”

What distinguishes Parson’s system is his use of “coaxial” cable, an innovation first introduced by AT&T in the 1930s. 

“Coax” was invented by Lloyd Espenschied and Herman Affel at AT&T’s Bell Labs in 1929. Unlike conventional twin-lead (parallel) wires, coax carries high-frequency signals with far less loss. It is essentially a “wire within a wire,” a central conductor suspended inside a tube of insulation, which is then encased in a flexible cylinder of braided copper shielding. This concentric structure minimizes interference and preserves signal quality over long distances, making it ideal for redistributing television signals, especially in mountainous or urban areas where conventional antennas are not up to the task. 

With coax at its heart of its humble beginnings in places like Astoria, CATV was instrumental in expanding the reach of television to mountainous and rural areas through the 1950s and 60s.

By 1962, there were nearly 1,000 CATV systems around the country serving an estimated 1 million subscribers.  Although the business that Ed Parsons and others pioneered started as a passive distribution model, entrepreneurs soon began experimenting with original content, news, weather, and other local services. By the end of the 1970s CATV was no longer just a way to fix bad reception. “Cable” became an indispensable utility in urban areas, too, and, ultimately a new medium in its own right and a flourishing source of innovation. 

Besides building his CATV business, Ed Parsons sold televisions and other electronics from a store on Commercial Street in Astoria. In 1953 he sold the fledgling business, and he and Grace returned to Alaska, where Ed worked as a bush pilot on the frontier.  By the time of his death in 1989, the business Ed Parsons started so he and Grace could watch TV on the Oregon coast had grown into a cornerstone of the global communications industry.

¹ Walson’s “first” claim has long been questioned and his claimed starting date can not be verified.[9] The United States Congress and the National Cable Television Association have recognized Walson as having invented cable television in the spring of 1948.[8]  (Wikipedia)

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[milestone_featured]

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September 7, 2027 will mark 100 years from the day when electronic television made its first appearance on Earth.  To generate interest in the Centennial,  this website and accompanying podcast is going to Count Down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television over 100 weeks until September 7, 2027.
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Come Thanksgiving weekend in 1947, there were still fewer than 50,000 television sets in all of America, and most of those were still concentrated in the greater New York metropolitan area.  

But that Sunday, November 26, witnessed the first regularly scheduled broadcast of Meet The Press – still the longest running program in all of broadcasting history.

Meet The Press was the brainchild of Martha Rountree, a trailblazing journalist and producer and arguably the first woman of any stature in broadcast news in America.  Born in Florida, raised in South Carolina, Rountree began her career in the 1930s, eventually co-founding Radio House, a production company specializing in public affairs programming.  

In 1945 Rountree joined forces with Lawrence Spivak, the publisher of The American Mercury, a political and cultural affairs magazine founded in the 1920s by renowned journalists H.L. Mencken and George Nathan. Spivak wanted a radio program to promote the magazine. Rountree delivered The American Mercury Presents: Meet the Press, which aired on Mutual Radio beginning in 1945.

Rountree was the first host of the program. With Spivak often joining her, the show earned a strong following for its no-nonsense format, with Rountree moderating a panel of journalists asking rigorous questions of public figures.  

in 1947, NBC was looking for news and public affairs oriented programming and approached Rountree about adapting her radio program for television.  Rountree accepted the offer, but only on the condition that she retain full editorial control, which was rare for any producer at the time, let alone a woman in the male-dominated world of broadcast journalism.

NBC’s Meet The Press debuted on New York’s WNBT Thursday evening November 6, 1947, (before moving to its now-familiar Sunday morning time slot by the end of the month.^⁠1 Martha Rountree continued as the host and moderator — making her the first woman to moderate a public affairs program on American television. 

The first televised edition of Meet The Press featured James A. Farley, the former Postmaster General and Democratic Party chairman under FDR.  Farley was grilled on-camera by a panel of Washington journalists, including Spivak. 

Three weeks later the show was slated into the Sunday morning slot where it has aired continuously ever since. Every Sunday, some high-profile newsmaker sat at a desk facing a panel of journalists. The questioning was sharp, and the panelists were not obliged to be polite. Rountree enforced a disciplined structure: no speechifying, no commercials during the interview, and no softball questions.  

With television still in its  ‘single-sponsor’ era, General Foods backed the show, looking to lend its brands credibility by aligning with serious, public interest programming.  General Foods remained the primary sponsor throughout the 1950s, as Meet The Press became a cornerstone of NBC’s growing public affairs and news division. 

In 1953, in a mutual decision that some accounts have attributed to a coin toss, Martha Rountree sold her interest in Meet the Press to Spivak, who continued to host the program for more than thirty years.  Spivak transferred full ownership to NBC in 1955.

In the 1950s and ’60s, the show’s guest list included towering figures from the Cold War era: Dwight Eisenhower, Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon, John F. Kennedy, and Fidel Castro, who was interviewed in Havana in 1959. Spivak’s calm but unflinching style earned the show its reputation as a serious forum, neither a soapbox nor a trap.

The success of Meet The Press inspired a slate of similar programs:  CBS followed suit with Face The Nation starting in 1954.  ABC’s Issue and Answers aired from 1960-1981 and ABC This Week from 1981 to today.  PBS created Inside Washington, The McLaughlin Group, and Washington Week.  In the 1980s and 90s, cable entered the arena with Fox Sunday and State of the Union on CNN. 

After Spivak’s retirement in 1975, Meet The Press was hosted by a succession of journalists, including Bill Monroe, Garrick Utley, and Marvin Kalb. In 1991, Tim Russert took over and restored the program’s prestige and ratings until his sudden death 2008.

Over nearly eight decades, Meet the Press has weathered changes in the media landscape, the political environment, and technology. It has survived the decline of single-sponsor television, the rise of cable news, and the fragmentation of audiences in the 21^st century.  Its early success demonstrated that television could live up to its mandate to use the airwaves for public service, and audiences could see what civic engagement looks like when cameras replaced the stenographer’s pad and accountability went coast-to-coast.

After Tim Russert’s death, Meet The Press was hosted by David Gregory and Chuck Todd.  Todd was replaced by Kristen Welker in 2023 – the first woman in the host’s chair since Martha Rountree 70 years before. 

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¹ Meet The Press  initially aired only locally on WNBT, the RCA/NBC affiliate in New York.  The show went national in early 1948. WNBT became WNBC-TV in 1954.

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[milestone_featured]

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September 7, 2027 will mark 100 years from the day when electronic television made its first appearance on Earth.  To generate interest in the Centennial,  this website and accompanying podcast is going to Count Down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television over 100 weeks until September 7, 2027.
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Some time in the afternoon of December 27, 1947 a genial thirty-year-old man with wavy dark hair and a broad smile, wearing a fringed cowboy shirt and a bolo tie, looked into a television camera at WNBC Studio 3A in Rockefeller Center and called out,

 “Say kids, what time is it?” 

Across the stage, about 40 children between the ages of 4 and 10 responded enthusiastically…

 “It’s Howdy Doody Time!” 

The host was Bob Smith, a veteran radio announcer from Buffalo, New York who assumed the moniker of “Buffalo Bob” alongside a freckle-faced marionette in a checkered cowboy shirt and a kerchief known as “Howdy Doody.” Children’s programming had arrived on television. 

Like a lot of early TV, The Howdy Doody Show was imported from radio.  

In 1946, the NBC radio network carried a show for kids called The Triple B Ranch, created by Bob Smith for WGR in Buffalo.  The Sunday afternoon broadcast featured songs, Western-themed stories and comic skits performed by the host as Buffalo Bob.  A character called Howdy Doody – “The all-American boy!” – was the breakout hit of the show, bringing young listeners back every Sunday for his earnest personality and cowboy spirit.

Smith’s agent, Martin Stone, quickly recognized the TV potential of his client’s squeaky-voiced alter ego and arranged a meeting with NBC programming executive Warren Wade. Legend has it that Stone brought along his six-year-old daughter, whose unfiltered enthusiasm for Howdy Doody helped persuade Wade to begin planning the show’s transition to television. 

The Howdy Doody Show premiered on Sunday, December 27, 1947 as part of NBCs Puppet Playhouse, before shifting to a daily schedule, Monday through Friday at 5:30 PM – conveniently placing the popular show well after school and before the typical American dinner hour. 

Puppeteer Frank Paris built the first Howdy puppet. The more familiar version of the puppet was created by Velma Dawson, and Howdy’s voice was performed by Buffalo Bob himself.  Not surprisingly, Buffalo Bob and his freckled sidekick were never seen on screen at the same time. 

The show was sponsored by Colgate-Palmolive, which used the platform to advertise toothpaste and shampoo in one of corporate America’s first efforts to use television to target its products to children. 

In addition to Howdy and Buffalo Bob, the show assembled a colorful cast of characters from the fictional town of Doodyville:

• Clarabelle, the silent clown who spoke only with a horn and a seltzer bottle – who was first portrayed by Bob Keeshan, who later found his own stardom as Captain Kangaroo.

• 

  Chief Thunderthud, a Native American known for the catchphrase “Kawabonga!”

• Princess Summerfall Winterspring, originally a female Native American puppet who eventually became a live action character.  Sadly, the Princess’s birthday fell on Leap Year, February 29, so even though she was 16 years old, she’d had only four birthdays.
• Mr. Bluster, the pompous mayor of Doodyville known for his loud, self-serving decrees. 

Other characters bore silly names like Dilly Dally, Flub-a-Dub and Inspector John H. Fadoozle, but none of the characters was more important than the kids in the Peanut Gallery.  Kids looking in from all around the country could easily imagine themselves in those bleachers. 

Howdy Doody proved the viability of programming for – and advertising to – children, and paved the way for other pioneering shows.

• 

  Kukla, Fran and Ollie premiered January 12, 1949 on NBC Chicago. Created by puppeteer Burr Tillstrom, and hosted by singer-actress Fran Allison, the show’s ad-libbed, gentle humor found a robust following among adults as well as their kids.

   

• The Small Fry Club, hosted by Bob Emery, another former radio personality known for his warm, low-key style.
• Junior Jamboree and Telecomics were other early experiments in children’s programming, though mostly local or short-lived.

Howdy Doody was broadcast live on NBC for 13 years, airing 2,343 episodes from 1947 to 1960.   It was also one of the first shows to be broadcast in color, providing NBC and its parent company with another vehicle to entice consumers to buy RCA’s pricey, new, color TVs when they first went on the market in the mid-to-late 1950s.  

Howdy Doody was instrumental in demonstrating the commercial viability of television.  The show provided a daily destination for both children and the advertisers that sought to reach them, proving that kids were a profitable audience. 

The template Howdy Doody established lasted for decades: a mix of character-driven storytelling, participatory interaction, product tie-ins, and live performance.  

For 2,342 episodes, Clarabelle the Clown remained silent. But at the very end of the show’s final broadcast, he spoke his first and only word, whispering a single, tearful, “Goodbye, Kids.”

Clarabelelle Speaks! (Wait for it)

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[milestone_featured]

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September 7, 2027 will mark 100 years from the day when electronic television made its first appearance on Earth.  To generate interest in the Centennial,  this website and accompanying podcast is going to Count Down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television over 100 weeks until September 7, 2027.
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On the evening of May 7, 1947, RCA-made, Image Orthicon-powered television cameras came to life at NBC’s Studio 8-H in Rockefeller Center — the same studio where, a decade earlier, Maestro Arturo Toscanini had made NBC a cultural force with live broadcasts of the NBC  Symphony⁠.^⁠1

The new show was called Kraft Television Theatre, and represented a turning point for the new medium in two respects.

First, it was live theater, like Broadway on the air. It was not filmed, canned, or recycled from radio. Kraft Television Theater was written and produced for TV, performed live by marquee actors, and broadcast into American living rooms in real time.

It was also American advertising’s first serious foray into the new realm of television. 

The FCC had permitted commercial television to begin on July 1, 1941 (which was covered in Countdown #91, Bulova Time) 

The war put the whole proposition on hold. 

First, A Public Service 

Before the advent of television, advertising had a long history with radio that reflected the medium’s rudimentary origins, none of which were overtly ‘commercial.’ 

Radio started in the early 20th century with amateur wireless experiments before finding its way into military and maritime applications.  There was initially no demand for home entertainment.  But by 1920, with the addition of the circuitry pioneered by the likes of Edwin Armstrong and Reginald Fessenden⁠, radios were finding their way into American homes, and companies like Westinghouse, General Electric, and RCA began broadcasting regular programming to stimulate radio sales.^⁠2

The first radio station to offer regular programming – KDKA in Pittsburgh – went on the air on November 2, 1920, broadcasting the results of that day’s presidential election.  This established a precedent for broadcasting as a public service, not a source of revenue.  The precedent didn’t last very long. 

On August 28, 1922, radio station WEAF in Queens, New York broadcast the first paid-for content transmitted over the airwaves. WEAF was operated by AT&T, the company that made its money transmitting signals over wires, not air.  Envisioning radio as an extension of its existing business, the company proposed to engage in “toll broadcasting,” where organizations could pay to use the airwaves, just as they paid to use telephone lines.

WEAF’s first paid-for broadcast was a ten-minute segment paid for by the Queensboro Corporation, a real estate developer promoting properties in Jackson Heights.  The ad (if you can even call it that) wasn’t a jingle or a hard-sell pitch — it was a spoken essay, read by an announcer, extolling the virtues of a new suburban lifestyle. Though the effort was modest by modern standards, this moment was pivotal: for the first time, a third party had paid a radio station to reach a mass audience via radio.

The model established that day morphed in the decades that followed. 

Wait, We Can Make Money With This!?

In 1924, AT&T leased WEAF to RCA, which folded it into the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) in 1926 – the first true national radio network.^⁠3⁠  NBC was structured around a “sustaining sponsor” model, where advertisers would fund entire programs in exchange for on-air promotions. The result was a slate of programs like 

• The A&P Gypsies – sponsored by the Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company 
• The Ipana Troubadours – sponsored by Ipana Toothpaste from Bristol-Myers
• The Voice of Firestone – sponsored by the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company
• The Cities Service Concerts – sponsored by Cities Service Oil Company (which today is known as CITGO).

These and dozens of other programs promoted America’s most familiar brands. Even RCA got into the act, sponsoring the prestigious  Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra as a vehicle for promoting both the NBC network and RCA’s own line of radios and phonographs. 

At the nexus of this web of broadcasters and advertisers, one firm ruled the roost: J. Walter Thompson.  

From its roots in print advertising in the 1860s, JWT became the dominant force in radio in the 1920s and ‘30s.  JWT crafted radio programs around clients like Kraft Foods, Lever Brothers, the Ford Motor Company, General Foods, and Westinghouse, seamlessly embedding advertising into broadcast entertainment.  With such single-sponsor programming, advertisers – not talent – controlled the tone, style, and even the casting of radio shows.  

The agency’s success with radio dramas and music programs like The Kraft Music Hall and The Lux Radio Theatre made JWT the go-to firm for brands looking to advertise on the air.  JWT’s  access to all the essential talent — producers, writers, announcers — put the agency in the driver’s seat for any future shifts in the industry. 

When television came out of the gate after the war, JWT remained cautious. Early broadcasts were clunky, production costs were high, the audiences were minuscule, and the visual demands of the new medium posed creative challenges that neither radio producers nor ad agencies were fully prepared for.

But once the technology was proven and TV sets began to sell, audience surveys revealed that viewers recalled more than just the shows.  They remembered the sponsors. 

Say Cheese!

While JWT and NBC tested several formats, Kraft’s own ad team pushed JWT to mount a full hour show, firm in their conviction that high-minded drama would appeal to viewers and elevate their brand.  Keen to promote a new line of processed cheese products — the individually wrapped Kraft Cheese Slices –  the company agreed to foot the bill for a 13-week trial starting in the spring of 1947.

The debut episode of Kraft Television Theater was an adaptation of Elizabeth McFadden’s 1933 Broadway play Double Door, directed by Fred Coe and Delbert Mann and featuring actors John Baragrey and Eleanor Wilson.  The program was narrated by Ed Herlihy, who’s voice would become familiar to TV viewers for the next thirty years. ^⁠4

Trade magazines reported a tremendous surge in demand for Kraft Cheese Slices immediately after the debut of Kraft Television Theatre. In oral histories archived by the Television Academy, ad executives recalled the “phones lit up” at Kraft headquarters. A Television Magazine reader poll noted that Kraft Television Theatre had achieved “the highest sponsor recall of any program on the air” – effectively dispelling whatever doubts Madison Avenue may have still harbored for the potential of television. 

For eleven years from 1947 to 1958, Kraft Television Theater ran more than 650 live episodes on NBC and ABC, and showcased a memorable array of actors, directors, and writers. Future stars like James Dean, Grace Kelly, Rod Steiger, Helen Hayes, and Paul Newman all made appearances during the salad days of their careers. Future Hollywood directors like Sidney Lumet, Robert Altman, and George Roy Hill cut their teeth learning how to choreograph actors and block cameras across a tight studio floor. And a young screenwriter named Rod Serling added his unique voice to the medium.

Starting with adaptions of existing plays or short stories, the form quickly evolved to inspire original writing better suited for small screen’s intimacy and immediacy.  Stories of marriage, war, ambition, politics, and crime offered viewers something more substantial than puppets, pratfalls, and vaudeville-style hijinks. 

The success of Kraft Television Theatre inspired what some look back on fondly as the “Golden Age” of live television. Its success spawned a wave of imitators: Philco Television Playhouse, Studio One, Goodyear Television Playhouse, Playhouse 90, and other shows that gave television a style  distinct from radio, film, and theater.

But despite the highbrow pretensions, it’s instructional to remember that it all started with the imperative to sell more cheese.

¹ And where, three decades later,  Saturday Night Live would launch another five decades of comedy history.

² Armstrong’s contributions are covered in Coundown #99, Video Gets Its Audio.  Reginald Fessenden was a Canadian radio pioneer who, in 1906, made the first known broadcast of voice and music over radio waves.

³ Also In 1926:  RCA, AT&T, GE, and Westinghouse agreed to a consent decree that formally divided the emerging radio and electrical industries. AT&T ceded broadcasting to RCA, selling  WEAF to RCA for $1 million. RCA in tern ceded wired communications to AT&T in exchange for for using AT&Ts wired network to relay its content to the fledgling NBC network (that also launched in 1926).   GE and Westinghouse retained manufacturing roles but stepped back from content production or distribution.  This agreement effectively carved up the airwaves and established the structural blueprint of American broadcasting — with RCA controlling content, AT&T owning infrastructure, and GE/Westinghouse supplying the hardware.

⁴ Ed Herlihy was a familiar voice  on American radio and television for over three decades, with his presence on TV lasting from the late 1940s into the early 1970s.   Herlihy was a regular presence on NBC programs, voiceovers for newsreels, and countless commercials, especially for products like Cheez Whiz and Jell-O. He occasionally made appearances — notably in Woody Allen films like Annie Hall (1977) and Zelig (1983),  playing a version of himself or using his iconic announcer persona.

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[milestone_featured]

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September 7, 2027 will mark 100 years from the day when electronic television made its first appearance on Earth.  To generate interest in the Centennial,  this website and accompanying podcast is going to Count Down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television over 100 weeks until September 7, 2027.
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After the ‘false dawn’ of 1939-1941, one of television’s first steps out of its postwar crib was the telecast of a heavyweight title fight between Joe Louis and  Billy Conn on June 19, 1946.

What makes the event noteworthy is not the fight itself (Louis knocked Conn out in the 8^th round to retain his title) but the camera tube that NBC used for the first time for this particular broadcast: the Image Orthicon. 

Despite the race to bring it to market, television was barely viable before the war. The camera tubes of the 1930s were hardly up to the task. RCA’s Iconoscope delivered a usable signal, but that signal came with a lot of noise, poor contrast, and required either bright daylight or unbearably bright studio lights.  The images from Farnsworth’s Image Dissector were cleaner and more stable than those of the Iconoscope, but the tube was far less sensitive and also required a veritable flood of interior lighting.

Between 1937 and 1939, RCA arrived at a breakthrough when engineers at the Camden, NJ laboratory  – primarily Albert Rose, E.G. Ramberg, and Harold Law – developed a camera tube that offered both improved sensitivity and image fidelity.*

RCA’s new tube bore little resemblance to Zworykin’s Iconoscope, but RCA insisted on calling it the “Orthiconosope” – adding the Greek prefix meaning “straight” to the older tube’s name for the sake of marketing continuity.  The name was eventually shortened to “Orthicon” but, like everything else, development ceased at the start of the war.

The Image Orthicon was a further improvement, and arguably the video camera tube that changed everything in the mid 1940s.

To understand why the Image Orthicon succeeded where its predecessors struggled, it helps to break down its internal architecture, which consists of four major elements:

– an electrical image

– a charge-storage target

– a low-velocity scanning beam

– a secondary-emission electron multiplier

Of those four elements, three derive largely from Philo Farnsworth’s work.

First, the scene to be televised begins its journey from light to electricity by landing on a light-sensitive surface that forms an “electrical image” – the breakthrough concept defined in Farnsworth’s first 1927-30 patents. 

After being momentarily stored in a second element (about which more in a moment), the charge pattern is scanned by a “low-velocity electron beam,” something Farnsworth introduced in patents related to the Image Dissector in the 1930s.

Next, the signal from the low-velocity scan is amplified in an “electron multiplier,” a configuration that uses the physics of secondary electron emission that Farnsworth also began experimenting with in the early 1930s. 

The only major component of the Image Orthicon’s architecture not derived from Farnsworth’s work is a target plate capable of momentarily storing the charge pattern – a principle adapted in both RCA’s Iconoscope and  Orthicon tubes, but developed independently in the 1920s by the Hungarian physicist Kálmán Tihanyi.^⁠1

So the Image Orthicon – the camera tube that delivered so many of the iconic television images of the 1940s and 50s – is based largely on Farnsworth’s innovations, albeit with crucial development and refinement by RCA engineers.

Even the name of the new camera tube was derived from its two predecessors:  The “Image” part of the name is derived from the “Image Dissector” because the first element of the tube converts light into electrons in precisely the manner described in Farnsworth’s first patent. The “Orthicon” part of the name derives from RCA’s lexicon. 

The sequence of events during these years is fuzzy, but this much seems certain:  By 1939 RCA was existentially invested in the launch of television. But even as David Sarnoff added “sight to sound” at the New York World’s Fair, the company still refused to acknowledge or license the Farnsworth patents that made the new medium possible, starting with #1,773,980 from 1927-30. 

Farnsworth’s improved “Image Dissector” patent dated back to 1933.  RCA’s work on the Orthicons began between 1937 and 1939.  We can only imagine the consternation facing RCA’s patent attorneys when they discovered that one of the critical elements of both new tubes – the low velocity electron scanning beam – was previously covered by a Farnsworth patent. So it comes as no surprise that a few months after the World’s Fair, RCA finally capitulated to Farnsworth and accepted a license for the use of his patents.  

But wait, there’s more:  By the time RCA accepted a license with Farnsworth, the patent office had been dealing for the better part of a decade with the company’s aggressive “pay no royalties” strategy.  One patent officer was so fed up that he told Farnsworth’s attorneys that in addition to the patent rights to the Image Orthicon, “we’d have given you the name, too” – but that was covered by separate trademark provisions.  

So we come to July, 1946.  The war has been over for nearly a year.  The nation is converting its military production to civilian uses once again.  Thousands of highly trained engineers, technicians, and radio operators returned home with cutting-edge knowledge in electronics, optics, and signal processing. These veterans found work with companies like RCA, CBS, DuMont, General Electric, and dozens of other companies that were staking out claims on the new territory of television. 

With the Image Orthicon, television finally had a reliable “eye” that could see clearly in the real world. The technical barriers were cleared. The legal impediments were settled.

And from that summer night in 1946, television antennas began appearing on rooftops all over the world. 

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If you really want to get into the weeds re: the inner workings of the Image Orthicon, here’s a detailed video that explains it all for you:

*The Orthiconoscope was first announced in Sept. 1939 with the publication of a paper by Rose and Iams in the Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE). There also appears to have been work on a similar principle (low-velocity scanning) by Blumlein and McGee at EMI prior to the RCA initiative to develop a tube with low-velocity scanning.   

¹ RCA long credited this “storage principle” to Vladimir Zworykin, but the idea was first formulated by the Hungarian Kálmán Tihanyi, whose 1920s designs for an all-electronic camera introduced the “storage mosaic” that later defined the Iconoscope. RCA later absorbed Tihanyi’s patents and incorporated the storage principle into its own designs. For more, see the footnotes accompanying Countdown #94, “Now We Add Sight to Sound”

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[milestone_featured]

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September 7, 2027 will mark 100 years from the day when electronic television made its first appearance on Earth.  To generate interest in the Centennial,  this website and accompanying podcast is going to Count Down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television over 100 weeks until September 7, 2027.
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On December 8, 1941 – the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor – President Roosevelt convened Congress to declare war on Japan.  On December 11, Germany and Italy honored their 1940 Tripartite Pact with Japan and declared war on the United States.  Congress reciprocated the same day, and the global conflagration was fully engaged. 

Over the next several months, the country mobilized nearly all its industrial and military capacity to fight a world war on two distant fronts.

On January 16, 1942, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9024, authorizing the newly formed War Production Board to allocate raw materials, halt non-essential manufacturing, and convert peacetime industries to military production.  

On April 22, the Board ordered a halt to all civilian radio and television production, diverting that industry’s resources toward radar, communications, and guidance-and-control devices for aircraft, ships, and ground forces.

Most histories of television will draw a blank line through the war years, implying that the industry went into suspended animation from 1941 until 1946.  But in fact, the race for television going into 1940s fed directly into war effort.  And when the fighting finally ended, the war effort would, in turn, supercharge television’s assault on the nation’s airwaves. 

Among the new technologies that played a critical role in the war was something engineers first gave the unwieldy name of ‘radio detection and ranging.’  Better known by its common acronym, “RADAR” uses reflected radio waves to detect the distance, direction, and speed of objects like aircraft and ships.   

Electron Bunching 

Here’s a fun fact: The evolution of radar is intimately tied to the inventing of television.  

Philo Farnsworth’s achievement in 1927 was, quite literally, a ‘quantum leap’ in what humans could do with the fundamental forces of nature. The ‘electrical image’ described in Farnsworth’s first patent discloses an unprecedented ability to focus and steer the subatomic particles called electrons.  We take that level of electron control entirely for granted today, but at the time, the achievement was truly monumental, and opened the door to several other breakthrough technologies, not least among them radar. 

Recall that by the time he got a proper laboratory setup in San Francisco in the fall of 1926, he had expected to see his idea show up somewhere else for more than five years.  That it hadn’t is one measure of how far he was ahead of any competition. Once certified with his first patents, that lead only lengthened by virtue of the new things he learned in his laboratory every day.

One of the novel ideas at the heart of radar is a phenomenon called ‘electron bunching.’ Farnsworth began experimenting with the principle in the mid 1930s.  In 1936, he applied for several patents in anticipation of radar and other forms of microwave amplification. 

But, in one of the more tragic terms in the whole Farnsworth saga, on his return from Germany after the 1936 Olympics he learned that those patents had been abandoned. 

The private investors supporting his venture were already stretched thin by the combined costs of his laboratory operations and the years of litigation with RCA. They refused to bear the additional burden of defending any patents not directly related to television.  

As a result, Farnsworth lost the right to stake a claim on another essential realm of 20th-century electronics. 

It fell instead to others to stake out the new field. 

Blips on a Flickering Screen 

Radar has a mixed parentage.  Among its pioneers were the brothers Russell and Sigurd Varian—Stanford trained engineers who developed the klystron in 1937. The Klystron was the first practical vacuum tube that could generate and amplify stable microwaves, using the principle of electron bunching that Farnsworth had pioneered but been forced to abandon.

It is instructive to recall, too, that Russell Varian worked for a time in Philo Farnsworth’s San Francisco lab, where he gained first-hand experience with cathode-ray technology before he and his brother formed Varian Associates, one of the firms that would anchor what is now known as Silicon Valley.

Meanwhile in Britain, Sir Robert Watson-Watt and his team were racing to turn radio into an early-warning system against approaching aircraft, culminating in the “Chain Home” radar network that helped win the Battle of Britain. Around the same time, John Randall and Harry Boot’s cavity magnetron pushed radar into even higher-frequency microwaves, a breakthrough the British soon shared with the U.S., jump-starting American research at MIT’s Radiation Lab.

Regardless of the underlying technology, radar owed much of its rapid advance during World War II to the race for television. What all of these systems had in common was their reliance on advanced cathode ray tubes to show the positions of enemy ships and aircraft as blips of light on a flickering screen.  

By the time radar became a national priority, both the U.S. and the U.K. had the infrastructure in place to mass-produce radar displays. Television research labs quickly retooled: RCA, already dominant in radio, became a major radar supplier; DuMont, a pioneer in CRT instrumentation, turned its expertise to military contracts; and companies like General Electric and Philco followed suit, building the eyes of the Allied radar network.*

Boxes for Bullets 

Philo Farnsworth also flourished during the war.  

In 1938 – his investors converted his fledging research and development enterprise into an electronics manufacturer. ^⁠1The newly minted Farnsworth Television and Radio Corporation acquired manufacturing facilities in Fort Wayne, Indiana and produced radios and phonograph consoles in anticipation of ramping up for television. The company secured $3 million in an IPO and was listed on the New York Stock Exchange with the symbol ‘FTR’ on March 14, 1939 – the day before Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia. 

Like the rest of the industry, FTR converted rapidly to wartime production, and that provided the financial foundation Farnsworth himself needed to retreat to a homestead in Maine for the duration of the war. 

In his well-funded private laboratory Farnsworth was joined by Cliff Gardner,  his brother-in-law and still his chief glass blower.  Together they designed specialty tubes for the war effort, sending those designs to Fort Wayne for fabrication.  Safely ensconced in the woods of Maine, Farnsworth set his sights on what might be next. 

In 1941, Farnsworth was quietly invited to participate in a secret project in New Mexico. The man who likely possessed as much knowledge of the quantum realm as any of the geniuses assembled at Los Alamos told his wife, ‘I think they are building an atomic bomb and I want nothing to do with it.”  

Instead, he sat the war out in Maine, and with his brothers created a company to selectively harvest and mill wood from the surrounding pine forests to make “boxes for bullets” to be shipped overseas.

What Did you Do In The War, Daddy? 

David Sarnoff assumed a somewhat higher profile during the war.  

Freed from the imperative to retool his premature foray into commercial television,  David Sarnoff redirected RCA’s vast technical capacity toward the war effort, serving as a consultant to General Eisenhower and positioning the company as a key defense. His chief scientist, Vladimir Zworykin, likewise applied his television expertise to radar, infrared, and night-vision research at RCA’s laboratories.

For his contributions, Sarnoff was awarded the nominal rank of Brigadier General in the U.S. Army Signal Corps in 1945.  The title was strictly honorary, but it was enough for Sarnoff to expect his subordinates, family and friends to address him as “General Sarnoff” until he moved on to the great corner office in the sky in 1972.

In addition to such luminaries as Farnsworth, Sarnoff and Zworykin, the stalled civilian electronics industry contributed substantial numbers of skilled engineers to the ranks of the Signal Corps, Naval electronics, and radar operations.  Their experience with broadcasting and electronics was directly applicable to military communications, surveillance, and detection systems.

Though television itself was mothballed during the war, all the underlying infrastructure – and the trained personnel that ran it all – were instrumental to the Allies’ victory. 

When the U.S. entered the war in 1941, total domestic production of cathode ray tubes amounted to fewer than 50,000 units per year.  By 1945, U.S. factories were churning out nearly 2-million CRTs per year.    

When the war finally ended, the massively expanded industrial base laid the foundation for the postwar television boom that followed. 

 

¹ Farnsworth Television and Radio Corp was formed largely in response to the abandoned radar patent fiasco and subsequent events in 1936.  After New York investment bankers were drawn into arrange the financing, the factories of the ailing Capehart Corporation, a manufacturer of high-end radios, radio-phonograph consoles and related consumer electronics and relocated from Philadelphia to Fort Wayne.

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