100YearsOfTV

[milestone_featured]

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September 7, 2027, will mark 100 years from the day when electronic television was invented.  To celebrate the Centennial,  this website and accompanying podcast are going to countdown the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television.
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November 22, 1963, started much like any other day in the fictional town of Oakdale, Ohio, when television’s most popular daytime drama, As The World Turns, went on the air at 1:30 PM Eastern Time on CBS.

In the second scene of the episode, veteran actress Helen Wagner – playing series matriarch Nancy Hughes – has just sat down for coffee with her father-in-law, the avuncular Grandpa Hughes played by Santos Ortega.  They’re discussing arrangements for Thanksgiving dinner when  suddenly Oakdale is wiped off the screen by a bolt of static and a black card that said simply, “CBS News Bulletin.”   

In Columbus, Mississippi, Beth Blasingame – like millions of other children across the country –  was playing on the floor in front of the TV while her mother was making lunch in the kitchen. 

How Is This Possible? 

Only four years old, Beth did not understand what was happening.  “I thought we were watching real people in Oakdale,” Beth recalled decades later. “I didn’t know that was possible. This is my first real memory.” 

Beth Blasingame’s first real memory was experienced through television – and quickly became a collective national memory, one of just a handful of “do you remember where you were?” events in modern history.  

What Beth and her mother heard next was the voice of CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite:

The bulletin lasted about 45 seconds.  When it was over, the screen returned to a commercial for Nescafe Minute Brew – “a new kind of instant coffee” – already in progress.  

When the commercial ended, the title card for As The World Turns returned briefly to the screen, but before the program could resume, the CBS News Bulletin and the disembodied voice of Walter Cronkite returned with “further details:” 

Back to Oakdale

The bulletin continued for nearly three minutes before the screen returned to yet another scene of domestic normality from Oakdale. 

That placid scene was followed by a cocker spaniel and her puppies chowing down on a bowl of Friskies dog food.  But the canine feast was interrupted by the CBS News Bulletin card again. For several minutes Cronkite recapped the events unfolding in Dallas before taking “a pause to allow all our stations to identify themselves and join the network.”  

Ten seconds later, Cronkite himself finally appeared in shirtsleeves surrounded by telephones behind a desk in the CBS newsroom. 

That was the end of the normal day in fictional Oakdale, Ohio – and in all of America if not the world. 

For the better part of the ensuing hour, the screen switched between Cronkite’s newsroom and scenes of the crowd milling about at the Dallas Trade Mart where Kennedy had been scheduled to speak that afternoon.

Back at the news desk, Cronkite faced the camera with unconfirmed reports that the president was dead. 

Apparently Official

Beth Blasingame recalls what happened next: 

My mother gave a gasp, wiped her hands on her apron and ran to the phone on the wall. She called my sister’s school to ask if they had heard. They said yes and they were calling the bus drivers to come get the students. My daddy was a salesman traveling in another state. He said he did a U-turn and headed home. He said that every church was lit up and parking lots full as he drove home. My parents were not Kennedy fans, but they wept with the rest of the nation.

Similar scenes were unfolding all over America, and for the next several days the entire nation was, as the saying goes, “glued to their televisions.”

By the time Cronkite made his pronouncement, all three of the major networks had dropped their regular programming and switched to their newsrooms. 

NBC had been airing a filmed sitcom, Bachelor Father, when its first bulletin interrupted the program.  The network soon switched to Chet Huntley and David Brinkley anchoring from New York.

ABC, still the smallest of the three networks, was airing a rerun of Father Knows Best  when it cut away to news bulletins. ABC lacked the depth of resources of its larger rivals, but  nonetheless committed to uninterrupted coverage with anchor Ron Cochran.

Reach and Limitations 

Once Kennedy’s death had been officially confirmed all three networks went with wall-to-wall coverage. Estimates suggest that a cumulative audience of  between 100 and 150 million Americans tuned in sometime during that afternoon and evening. 

While this largest-ever audience tuned in over the ensuing weekend, Kennedy’s assassination demonstrated both the cultural reach and the technical limitations of television in the early 1960s.  

The national catharsis demanded immediate coverage, but there were no satellite feeds and only limited microwave links between Dallas and New York.  Television cameras were still enormous and immobile, so video from Dallas was limited. The closest the networks could come to real time was 16mm film that had to be shot and processed before any footage could be put on the air.  

On Saturday, November 23, the networks focused on the deceased president lying-in-state, first at the White House and then under the dome of the Capitol Rotunda.  Reactions were conveyed from foreign leaders, correspondents offered analysis and extended studio discussions. Nielsen estimated that more than 120 million  Americans watched television at some point that day.

By Sunday, authorities in Dallas had a suspect in custody: Lee Harvey Oswald was being held at the police headquarters in downtown Dallas.

Murder in Real Time 

Word leaked out Sunday morning that Oswald would be transferred to the Dallas County Jail.  The route required Oswald to pass through the basement of police headquarters, where all three networks mounted cameras to provide the country its first look at the man accused of murdering the president in cold blood and in broad daylight.  

At 11:21 AM, as Oswald was being led toward an armored car, a Dallas nightclub owner named Jack Ruby stepped out of the shadows, fired a pistol, and suddenly Oswald himself was murdered in cold blood, in broad daylight – and in front of a nationwide TV estimated at some 80 million people watching in real time. ^⁠1

CBS coverage of the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald, November 24, 1963.

Again, television united the nation in disbelief. 

The televised, collective, national state of shock continued the following day. John F. Kennedy’s funeral procession and internment in Arlington Cemetery on Monday, November 25, remains one of the most-watched events in television history.  Conservative  estimates count the audience at upwards of 100 million viewers in America alone.

In Western Europe, much of the funeral was carried live or near-live via the Eurovision system, which linked national broadcasters by microwave and cable relays^⁠2. Britain, France, West Germany, Italy, and others cleared their schedules much as U.S. networks had; Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia, and parts of Africa mostly saw the funeral hours or days later, via kinescope films or videotape flown overseas. In all, the total audience for the funeral has been estimated at 600 million worldwide. 

Return to “Normal” 

Life in fictional Oakdale, Ohio, returned to some semblance of normal on Tuesday, November 26, when As The World Turns resumed its regular schedule.  But something fundamental shifted in the real world for Beth Blasingame and her family – and the entire country. 

The weekend of the Kennedy assassination not-so-subtly redefined the relationship between television and the nation’s perception of itself.  For the first time, history was not something conveyed after the fact. It was experienced simultaneously nationwide.  And a nation conditioned by the sight of fictional murder and mayhem got to see the real thing firsthand. 

The coverage of the assassination brought television into a new era.  Today’s continuous coverage of “breaking news” can trace its origins back to Dallas in 1963. Later crises – from Vietnam and Watergate to 9/11 – refined the formula, but a new template was set: when history turns violent or unstable, the cameras stay on. 

An iconic moment from the funeral: 3-year-old John F. Kennedy Jr. salutes his father’s casket

In many respects, the Kennedy assassination marked the end of an age of postwar innocence reflected in white-bread, status quo programming like Lucy, Ozzie and Harriet, and Father Knows Best. 

The assassination also marked the beginning of a challenging time – when the first generation of children raised on their shared television experience would begin to question that status quo. 

And much of the turbulence would unfold on television. 

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¹ For comparison: On January 28, 1986, approximately 20 million witnessed the explosion of space shuttle Challenger in real time; Roughly 50 million people were tuned in when the second airplane struck the World Trade Center September 11, 2011.   That makes the  estimated 80 million viewers who witnessed the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald still  the largest audience ever to witness a sudden, unscheduled act of violence live on television.

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[milestone_featured]

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September 7, 2027, will mark 100 years from the day when electronic television was invented.  To celebrate the Centennial,  this website and accompanying podcast are going to Count Down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television.
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If the Cuban Missile Crisis did anything, it fulfilled television’s promise to put viewers in the middle of history as it unfolded, in a way that print readers or radio listeners could scarcely imagine. 

From Herbert Morrison’s radio account of the Hindenburg disaster (“Oh, the humanity!”) in 1937 to Edward R. Murrow’s rooftop broadcasts during the Battle of Britain (“This… is London”) in 1940, radio made urgency audible for the listener.  

But for viewers around the world, television made the impending doom of the Cuban Missile Crisis truly visceral. The maps and photos of missile silos displayed in living rooms from coast to coast engaged viewers’ central nervous system in a way that sound alone never could.  

They they didn’t just hear the firmness in President Kennedy’s voice. His determined gaze beaming through the fixed frame of the screen made the tension between an existential peril and the president’s grace under pressure truly palpable. 

Once the crisis had passed and the world went on about its business, what television audiences wanted was some kind of release.  One way that television responded to the absurd prospect of nuclear annihilation was the time-tested tradition of satire. It is fitting that the first response would start in Britain – the first country to launch regular television service in 1936. ^⁠1

From Punch to Goons

From the caricatures printed in Georgian tabloids to the Victorian irreverence of Punch, the roots of British satire reached well back into the print era, fostering a tradition that assumed public life was fair game.  

But in the age of electronic media, the BBC was the epitome of British decorum.  This restraint was first dictated by John Reith, the founding Director-General of the British Broadcasting Company from 1927 until 1938.  Reith’s guiding maxim was “inform, educate, and entertain” – in that precise order of diminishing priorities.  

Public affairs were to be covered with impartiality, authority, and what came to be known as “Reithian restraint.” Sharp opinions were permissible, but critique stopped at the point of ad hominem attacks or maliciously mocking those in public office. 

John Reith retired from the BBC in 1938, but his shadow loomed over the organization well into the 1940s.  

So it might have come as a bit of a surprise to radio audiences in 1951 when the BBC launched The Goon Show, a surreal, anarchic comedy that challenged many of the conventions of traditional broadcasting. 

Created by Spike Milligan and featuring rising comics like Peter Sellers, The Goon Show treated authority and bureaucracy as raw material for all manner of nonsense for nearly a decade. The airing of its final episode in the winter of 1960 left something of a hole in the British cultural landscape. 

From Silly to Ridiculous

But if radio could make authority sound silly, then television could make it look downright ridiculous – and two years later the BBC rose to the task. 

On November 24, 1962 – just a few week after the Cuban Missile Crisis – the BBC began airing a program that treated the week’s news not as sacred text, but as grist for large scale mockery. 

That Was the Week That Was – or TW3 as it was quickly branded – wasn’t the first time politics was the butt of British humor, but it is fondly recalled as the first time television made topical satire the premise for a nationwide weekly comedy catharsis.

TW3 was created, produced, and directed by Ned Sherrin and Jack Duncan. 

The host was an aspiring 23-year-old Briton named David Frost. Frost was neither a comic nor a journalist, but was earning a reputation as a clever, articulate champion of the postwar intellectual culture that produced Beyond the Fringe and other satirical revues.^⁠2

Frost had studied English at Cambridge, edited the university magazine Granta, and was coming up through the ranks of the BBC from the Talk department – a division that placed him in proximity to news discussion and analysis, rather than either straight news reporting or sketch comedy.  He was smart, clean-cut, and spoke with the kind of precise British diction that lent an air of gravitas to his on-screen persona – even as he delivered devastating punch lines. 

That Was the Week That Was was more than a variety show with topical jokes; it was a weekly act of cultural sabotage. 

Putting a traditional comedian at the front might have framed the show as frivolous or irresponsible. Instead, David Frost, looked like someone who might just as plausibly be hosting the BBC’s flagship current affairs program, Panorama.⁠  ^⁠3Young as he was, Frost’s presence provided reassurance that the show’s incendiary material was being presented by somebody who bore some semblance to an adult.⁠ ^⁠4

From the first fade-in, TW3 offered a departure from anything that had preceded it. More than a “comedy about politics,” it was a kinetic collage that borrowed the familiar constructs of current affairs and journalism – headlines, quotes, summaries and debates were  delivered with a serious tone – and then subverted them with sketches, monologues, and music.  

The show vaporized whatever remained of John Reith’s long shadow of restraint and turned the venerable Beeb’s mantle of seriousness inside-out. 

Satire to Sing Along To

Every week, TW3 opened with a musical number performed by Millicent Martin, a young actress and singer who warbled outrageous political observations with the calm demeanor of a BBC newsreader. 

Martin’s phrasing delivered an absurdist counterpoint to the biting lyrical content, declaring in the opening minutes of each episode the show’s subversive tension between decorum and dissent.

The lyrics of the opening number changed with the headlines, but the show was careful to use the same melody every week – effectively turning the news into a chorus that the whole country could sing along to. 

And, fittingly, the opening song of that first show in November 1962 offered a cutting recap of the recent, narrowly survived Cuban Missile Crisis – and the strange anticlimax that followed. 

TW3 honed its satirical edge by putting public figures and institutions – the Prime Minister, the Parliament, establishment manners, and the hypocrisies of class and society – into a stark comic relief that seemed disruptive under the solemn mantle of the BBC.  What was pioneering in its time seems obvious now, but it was startling amid a postwar BBC culture where convention and respectability were part of the brand. 

That Was The Week That Was ran for only two seasons over 13 months, airing its last episode in Great Britain on December 28, 1963. 

But that was not the end of the weeks that were. 

Jumping the Pond

Even as the last episode aired in Britain, TW3 was setting up its second act across the pond.  

After NBC secured the rights to replicate the program in the U.S., a pilot episode aired on November 10, 1963, under the direction of producer Leland Heyward.   

David Frost remained the on-air face of the U.S. version – effectively importing the show’s tone along with its title.  Between Heyward and Frost, the American version of TW3 leaned hard into its predecessor’s DNA.  

Frost remained central, but American folk singer and actress Nancy Ames assumed Millicent Martin’s role as the resident vocalist.  More of a trained singer than a comic, Ames helped translate the British program’s satirical format into the American idiom.

When it crossed the Atlantic, TW3 landed in an environment that was primed for its kind of humor.  The trail had been blazed in print and radio, from editorial cartoons to Will Rogers’s folksy monologues.  Early television variety shows routinely included topical jokes, but TW3 was the first program to make political satire the sustained focus of an entire broadcast. 

That Was The Week That Was was by no means the first program on television— in either the U.K. or the U.S. — to make fun of politicians or joke about current affairs. 

But TV historians routinely cite TW3 as a prototype: ground zero for a through-line that continued in the 1960s with The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, expanded in the 1970s through Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update,” and sharpened in the 1980s and 1990s with programs like Spitting Image and Politically Incorrect.  Today, staples of late-night cable like Comedy Central’s The Daily Show and The Colbert Report all carry the DNA of That Was The Week That Was.

Millicent Martin opens an episode the British version of TW3

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¹ Countdown #95: Mystic, Magic Rays

² Beyond the Fringe was a landmark British satirical stage revue that premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1960 before transferring to London and Broadway. Written and performed by Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett, and Jonathan Miller, it marked a decisive break from deferential, class-bound comedy, openly mocking politics, religion, and the British establishment. Its success helped usher satire from the margins of revue and radio into the cultural mainstream, clearing the ground for programs like That Was the Week That Was.

³ To this day a fixture on BBC-TV, Panorama  began airing on November 11, 1953, making it the world’s longest-running TV news magazine program (NBC’s Meet The Press is both the longest running program of any genre and longest-running news interview show; Countdown #86). 

Panorama specializes in sober, authoritative reporting: foreign affairs, domestic politics, investigative exposés, and long-form interviews, all delivered in a tone of institutional seriousness and editorial restraint. It was emphatically not “entertainment.”

⁴ Frost’s later reputation as a serious television journalist – most famously through his interviews with disgraced former U.S. President Richard Nixon in 1977 – grew directly out his tenure on TW3.

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[milestone_featured]

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September 7, 2027, will mark 100 years from the day when electronic television was invented.  To celebrate the Centennial,  this website and accompanying podcast are going to count down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television.
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As we have endeavored to do for you here, once you have peeled back the curtain of false narratives about television’s origins, you can begin to appreciate that its physics emerged from the same well of cosmic knowledge that gave the world nuclear energy — and atomic bombs.

The first paper that Albert Einstein published in 1905 was his articulation of the photoelectric effect – the process by which light becomes electricity. That is the essential principle that Farnsworth bottled in his Image Dissector tube^⁠1.

Later that year Einstein published his paper outlining the Theory of Special Relativity.  Then in 1907, he added a coda that described the theory of energy/mass equivalence.  That theory is more familiar in what is perhaps the most famous mathematical equation of all time: E=mc² – the theory that becomes fact in nuclear power plants and atomic bombs. 

The thread of scientific logic that Einstein followed does not go straight from converting light into electricity to powering (or vaporizing) cities.  The point is that all of these ideas emerged from a new understanding of the physical universe. The wholly electronic form of television that first appeared on Farnsworth’s workbench in 1927 emerged from the same intellectual paradigm as the advances in physics that powers nuclear submarines – and flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The two ends of Einstein’s seminal work came full circle in the autumn of 1962.

We Interrupt This Program 

If you were planted before a TV at 7:00 PM eastern time on October 22, 1962, you would have most likely been watching one of three programs:  On CBS, you were tuned into To Tell The Truth; on NBC, you were watching The Alfred Hitchcock Hour; ABC was broadcasting the wartime drama Combat!

But within minutes of the hour, instead of Hitchcock, NBC viewers saw an image of the Seal of The President of The United States, accompanied by announcement that:

NBC News brings to you from the White House in Washington an address by President Kennedy, declared to be officially of the highest national urgency. Mr. Kennedy met today with the National Security Council and conferred with leaders of Congress rushed back to Washington by Air Force jet. 

And then… 

The president of the United States….

John F. Kennedy’s image appeared on the screen, from a hastily rigged broadcast facility in the Cabinet Room.²  Seated behind an uncluttered desk, against a neutral grey background with the America flag on one side and the presidential flag the other, Kennedy addressed the camera as some 85-90 million people watched anxiously from the other side of the lens.^⁠3

“Good evening, my fellow citizens. 

This government has promised to maintain the closest surveillance of the Soviet military buildup on the island of Cuba. Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island. The purpose of these bases can be none other and to provide a nuclear strike capability against the western hemisphere.” 

Prior to that Monday night, there had been reports of a Soviet military buildup in Cuba. Most of the coverage took the form of rumor and speculation about surveillance flights and missiles.  By October 18, several journalists – like the New York Times James Reston and David Halberstam, and Washington insiders like Charles Bartlett and Walter Lippmann – sensed that something major was unfolding.

What nobody but Kennedy’s inner circle knew before the president addressed the nation was that the U.S. had photographic proof that the Soviet Union was setting up offensive nuclear missiles in Cuba – and that the prospects for a nuclear confrontation were being openly discussed at the highest levels of the administration. 

Once Kennedy appeared on television and spoke of “nuclear weapons capable of striking most of the Western Hemisphere,” the national mood shifted dramatically from worrisome to downright apocalyptic. 

Ashes In Our Mouth

Before charting a course of action, Kennedy clearly stated the stakes: 

“We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth – but neither will we shrink from that risk if at any time it must be faced.”

Suddenly, the collective immediacy of television dramatically shifted the consciousness of the nation. This was the first time a sitting U.S. president used live television to announce a confrontation that could plausibly witness the end of the world. 

For 18 minutes, the President of the United States detailed the deceptions that the Soviet Union had committed in violation of international laws and treaties, and how the “transformation of Cuba” with “weapons of sudden mass destruction constitutes an explicit threat to the peace and security of all the Americas.” 

The president’s calm but grave tone turned global statecraft into a fact of daily life. For families gathered in their living rooms, the rhetorical abstraction of the “Cold War” suddenly mutated into an immediate and personal peril. 

In measured terms, Kennedy announced several actions that the United States would take in the days ahead.  

The centerpiece of the American response was an immediate naval “quarantine” of Cuba – carefully avoiding the use of the more bellicose word “blockade.”  That meant that any Russian ships approaching Cuba carrying offensive military equipment would be turned back before reaching the island.

Next, Kennedy assured the nation that the U.S. would continue intense aerial surveillance of Cuba, and directed the U.S. Armed Forces “to prepare for any eventualities.”

Kennedy then made it clear that “any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere” would be regarded as “an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”

Kennedy’s address was both explicit and cautionary.  In his closing remarks he reiterated the stakes and – to the extent he could without inciting panic – the potential consequences.  

“It is difficult to settle or even discuss these problems,” Kennedy said, but insisting that any Soviet threat “must and will be met with determination.”

After addressing “the captive people of Cuba,” Kennedy set a sober tone for “the difficult and dangerous effort” ahead. “No one can see precisely what course it will take or what costs or casualties will be incurred.  But the greatest danger of all would be to do nothing.”

It didn’t take a scholar of international diplomacy to read between the lines:  “attack by the Soviet Union on the United States ” meant World War III and “full retaliatory response” meant nuclear annihilation.

Hard Truth, Real Consequences 

After Kennedy’s address, the networks did not return to their regularly scheduled programming.  Contrived Truth or Consequences were going to have to wait until the journalists and commentators had their chance to weigh in on the real thing. 

In the days that followed, the major networks suspended normal programming for extended periods. Anchors like Walter Cronkite became a steady presence, translating nuggets of hard information into measured narratives. Cronkite, in particular, embodied television’s evolving authority: trusted, restrained, and conscious of the medium’s influence on both public opinion and emotion.

The Cuban Missile Crisis was resolved not by a single dramatic act, but through a nerve-wracking de-escalation that unfolded over thirteen days.  Though the world was not aware of the extent of the danger until Kennedy’s address on October 22, the tension had in fact started some days earlier, when aerial surveillance confirmed  the confirmation of the build up in Cuba. It effectively ended on October 28, when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev announced that the Soviet Union would dismantle and remove its nuclear missiles from Cuba in exchange for a U.S. pledge not to invade the island. ^⁠4

From Kennedy’s October 22 address until Khrushchev’s announcement six days later, television was almost continuously tuned in to the crisis, turning America’s living rooms into windows on the White House Situation Room. ^⁠5

Like armchair military commanders, television viewers could follow the drama not only through words, but through images: maps of the Caribbean, photographs of missile sites, grainy footage of ships approaching the quarantine line, and the extraordinary spectacle of a Cold War confrontation playing in the United Nations. 

More than any moment in his brief tenure, the Cuban Missile Crisis sealed John F. Kennedy’s legacy as the first true television president. Youthful and telegenic, the screen framed him simultaneously as both Commander-In-Chief and even-handed father figure, keeping his head while others around him were losing theirs.

It’s hard to say that television played a direct role in the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  But it’s equally misleading to say that it did not.  Television galvanized the nation’s consciousness in the face of existential risk.  It is arguable that the nation’s leaders knew they could stand firm because they also knew that a well-informed citizenry understood the risks and shared their determination. 

In that sense, it seems fair to say that Einstein’s first discovery in 1905 did indeed have a hand in staving off the apocalyptic consequences his further work eventually ushered into the world.

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John F. Kennedy addresses the nation from the White House on October 22, 1962.

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¹ Most people think Albert Einstein won his Nobel Prize for Relativity or E=mc².  But  Einstein was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize for his work on the Photoelectric Effect, in part because of its role in establishing the foundations of quantum mechanics.

² Unlike later Presidential addresses, Kennedy’s 1962 address was staged from the Cabinet Room because the Oval Office was too small and poorly lit for the camera equipment of the time. The Cabinet Room offered better depth, lighting, and camera placement.

³ The size of the audience for Kennedy’s address vary from 80 to 100 million, with historians and scholars settling on ~85-90 million. (Television penetration is estimated at ~90% of the population of ~190 million.)  The number is difficult to pin down because Nielsen did not meter such interruptions of entertainment programming, and the audience surged during the address.  Several contemporary sources described it as the largest television audience in American history to that date.

⁴ The resolution also included a secret American agreement to withdraw U.S. Jupiter missiles from Turkey, a concession deliberately withheld from the public at the time to preserve NATO unity and avoid the appearance of a quid pro quo.

⁵ The White House Situation Room was created early in John F. Kennedy’s presidency, in direct response to the communication failures exposed by the Bay of Pigs invasion. Kennedy ordered the conversion of a basement conference space in the West Wing into a dedicated, around-the-clock intelligence and crisis-monitoring center, staffed by military officers and intelligence analysts. By the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, the Situation Room was fully operational and served as a central hub for receiving U-2 reconnaissance imagery, diplomatic cables, and military updates.

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[milestone_featured]

_______________________

September 7, 2027, will mark 100 years from the day when electronic television was invented.  To celebrate the Centennial,  this website and accompanying podcast are going to Count Down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television.
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Throughout the 1950s, ABC was the perpetual also-ran network, running a distant third to its older, larger rivals. 

With their pedigrees stretching back to the 1920s, NBC and CBS were the twin tentpoles of American broadcasting.  ABC, on the other hand, was the orphan child of the industry, with fewer affiliates and less capital to invest in infrastructure or prestige programming. 

ABC started as part of NBC. Until 1943, parent company RCA operated two radio networks. NBC Red was the commercially driven flagship, built around big-budget entertainment and major sponsors. NBC Blue was somewhat less overtly commercial, offering more news, public-service, and lower-revenue offerings.

With two national networks at its command, RCA had a hammer-lock on America’s airwaves. But in 1941, the FCC adopted new “Chain Broadcasting Rules” designed to put limits on the networks’ growing monopoly power. Under the new rules, the Commission ordered NBC to divest one of its two  networks. 

 Mr. Life Saver 

RCA complied with the ruling by selling NBC Blue to Edward J. Noble, who  made his fortune turning the peppermint white “Life Saver” into one of America’s most popular confections. 

By the early 1940s Noble commanded broad interests in advertising and consumer marketing. In NBC Blue, he saw a singular opportunity to acquire a national radio footprint and establish a much needed third network. 

In 1943 Edward Noble bankrolled the acquisition of NBC Blue for $8 million (about 150 million in 2026 dollars) and in 1944 he rebranded the network as the American Broadcasting Company. 

Between 1944 and 1946, ABC expanded its radio network but had none of the resources that its larger, older rivals were already pouring into television. 

As the FCC began lifting the wartime restrictions, ABC applied for broadcast TV licenses, starting with a TV-version of its flagship WJZ radio station in New York. Applications were filed in Chicago and Los Angeles as well to match NBC and CBS’s reach in the nation’s largest markets. 

ABC started its network TV service in April 1948 to a relatively tiny number of affiliates and with a thin slate of offerings. The few stations the network did have often had weaker signals than their rivals, which, when combined with the weaker program slate, kept the network chronically third in the national ratings throughout the 1950s. ⁠^⁠1

Another Decision 

ABC’s fortunes began to improve in the wake of another pivotal legal ruling.

In May, 1948, the United States Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in United States v. Paramount Pictures. Finding that Hollywood’s control of the production, distribution, and theatrical exhibition of motion pictures constituted a vertically integrated monopoly, the Court ordered the studios to divest their nationwide movie theater chains. 

It took nearly two years of contentious negotiations between the studios and the Justice Department to iron out the details. In 1950, in a series of agreements known as the Paramount Consent Decrees, Paramount was formally split into two separate companies: Paramount Pictures Corporation stayed in the motion picture production and distribution business. A new company, United Paramount Theatres – or UPT– assumed ownership and control of the theater chain formerly held by Paramount.

At the time of the Consent Decrees, Paramount’s theatrical division was run by Leonard Goldenson, a Harvard-educated lawyer and businessman who had rescued the studio’s theaters from the worst of the Great Depression. When UPT was spun off in 1950, Goldenson was named president, putting him in command of more than 1,400 theaters and their consistent, reliable cash flow. 

Goldenson wanted to expand but couldn’t go into the motion picture business because of the court ruling that had put him where he was in the first place.  But Goldenson was savvy enough to realize that there was “a new screen in town” – and turned his aspirations toward the weakest of the three television networks.

Still Third of Three

ABC was third-of-three in everything that mattered: the number of affiliates, quality programming, and ad revenue. But Goldenson believed that with adequate financing and Hollywood production expertise, ABC could compete with NBC and CBS.  Goldenson figured he could forge a whole new kind of integration by merging UPT’s capital with ABC’s broadcast platform.  

United Paramount Theatres merged with ABC in 1953, taking on the name of the acquired network. The influx of fresh capital transformed the chronically underfunded network into a competitive force.⁠^⁠2  

The merger also gave ABC sufficient financing to form a pioneering production alliance with Lew Wasserman’s MCA/Revue Productions, and ABC finally had the content pipeline it needed to compete with NBC and CBS.^⁠3

The impact of the merger was almost immediate.  The capital infusion enabled ABC to form its alliance with the Walt Disney Company, which was instrumental in in the creation of Disneyland – as covered in Countdown #74, Money Isn’t Everything.  After the merger, ABC started building more owned-and-operated stations as well as signing on more affiliates around the country.  

By the late 1950s, ABC was noticeably more competitive, but there was one critical area where it was still well behind its older, larger rivals:  Sports.  

NBC had baseball and big college football. CBS had the NFL, SEC football, and heavyweight boxing. 

ABC had… almost nothing.

Another Acquisition 

In 1959, ABC acquired a company called Sports Programs, Inc. from Edgar Sherick, a veteran of MCA/Revue – the company that Leonard Goldenson had engaged fill ABC’s thin programming lineup.  

Sherick operated around one of MCA’s core philosophies: if you didn’t have the money, you compensated with packaging ingenuity and clever deal-making.  When he left MCA to form Sports Programs in 1956, the company started supplying ABC with the kind of low-cost, ready-to-air sports programming that ABC was increasingly relying on. After the acquisition of Sherick’s company, he was named ABC’s vice president of programming. 

One of Sherick’s first tasks in his new post was to fill the gap in ABC’s sports coverage.  Well aware that ABC could ill-afford the rights to big American sports, he turned instead to the idea of a weekly international sports anthology, surmising that he could fabricate “must-see TV” out of lower-cost international events, tape-delayed competitions, and visually striking athletic events.   

To develop this Wide World of Sports, Sherick turned to a 27 year-old producer he had recently hired away from NBC:  Roone Arledge.  

A native of Queens, Arledge was still a student in Columbia University’s journalism program when he started experimenting with live broadcasting setups.  He started working at NBC as a production assistant in the early 1950s before becoming an assistant producer for The Today Show’s occasional sports remotes. At NBC, Arledge quickly distinguished himself for his visual imagination and for arguing that sports television should cultivate the underlying human drama, not just the play-by-play of televised sports. 

Big Swings 

Arledge’s ideas for coverage included slow motion cameras, multiple isolation angles, handheld cameras on the sidelines, and pre-produced features.  Executives at NBC routinely dismissed his suggestions as too expensive, too complicated, and just unnecessary for sports broadcasting. 

But in Ed Sherick at ABC, Roone Arledge found not only a receptive ear, but an executive willing to take some big swings.  

When Sherick described his idea for a weekly sports anthology, Arledge started spinning off ideas of his own:  The show had to have a host with narrative authority; It should use pre-produced profiles and filmed inserts; Camera placement had to show the athletes’ emotions, not just the action; And editing should shape each episode as a narrative arc, not just an assorted variety of unrelated events.

 Most importantly, Arledge felt the show should have a defining philosophy.  

To create a mission statement, Arledge turned to ABC staff writer George Meister, who crafted the iconic opening of every episode:^⁠4 ⁠

“Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sport…the thrill of victory, and the agony of defeat…”

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The opening sequence from ABC’s Wide World of Sports ca. 1974

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That intro was delivered by veteran sportscaster Jim McKay who became the face and voice of the show starting with its second episode, assuming the role of host and storyteller rather than play-by-play announcer. 

After a pilot episode of the new show aired late in 1960, ABC’s Wide World of Sports made its official premiere on April 29, 1961 featuring two venerable track-and-field events, the Penn Relays – broadcast live from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and the Drake Relays – tape-delayed from Des Moines, Iowa. 

Innovations 

Over the years that followed, Roone Arledge used Wide World of Sports as a proving ground for countless innovations, among them: 

• Up-close camera work to capture emotion and detail;

• Slow motion replays with frame-by-frame analysis (the advent of tape replay will be covered in Countdown #51);

• Split-screen comparisons;

• Pre-produced athlete profiles integrated directly into live coverage;

• Wireless miniature mics with unconventional placements;

• Dramatic editing and storytelling structure emphasizing the human drama of competition;

• International remote production on an unprecedented scale.

 In addition to Jim McKay, Wide World of Sports introduced many hosts and commentators now familiar in the pantheon of sportscasters: Among them Howard Cosell, Keith Jackson, Bud Palmer, Frank Gifford, Al Michaels, and Becky Dixon, who was the first female cohost with McKay starting in 1987. 

Among the international events that were popularized by Wide World of Sports were the Indianapolis 500, Wimbledon, The British Open, various Olympic trials and figure skating championships, boxing events like the first Muhammad Ali fights via tape delay, numerous Alpine skiing events, and world gymnastics championships. 

In addition to such marquee events, Wide World of Sports frequently featured the unique and the unusual: Cliff diving from Acapulco; barrel jumping; jai alai; demolition derbies, log rolling and lumberjack competitions; surfing championships; rodeos; table tennis; mountain climbing; camel races, elephant polo, and other global oddities.  

These events were often filmed in locations in Europe, Central America, Africa, and Asia that Americans had never seen before.

By the time its 37-year run ended in 1998, Wide World of Sports had aired more than 600 episodes and presented over 1,000 different sporting events from roughly 100 countries around the globe.

From Sports to News 

Wide World of Sports, made Roone Arledge one of the giants of American broadcasting.  

In 1977, Arledge was appointed president of ABC News, a move widely considered radical at the time: no network had ever turned its news division over to a sports producer. 

But Arledge brought with him the same instincts that had transformed sports broadcasting – dramatic pacing, tight storytelling, bold graphics, muscular field reporting, and an insistence on treating every story as both journalism and human interest story. 

Under his leadership ABC News launched 20/20, reinvented World News Tonight with a three-anchor structure, expanded Nightline out of the Iran hostage crisis in 1979, and infused the entire division with a sense of urgency and visual intelligence that reshaped American newscasting. 

Roone Arledge remained at ABC for nearly forty years, guiding first sports and then news until ill health forced his retirement from day-to-day duties in the late 1990s. He died in 2002 at the age of 71, leaving behind a half-century of work that altered the grammar of television itself — from the way the country watches football games to the way it understands world news.

In the span of a decade, the once-struggling ABC network acquired a sports identity so strong it became a cornerstone of its brand. 

Wide World of Sports didn’t single-handedly lift ABC out of the basement, but it provided the foothold – undeniable proof that the smallest of the three networks could originate programming that could attract the kind of audience that advertisers coveted. 

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¹ Another factor in ABC’s slow entry into television was the FCC’s freeze on new licenses between 1948 and 1952.  This moratorium probably deserves its own entry in the Countdown, as it also contributed to the demise of the DuMont Network (Countdown #64 – Have You No Sense of Decency?)  For now it is noted for possible future reference.

² UPT acquired ABC. Realizing the longer-term potential of the new medium, Goldenson opted to rebrand the company as ABC.

³ Lew Wasserman was the driving force behind Music Corporation of America (MCA) the most powerful talent agency in Hollywood.  MCA also owned Revue Productions, a rapidly expanding TV production company that had important Hollywood talent under contract and owned the old Republic lot in Burbank (now Universal City).  MCA/Revue’s specialty – filmed TV series produced cheaply and quickly was perfect for ABC’s budget.

⁴ This opening was not part of the premiere of Wide World of Sports in 1961; it was added sometime in 1962 and remained part of the program for the remainder of its run.

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[milestone_featured]

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September 7, 2027, will mark 100 years from the day when electronic television was invented.  This website and podcast are counting down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television over 100 weeks until the Centennial.
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When Franklin Roosevelt took to the airwaves to calm the depression-weary populace and sell the New Deal with his Fireside Chats in 1933, roughly half of the U.S. population lived in its urban centers. The other half still lived in the rural countryside. 

Over the decades that followed, dynamic forces altered that ratio. 

Mechanization reduced the need for farm labor, and the Depression drew workers to urban industries. The nationwide mobilization for WW II accelerated those patterns.  

After the war, housing construction, manufacturing, and the interstate highways lured ever increasing numbers of people toward ever-expanding metropolitan areas.

The spread of radio across the continent ran parallel to those migrations. 

Life that once revolved around local news and culture was modulated with more distant affairs. Farmers in the Midwest started listening to the same voices, jokes, ballgames, and political speeches as shopkeepers and bus drivers in the cities. Vaudeville stars, orchestras and big bands, comedians and celebrities were almost all urban voices coming out of places like New York and Chicago.  

The Urban Migration

By 1960, more than 70% of the American populace lived in or near the cities.  And thanks in large part to that concentration, nearly 90% of the total population lived under the electronic penumbra of television.

It comes as no surprise that the country’s political landscape shifted along with the changes in its demographics.  And nowhere is this shift more apparent than in the role of the president of the United States. 

For the first 150 years of the Republic, the American president was just that – the presiding officer of a far-off Federation, a remote figure whose name appeared in newspapers and hovered over civic life from afar.  

Some individual presidents earned fame or notoriety – Jackson for his populism, Lincoln for preserving the Union, Teddy Roosevelt for his trust-busting – but political life unfolded mostly in print, in party meetings, or on the stump. Congress legislated policies and presidents executed them. They were not entertainers, and they certainly didn’t drop into the nation’s parlors every evening.

Electronic media changed all that.  

Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats created a new level of presidential familiarity, but even FDR was only an occasional presence. His voice graced living rooms just a few times a year, and the medium still acted mostly as an extension of newspapers. Radio made the presidency audible, but it did not make it ubiquitous.

That escalation was far better suited to television. 

TV Alters The Landscape

 As noted in Countdown #94 – Now We Add Sight to Sound – Franklin Roosevelt was the first U.S. President to appear on television in any form, when he addressed the1939 New York World’s Fair in front of RCA’s cameras.  With all civilian electronics production paused for the duration of World War II, it was 8 years before another U.S president appeared on television.  

On October 5, 1947, Harry Truman made the first televised address from the White House, to enlist aid for postwar Europe.  Speaking from the Diplomatic Reception Room (not the Oval Office)F Truman’s address was carried by CBS, NBC, and the DuMont Network.  And, although it reached an audience of fewer than 50,000 receivers, Truman’s 1947 address is recalled as start of routine presidential appearances on television. 

When Truman’s inauguration was televised on January 20, 1949, there were still only about a million TV sets in use nationwide, reaching only 2% of America’s households.  

But the audience for that event included department stores, bars, hotel lobbies, union halls, and fire stations that shared the event with gatherings of 20, 50, even 100 people at a time, thus reaching between five and ten million Americans who, for the first time, witnessed a presidential inaugural in real time. 

 The influence of television in national affairs grew exponentially through the 1950s.  

By the time of the 1952 campaign, there were more than 15 million television sets in the country, all tied together through a nationwide web of coaxial cables. For the first time, the networks – NBC, CBS, and the upstart new ABC – offered “gavel-to-gavel” coverage of both the Republican and Democratic National conventions.⁠^⁠1

The presence of television cameras transformed the conventions. As the delegates were encouraged to wave their signs and chant their slogans on cue for the cameras, the myth of the “smoke filed rooms” dissolved into a made-for-TV spectacle – making politics a televised form of national theater.

After its convention nominated General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Republican National Committee hired Madison Avenue executive Rosser Reeves to create the first television advertisements for a presidential campaign.  

In Eisenhower Answers America (aka the I Like Ike ads), Reeves cobbled voter questions together with crisp, reassuring answers from the Republican candidate in a series of TV spots that injected  the now-familiar techniques of commercial advertising – brevity, repetition, and clarity – into national politics. 

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The first “I Like Ike” campaign commercial from 1952

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Eisenhower’s Democratic opponent Adlai Stevenson disdained such tactics, complaining that “the idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal is the ultimate indignity to the democratic process.” 

No surprise, then, that Eisenhower handily defeated Stevenson in 1952.  

By the time of their rematch in 1956, TV reached more than 70 percent of American homes and for many families had become their primary source of news.  

Now the incumbent, Eisenhower used television to project his calm, grandfatherly authority. His press conferences were televised, carefully lit, and timed for maximum evening-news exposure. 

Stevenson continued to struggle with the new environment.  His intellect and eloquence – easy grist for print reporters – did not translate well to the altered attention span of visual media. 

Needless to say, Eisenhower defeated Stevenson again in 1956. 

Eisenhower continued to use television effectively, and by the end of his second administration, penetration had reached nearly 90% of American households. 

Kennedy / Nixon

Television was ready to stake its claim as the pre-eminent forum for American politics when Democratic Senator John F. Kennedy squared off against Republican Vice President Richard M. Nixon for the first-ever televised presidential debate, staged at WBBM-TV in Chicago on the evening of September 26, 1960.

Surprisingly, there had never been a direct debate between the two major presidential candidates – not in person, not on radio, nor on television – until Kennedy and Nixon met in 1960.⁠^⁠2

One reason such an encounter had not happened during the broadcast era was the FCC’s arcane “equal-time rule,” which mandated that all candidates for any office be given similar airtime.  That meant that in a presidential race, any debate would have to include not only the Republican and Democratic party candidates, but also candidates from The Socialist Labor Party, The Prohibition Party, The Constitution Party, and any other independent who’d qualified for the ballot. 

All it took to get past that provision was an act of Congress.  

In the summer of 1960, the networks successfully lobbied Congress to pass a temporary suspension of section 315 – a bill whose sole purpose was to allow the networks to host a two-candidate debate. With no objections from the minor parties, once President Eisenhower signed the legislation, the networks went full speed ahead on organizing a debate.  

Now all they had to do was get the two candidates to show up. 

Given his stature as the sitting Vice President and the most likely successor to Eisenhower, Nixon was initially opposed to the networks’ proposal.  

Kennedy, on the other hand, wanted the debates to establish his legitimacy among an electorate who saw him as young, untested and – unlike any previous occupant of the office – Catholic.  Kennedy knew he was telegenic and was certain that appearing side-by-side with Nixon would make him look equally presidential.

Once it was obvious that neither candidate could plausibly decline the invitation – especially after Congress had changed the law – the ground rules were set.  

For that first debate, Kennedy and Nixon were each given 8 minutes to offer opening remarks, followed by a panel of journalists alternating questions posed to the candidates. Each answer was given up to two-and-a-half minutes and could be followed by up to one-and-a-half minutes of rebuttal.  There were no direct questions between the candidates, nor were any interruptions permitted.  

The format varied over the course of a total of four broadcasts, the last one on October 21,1960 from New York, but it was that first Kennedy-Nixon debate that permanently altered the priorities of American politics. 

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Highlights from the 1960 Kennedy/Nixon Debate, moderated by Howard K. Smith

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 On television, Kennedy came across as composed, confident and – most importantly – camera-ready. 

Nixon, who was recovering from an illness and recent knee surgery, looked pale and drawn, with a visible five o’clock shadow and beads of anxious sweat that glistened under the hot studio lights.  The contrast was stark: it was Kennedy who exuded “presidential” while Nixon seemed out of place. 

The debates were watched by an enormous audience: estimates place viewership for the first debate at roughly 70 million – the largest audience for any television event to that date. 

The debates were also carried on radio, and, ironically, those who listened on radio were inclined to think Nixon had won the debate on substance. But to the tens of millions who watched on television, Kennedy was the clear victor.  

After the debates, polling showed Kennedy moving into a slight but consistent lead over Nixon. 

Throughout the year Kennedy’s team – especially speechwriter Pierre Salinger and media advisor Ted Sorensen – designed the campaign around pictures, more than words. Kennedy held more televised press conferences than any candidate in history to that point.

 The results of the 1960 presidential election produced one of the closest margins in history.  Those 70 million viewers (pretending for a moment that they were all voters) split almost evenly:  the difference of roughly 118,000 more votes for Kennedy amounted to less than one-fifth of one percent. 

Image and Demographics

Regardless of the margin, the consensus that has rippled through decades is that television was instrumental in Kennedy’s victory.  That may be true – but entirely not for the reasons most often cited. 

Yes, Kennedy came across as cool, calm, and confident compared to Nixon. But the deciding factor may have been less a matter of image than one of demographics. 

Although the popular vote margin was razor thin, in America’s peculiar way of electing its presidents – the state-by-state Electoral College – Kennedy won by a wide margin: 303-219.  Much of that difference can be traced to where television was and where it wasn’t. 

By November 1960, the forces that had been gathering since the 1930s – urban migration and broadcast saturation – put a much larger portion of the electorate in dense urban areas than sparsely populated rural regions. 

The states Kennedy carried were the great urban and industrial centers where television had become as common as indoor plumbing: New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Michigan, Massachusetts, and even rapidly growing Texas. 

Nixon dominated the rural and sparsely populated states of the Midwest, the Mountain West, and parts of the South – places with fewer TVs and fewer electoral votes. 

In effect, the Electoral College mapped the nation’s shifting technological and cultural landscapes, rewarding the candidate who performed best in the places where the audience was largest. Kennedy didn’t win the presidency because of television alone, but the medium amplified the demographic shifts that delivered him the states that mattered most.

After 1960, there was a long hiatus before the country would witness such a spectacle again. 

In 1964, Lyndon Johnson – cruising toward a landslide – had no incentive to share a stage with Barry Goldwater. And Richard Nixon—still convinced the medium had burned him in 1960 – refused to debate when he ran again in 1968 and 1972. 

Televised presidential debates did not return to the air until 1976, when Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter revived the format that Kennedy and Nixon had pioneered almost a generation before.  

Despite the long hiatus, the Kennedy / Nixon debates were pivotal in American history – four nights when the political, cultural, and technological stars aligned on the nation’s television sets.

In 1960, the visual imperatives of television converged with the demographic trends that had been building for several decades, and the Kennedy-Nixon debates can be seen in retrospect as the moment when American politics shifted from substance to style. 

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Got an hour to spare? Here’s that whole first debate – September 26, 1960.

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¹ Television was used only minimally during the 1948 presidential election. There were fewer than 200,000 sets, concentrated mostly in a handful of major cities. The Truman campaign managed a small milestone when parts of the Democratic National Convention were televised live from Philadelphia. Truman’s acceptance speech reached a tiny but fascinated audience, and the Republican convention received similar treatment. But beyond these symbolic moments, the 1948 campaign still belonged entirely to newspapers, radio, and the whistle-stop train tour.

² The most famous debate in American politics prior to 1960 – the Lincoln–Douglas debates of 1858 – were not between presidential contenders.  Republican Abraham Lincoln and Democrat Stephen A. Douglas were candidates for the U.S. Senate from Illinois.

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[milestone_featured]

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September 7, 2027, will mark 100 years from the day when electronic television was invented.  To generate interest in the Centennial,  this website and accompanying podcast are 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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By the end of the 1950s, American households were about as likely to have a television set as they were to have hot and cold running water – the difference being that TV viewers spent a lot more time gazing into the phosphor-lit vacuum than they spent cooking, dishwashing, bathing or flushing their toilets.  

Nielsen and other industry sources estimated that by 1958, American households were watching roughly 4-5 hours of television every day – the equivalent of more than one day per week.  

Around the world, the numbers were smaller but growing exponentially. Britain, Canada, France, West Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union had all moved beyond their cautious postwar experiments. In many countries, TV penetration exceeded the 10% that some considered the threshold between a luxury and a necessity. 

The medium that had spent the 1930s in laboratories and the 1940s in limbo was, by the end of the 1950s, the command center of a new kind of mass culture. The growth statistics describe a planet rapidly adapting to a collective consciousness – and billions of individual brains being quietly rewired to absorb a relentless bombardment of visual stimuli.

In this context, the years 1958 and 1959 produced several milestones that, taken together, recall a two-year stretch when television – now a fixture in the world’s living rooms – began to find its own bearings and blaze new trails. And, as much of the world was just beginning to tune in, American producers were forging the template for what television would look and sound like.

Television Discovers “Cool”

One way to understand 1958 is to see it as the year when prime-time television began to both reflect and dictate the style of the period 

Three programs in particular—The Rifleman, 77 Sunset Strip, and Peter Gunn—premiered within months of each other.  Each represented a different facet of television finding its own forms, learning to look and sound like the postwar world rather than an extension of pre-war radio.

The Rifleman brought textured narrative layers to the well-worn Western. The father-son dynamic between Lucas and Mark McCain added emotional shading to a genre that had grown stale with cookie-cutter archetypes.

77 Sunset Strip embraced the glamorous contradictions of late 50s chrome-tail-fins Los Angeles, giving primetime its first weekly taste of Hollywood noir. Efrem Zimbalist Jr. anchored the series as Stuart Bailey, the cool, unflappable private detective.  Edd Byrnes, playing Gerald “Kookie” Kookson III, the comb-waving parking lot attendant at Dino’s Lodge, became the show’s breakout youth icon.

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The cold open and titles from the first season of Peter Gunn

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And then there was Peter Gunn, which may be the purest expression of television’s mid-century awakening. Created by Blake Edwards and scored by Henry Mancini, Peter Gunn brought a new level of polish to the small screen. Mancini’s jazz themes announced something different: the series that didn’t simply borrow atmosphere from the movies—it imported a cinematic sensibility into a television format still dominated by stage-bound sets and radio-style blocking.

In shows like these, television revealed a fresh capacity for sophistication. After a decade of conventional Westerns, sitcoms, and live-play adaptations, here was something sleek and modern. 

You Have Entered The Twilight Zone 

If 1958 was the year television found its style, then 1959 was the year it discovered its twentieth-century imagination by slipping into Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone.

Rod Serling was a disaffected veteran of the TV trenches. Before The Twilight Zone, he had earned the dubious distinction of being the most honored – and the most censored – writer of television drama in the 1950s.

He established his bona fides as the author of some of the most memorable episodes of television’s “Golden Age” of live drama.  His Requiem for a Heavyweight on CBS’s Playhouse 90 is still regarded as one of the greatest live television dramas ever aired, and earned Serling the first of his six Emmy Awards. He wrote dozens of episodes for shows like Studio One, Lux Video Theatre, and Kraft Television Theatre, often dealing with controversial subjects like race, corruption, war, and abuses of power – which themes often triggered objections from both networks and sponsors. 

By 1958, Serling was at the top of his game, but had grown frustrated with broadcast television. His  biggest clashes weren’t with networks, but with advertisers. For Requiem for a Heavyweight he was required to remove brand names so as not to offend cigarette, beer, and pharmaceutical sponsors. He had to rewrite No Time at All – a labor union story – after a sponsor objected to the depiction of a strike.  And a script he wrote about Emmett Till – the Black teenager murdered in Mississippi in 1955 – was vetoed unless he removed all racial references.

 “The sponsors censor everything,” Serling complained, “but the commercials.” 

Seeking a forum that would let him explore controversial ideas, Serling pitched CBS with a fantasy/sci-fi anthology series. It was a hard sell. Anthologies that didn’t reuse the same sets or locations were expensive. Fantasy was dismissed as “kids’ stuff.” And Serling’s reputation for stirring up controversies made sponsors wary. 

To entice the network, in 1958 Serling wrote The Time Element for Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse as a backdoor pilot.  When it tested extremely well, CBS ordered a limited trial run, knowing they could market a new series “from the Emmy-winning writer of Requiem For A Heavyweight.” 

The network watched nervously when The Twilight Zone premiered on October 2, 1959. The audience response and critical acclaim were so strong that the series was quickly extended. 

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The opening titles of The Twilight Zone – and its unforgettable theme music.

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The series ran a total of 156 episodes on CBS from 1959 to 1964, with Serling himself writing or co-writing more than 90 of them.  

With its anthology format cloaked in speculative fiction, The Twilight Zone did not merely entertain; it startled, provoked, and lingered in the viewers’ imagination. It gave television permission to be philosophical. It gave writers permission to think in original ways. The result was one of the most enduring programs in the history of the medium, and paved the way for similar series: The Outer Limits, Night Gallery and more recently The X-Files and Black Mirror.  

With Rod Serling himself – cigarette in hand – introducing every episode, The Twilight Zone gave a literary quality to a medium often dismissed as mindless and trivial.^⁠1  His presence encouraged layers of fantasy, parable, and science fiction in a weekly exercise of nuance far deeper than anyone expected of the small screen. 

After its run on CBS, the show immediately found continued success in syndication, and continues to run on the CBS-affiliated streaming service Paramount+.  The Twilight Zone is routinely ranked among the most-watched classic series, and remains far more famous now than it ever was during it original run.

To this day, the opening notes of the show’s theme music are mimicked when conversation turns to the weird or inexplicable – even among generations born long after the show ended its initial run. 

The Peacock Spreads Its Feathers 

While the writers and producers stretched the medium in studios and on stages, the scientists and engineers in television’s laboratories and factories were quietly preparing the medium’s next big technical transformation: the all-out pursuit of color. 

In the first years after the NTSC standard was updated, broadcasting in color remained a rarity. When RCA/NBC and Ampex introduced the first practical color-compatible videotape recorder in 1959, the ability to record color electronically set the stage for a full scale push into color TV. 

NBC started using the slogan, “brought to you in living color” in the mid 1950s. In 1956 the network added an animated peacock spreading its tail feathers.  A handful of shows like The Cisco Kid, My Friend Flicka and Sergeant Preston of the Yukon were filmed in color or offered color episodes, but remained the exception. Most regularly scheduled programs continued to be broadcast in black-and-white. 

Anthologies, specials and one-offs didn’t give viewers enough justification to make the costly leap into color. What RCA needed was a spectacle: a program that looked better in color week after week that could entice consumers to invest in RCA color televisions that sold for as much $600 – the equivalent of $6,000 in 2026. 

With no hint of irony, NBC reached for the prize with a Western series called Bonanza.

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The opening title sequence from Bonanza

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Bonanza followed the weekly tribulations of the Cartwrights — widowed patriarch Ben Cartwright, played by Lorne Greene, and his three adult sons, Adam, Hoss, and Little Joe – as they protected their vast Ponderosa ranch amid the moral thickets of the Old West.

NBC focused on Bonanza after producer David Dortort shot the  pilot on 35mm color film. When NBC president Robert Sarnoff saw the saturated footage of wide-open landscapes, brightly lit Victorian interiors, and vivid costumes, he must have thought he was looking at a brochure for RCA color televisions.^⁠2 

When it premiered on September 12, 1959, Bonanza was not only the first hour-long dramatic series broadcast in color, it was the flagship of a whole corporate strategy. The program rewarded households that had already invested in color TVs – and showed everyone else what they were missing. 

When Bonanza went on the air in 1959, there were fewer than 200,000 color receivers in American homes, but annual sales doubled and tripled through the early 1960s as RCA poured millions into marketing and manufacturing. By 1966 – when NBC became the first network to broadcast its entire prime-time lineup in color – RCA’s color-set division was generating more than half of the company’s profits.

Though they were initially reluctant to shoulder the added costs of color, CBS and ABC were compelled to follow NBC’s lead, and converted their prime-time lineups to color as well.  By the late 1960s, most television programming was offered in color.

The combination of falling set prices and a full color schedule on all three networks generated hundreds of millions in annual revenue for RCA – and transformed Robert Sarnoff’s big gamble on color into… well, a true bonanza. 

How About… A Little Scandal? 

By the end of its first full decade, television had become the nation’s nightly ritual, the glowing electronic hearth around which families gathered not only after dinner, but often during.^⁠3  And nothing on the schedule drew larger, more devoted followings than the prime-time quiz shows. 

Programs like The $64,000 Question, Tic-Tac-Dough, and Twenty-One turned seemingly ordinary Americans into instant celebrities possessed of superhuman memory and composure.  

The game shows were popular with sponsors, too.  For household names like Revlon and Geritol, the relatively low production cost made quiz shows the most profitable programming on television. They offered suspense, aspiration, and the reassuring fiction that success awaited any one off the street who could come up with the right answer before the other guy with a buzzer. 

Behind the scenes, the economics of “authenticity” presented unique challenges. Real competition produced unpredictable results that produced nervous sponsors. If a charismatic champion lost too soon, ratings fell. If a new contestant froze on camera, tension evaporated. The pressures of live, sponsor-driven programming created an environment in which the line between contest and performance blurred quickly—and, ultimately, fatally. 

The most egregious example was Twenty-One, produced by the seasoned but ethically elastic team of Barry & Enright. 

The show’s signature device was a pair of “isolation booths” –  fortresses of integrity that shielded contestants from outside cues. Behind the scenes was a very different story. Contestants were advised on topics, given answers, and even coached on facial expressions. The drama looked spontaneous, but it was engineered to maximize suspense.

In 1956 the show found its breakout star: Herbert Stempel, a  Queens postal clerk whose encyclopedic memory made him an unlikely champion.  Though obviously bright, Stempel came through the screen as clumsy and awkward – not the sort of character that sponsors wanted at the top of the ratings. 

Instead, the producers groomed a new contender: Charles Van Doren, a handsome, soft-spoken Columbia University instructor who seemed tailor-made for magazine covers. Stempel was explicitly instructed to lose on a question he knew cold. Van Doren’s rise became a national phenomenon, and Twenty-One garnered its highest ratings. 

The deception might have endured had Stempel remained silent. But after his forced exit, he began telling reporters that the show was rigged. At first he was dismissed as a sore loser. But as other contestants quietly confirmed patterns of coaching and manipulation, the claims gained traction. By 1958 the whispers had become headlines and in 1959 they became the subject of a Congressional investigation.

The decisive moment arrived in November 1959, when Charles Van Doren – after months of public denials and private pressure – appeared before a House subcommittee and admitted that Twenty-One had been rigged throughout his celebrated run. The confession was stunning: the handsome young scholar who had embodied the promise of television now embodied its deceit. NBC cut ties with Van Doren immediately. Columbia University accepted his resignation the same day.

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This short YouTube documentary tells the whole story.

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The collapse of the quiz shows was swift. Sponsors fled and networks purged their schedules. Several states passed laws prohibiting the fixing of contests, and the Federal Communications Commission expanded its oversight. Within eighteen months, the prime-time quiz show had virtually disappeared from the airwaves^⁠4.

Faking Authenticity 

 The quiz show scandals marked the first moment when Americans realized that television could fabricate reality as easily as it projected it.  The medium that had promised transparency and immediacy had instead demonstrated how convincingly it could fake authenticity. 

By the end of the 1950s, television had clearly entered a new era: confident enough to stretch its storytelling muscles in filmed Westerns and sleek urban dramas, imaginative enough to explore moral riddles in The Twilight Zone, and technologically ambitious enough to gamble its future on color. 

But the quiz show scandals made plain that in addition to reflected and illuminated  American life, television could just as easily manipulate it. 

Reality and artifice were never more than a camera angle apart, and the world  of “fake news” that would emerge decades later was not a break with the past but a continuation of conventions  woven into the medium from its earliest, flickering days.

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¹ Rod Serling was an extremely heavy smoker, often burning through four or five packs a day. He frequently appeared with a cigarette in hand during his on-camera introductions for The Twilight Zone, especially in the early seasons. In some episodes he’s holding it, lighting it, or gesturing with it; in others the cigarette is off-camera but the smoke is visible curling up beside him.  Serling died in 1975 after a string of heart attacks at age 50.

² Robert W. Sarnoff (1918–1997) was David Sarnoff’s eldest son.  He rose through the ranks of RCA after World War II, starting in advertising and corporate planning before being appointed president of NBC Television in 1953. Groomed as his father’s successor, he championed aggressive programming growth, early color promotion, and the integration of RCA’s hardware and NBC’s content strategy. By 1965 he had succeeded his father as president (and later chairman) of RCA, presiding over the company during the peak years of its color-television expansion.

³ “Frozen TV dinners” were actually a thing.^⁠ After Thanksgiving 1952, C. A. Swanson & Sons food company found itself stuck with 260 tons of surplus frozen turkey. A salesman, Gerry Thomas, proposed packaging the turkey with sides in a three-compartment, aluminum, oven-ready tray modeled after airline meals. Swanson test-marketed it in 1953 as a “TV Dinner”—complete with a box designed to look like a television set—and sold more than 10 million units the first year.

⁴ The quiz show scandals of the 1950s did not kill the format permanently but it did change the rules under which they operated. During the early 1960s, networks largely abandoned high-stakes, sponsor-controlled, prime-time quiz programs in favor of games produced under stricter network supervision. By the mid-1960s, shows such as Jeopardy! (1964), Let’s Make a Deal (1963), and The Dating Game (1965) helped restore the genre’s credibility. Congress reinforced public confidence by passing amendments to the Communications Act of 1934 in 1960 making it a federal crime to rig or predetermine the outcome of a purported contest of knowledge or skill for broadcast, establishing legal safeguards that remain in force today.

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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 are 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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The Medium Is A Fixture

By 1957, the number of households in the United State had grown to more than 51 million.  Nearly 40 million of those households had invested in at least one television set, making the new medium a fixture for nearly three quarters of the country.  

The typical screen measured 17-to-21 inches and sold for $150 to $200 (about $1,600–$2,100 in 2026 dollars). Fewer than 150,000 color receivers were in use, each costing $500–$600 (or $5,500–$6,500 in 2026).  And average viewing time had risen to four or five hours a day – easily eclipsing both radio listening and newspaper reading.

The Big Three networks – NBC, CBS, and ABC – extended their reach with coaxial cable and microwave relays linking nearly every major city.  The business model was still based on advertising, but the familiar “single sponsor” format behind programs like Texaco Star Theater and Kraft Television Theatre was fading in favor of breaks with commercials from numerous sponsors. 

On the West Coast, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz’s Desilu studios showed the industry that Hollywood production values could translate into weekly series.  Their flagship show, I Love Lucy, was consistently the highest-rated program on the air, along with other popular Desilu productions like Our Miss Brooks and December Bride.  

Hollywood Thaws 

Desilu’s success helped thaw Hollywood’s uneasy alliance with television, and by the mid 1950s all the major studios were feeding the network’s voracious appetite for fresh programs.  Warner Bros. went straight to the small screen in 1955 with Cheyenne, the first hour-long Western series for television, followed by Maverick in 1957.  These shows were made on film at the Burbank lot and distributed through ABC, creating the template for the “studio television” model that would dominate TV for decades. 

Columbia’s Screen Gems turned out a steady slate of family and adventure series like Father Knows Best, Rin Tin Tin, Circus Boy, and The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok, while also mining the vaults to fill local TV station schedules with syndicated film anthologies like Adventure Theater, and Thrillerama Theater.   MGM and Paramount also licensed their theatrical features to television. 

At the other end of the budget spectrum, quiz shows were as popular with audiences as they were cost effective. Shows like The $64,000 Question on CBS reached a third of TV households every week.  Lighthearted, banter-filled panel shows like What’s My Line and To Tell The Truth – both on CBS – were equally popular primetime fare. 

The audience for television was vast and diverse.  But it is unlikely that anybody in the audience at home recognized the man who invented the appliance in their living room when he made his one and only television appearance on the CBS panel show, I’ve Got A Secret, on June 3, 1957.

When host Garry Moore beckoned his next contestant to the stage, a gaunt man with a high forehead and wavy-but-receding hair ambled out from behind the curtain. It had been nearly 20 years since Philo Farnsworth had been in the limelight, but the host had to refrain from using his guest’s actual name. 

Dr. X

“We’re not going to identify this contestant,” Moore told panelists Bill Cullen, Jayne Meadows, Henry Morgan, and Faye Emerson, “because to identify him would tip off his secret. We will call him simply Dr X. Now, Doctor, if you will whisper your secret to me, we will show it at the same time to the folks out there.”

 “Dr. X” leans into Garry Moore and the screen shows, “I invented electronic television.”

The studio audience gasps slightly. 

Moore then adds, “Now, wait a minute. There is even more.”

“Dr. X” leans in again, and the audience sees “In 1922, when I was 14 years old.”  

The audience responds with more gasps and applause. 

To get the panelists off in the right direction, Moore instructs them that Dr. X’s secret  “concerns something that he did…” and hands the first round of questions off to Bill Cullen. After discerning that the secret involves some kind of machine, Cullen asks, “Is this some kind of a machine that might be painful when it’s used?”

To which Dr. X wryly replies, “Yes, sometimes it’s most painful.”

The questioning is handed off to Jayne Meadows, who determines that Dr. X works in some kind of laboratory  and then inexplicably asks, “Would this remotely or in any way be connected with psychiatric cases?”

The audience snickers, and Garry Moore gets a full laugh when he says, “In very rare interest instances it’s been known to cause a few.”

Even Dr. X gets a good laugh out of that one. 

Henry Morgan asks Dr. X if he’s a dentist. 

Poor Faye Emerson doesn’t even get a chance before Moore cuts off the game. 

“I think you fellas have led yourself down the garden path,” Moore says.  “Let’s cut them off…  I’ll forfeit the money and tell you that… this is the famous Dr. Philo T. Farnsworth, who invented electronic television.”

Yup.  The famous Dr. Philo T. Farnsworth. So famous that none of the four people working in the industry his invention made possible has any idea who he is. 

Are You Sorry?

After the big reveal, light hearted banter ensues.

Henry Morgan asks, “Doctor, truthfully…. are you sorry?”  

Farnsworth says, “No,” but Garry Moore chimes in, “I asked him the same question. He said, ‘Sometimes.'”  

Moore asks Farnsworth to describe what he invented. 

Farnsworth explains that “there had been attempts to devise a television system using mechanical discs and rotating mirrors…” and that his contribution was “to take out all the moving parts and make the thing entirely electronic. And that was the concept that I had when I was just a freshman in high school.”^⁠1

Moore continues, “He was the one who put electronics into television, which makes it possible for us to have whatever it is that we have now.”

Garry Moore then takes the party line, noting that “as the machines developed, there were other people who made contributions…” and asks, “How many patents do you hold, Sir?”

And Farnsworth replies, “Something in excess of 165 American patents.” 

When Moore asks, “What are you working on now?” 

Farnsworth answers by describing what is now known as High Definition Television (HDTV).  By making better use of bandwidth, he explains, “we can eventually get in excess of 2000 lines instead of [the] 525” that the NTSC adopted in 1941^⁠2. He adds that this, “will make for a much sharper picture,” – effectively predicting in 1957 the technology that would not become standard until the late 1990s.

What’s Next?

He also mentions, almost in passing, that he’s been thinking about “taming of the H-bomb – the hydrogen fusion problem.”  

As one does. 

At which point the emcee does his job. “Doctor Farnsworth,” Moore concludes, “we could talk for many hours, but unfortunately, television being what it is, it’s your baby, and we’re out of time.”

Garry Moore then hands Philo T. Farnsworth a carton of Winstons, $80 cash, and offers “our eternal gratitude. I’d be out of work if it weren’t for you.”

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The entire Farnsworth appearance on I’ve Got A Secret is on YouTube.

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¹ Two points of clarification: 

1. The Countdown is focused on September 7, 1927, the date that Farnsworth’s invention was first successfully demonstrated on a work bench.  But to inventors, the conception – when the idea first occurs – is considered the moment of invention.  The first successful test is considered “reduction to practice” of the original idea. 

2. Farnsworth’s inspiration came sometime in the summer of 1921, when he was 14 years old.  He turned 15 on August 19 of that year.  So it is plausible that he was 14 when he got the idea, but he would have been 15 in the winter or spring of of  1922 when he first sketched it out for his high school science teacher.

² The adoption of the “NTSC” standard of 525 lines per frame, 30 frames per second, and six megahertz per channel is covered in Milestone #92, Standards.

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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 are 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 the 1950s, the relationship between the emerging television industry and the established motion picture industry was a contested landscape of shared foundations and competing interests. 

On the one hand, Hollywood had been producing motion pictures for more than half a century. On the other hand, the easy availability of similar entertainment in every living room threatened the industry’s business model, especially its nationwide network of movie theaters.  

Some of the earliest experiments with mechanical television in the 1920s drew directly from motion picture technology. Among them, the “Radiovisor” contraptions demonstrated in the mid-1920s by C. Francis Jenkins drew on his extensive contributions to cinema projection technologies. 

Once the principle of electronic video had been proven, Farnsworth, too, turned to motion pictures to get past the Image Dissector’s crude beginnings.  

Out Of The Ashes 

Just a few weeks after his heralded demonstration for the press in early September, 1928, ^⁠1Farnsworth’s San Francisco laboratory was extensively damaged by fire. Tragedy turned into opportunity when insurance covered the losses, and the lab gang set about building entirely new equipment.  

The reset gave Farnsworth a chance to address critical engineering issues. But before he could measure any progress, he needed an image source with more motion and detail than geometric shapes painted on glass slides.  They tried televising live human subjects, but the extremely hot lights still required to render any picture at all prevented the use of live models for more than a few seconds. They had to come up with something else.

An entry in the lab journals from a few months after the fire reports: “Transmission of motion pictures by electrovision attained by Rutherford.” In other words, lab gang veteran Tobe Rutherford had developed what is now known as a “film chain,” a device for displaying motion pictures on television. As one observer wryly put it, that  just meant “they bought an old movie projector, got it working, and focused the projection on an Image Dissector.”

Mickey and Mary 

One of the first films that the lab gang ran through their projector was a loop from Walt Disney’s Steamboat Willie – the debut of a character named Mickey Mouse.  But their favorite footage was a clip of Mary Pickford, “America’s Sweetheart,” in a scene from The Taming of the Shrew. One of Farnsworth’s colleagues noted that, “Mary Pickford combed her hair at least a million times for the benefit of science and the development of television.” As the details in Miss Pickford’s features were gradually refined, the team could see much more clearly the obstacles that remained on the path toward producing a commercially viable television picture.

The tenuous dance between film and television was vividly illustrated when that same Mary Pickford visited Farnsworth’s laboratory in early 1930.  

In the 1920s, Pickford, her husband Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, and others had joined forces as United Artists – their answer to the iron grip that major studios like Paramount and Universal held on both production and exhibition. United Artists was established to give the talent in Hollywood – the  actors, directors, and producers – more control over their own films and profits, and to keep a wary eye out for any new developments that might impact the industry. Once television had gone “all electronic,” it was obvious it was going to have just such an impact. 

During a visit to San Francisco early in 1930, Pickford, Fairbanks and United Artists president Joseph Schenk expressed interest in seeing the electronic marvel at 202 Green Street. As Pem Farnsworth later recalled, “If they were going to be put out of business, they wanted to be part of the act that was coming in.”

Over the next two decades, the film industry’s curiosity about its potential rival waxed and waned.

New Realities 

Then, in 1948, the Paramount consent decree upended the old order, forcing the studios to divest their theater  chains.^⁠2  As box-office receipts slipped and TV ownership surged, the studios were compelled to cast a wary eye toward the glowing rectangles taking over America’s living rooms.

Necessity finally forced Hollywood to adapt.  The first to crossover was Walt Disney, when he produced One Hour in Wonderland, a Christmas special on NBC that doubled as a preview for Alice in Wonderland in 1948^⁠3.  Columbia, Republic, and Paramount tentatively invested in TV production or station ownership.  And veteran cinematographer Karl Freund was instrumental in the development of  DesiLu Studios’ three-camera film system that revolutionized sitcom production^⁠4. 

Still, Hollywood’s old guard clung doggedly to their dismissal of television as a lesser art form, a proletarian carnival of novelty acts, sports, and the occasional live drama – certainly not a suitable venue for any of Hollywood’s theatrical spectacles.

The tide finally turned on November 3, 1956, when CBS aired The Wizard of Oz as part of its Ford Star Jubilee series.  MGM originally licensed the 1939 classic for one night after trimming it slightly to fit a 100-minute slot (with commercials).  Bert Lahr – the Cowardly Lion himself – introduced the film, and Judy Garland’s daughter Liza Minnelli appeared in a live segment afterward. 

Risks and Rewards 

At a time when only a handful of households owned color TVs, few could see the film’s transition from sepia Kansas to Technicolor Oz. But even in shades of grey, audiences discovered the magic. Oz became part of the national mythology, and “We’re not in Kansas anymore” became part of the national lexicon. 

MGM sold the television rights for The Wizard of Oz to CBS for a flat fee – reportedly around $225,000 for that initial 1956 telecast.  That was an enormous sum – roughly $2.5 million in 2026 dollars – for what was a considerable gamble for all concerned.

For MGM, the risk was putting one of its cinematic crown jewels on the small screen. 

For CBS, it was spending such an enormous sum for a single broadcast. 

But the gamble paid in ways that neither could have imagined. 

CBS had a willing partner in the Ford Motor Company, who underwrote the telecast to the tune of more than $3 million –  $35 million in 2026 dollars.  For their expenditure, Ford reached an audience of more than 35 million viewers with commercials for its 1957 line of Thunderbirds, Fairlanes and Rancheros. CBS profited handsomely from the arrangement.  And MGM found a lucrative new market for its classic film library. 

For many Americans, this was the first time they had seen The Wizard of Oz since it stopped showing in theaters seventeen years before.  For the generation born after the war – who had never seen the film in theaters – the telecast soon became an annual ritual. 

After that initial airing in 1956, CBS arranged to rebroadcast Oz again in 1959, and then again every year until 1967.  NBC outbid CBS for the license in 1968 and continued the tradition through the early 1970s, when CBS regained the rights and aired it annually again from 1976 through 1998. 

For television, The Wizard of Oz  helped establish the home “movie night” that evolved into network staples like NBCs Saturday Night at the Movies and ABC’s Movie Of The Week.  For Hollywood, Oz demonstrated that a major studio feature could find a new life and a vast new audience through television. 

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¹ The Countdown begins with #100 Black Light Machine  and the press coverage after Farnsworth’s first public demonstration of electronic television in San Francisco on September 3, 1928.

² The Paramount consent decree of 1948 was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that ended the major Hollywood studios’ long-standing monopoly over film production, distribution, and exhibition. The ruling required the “Big Five” studios—Paramount, MGM, Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, and RKO—to divest ownership of their theater chains and cease anti-competitive practices such as block booking and fixed pricing. This effectively dismantled the vertically integrated studio system that had dominated Hollywood since the 1920s.

³ Disney’s initial foray into television is covered in Milestone #74, Money Isn’t Everything.

⁴ The formation of Desilu and the evolution of the 3-camera system used to film I Love Lucy is covered in Milestone #72, Lucy, You Got Some ‘Spainin’ To Do!

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[milestone_featured]

_______________________

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 are 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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At least two Russian names figure prominently in the early history of television:  Boris Rosing, who proposed an all-electronic approach to television and experimented with cathode ray tube receivers in 1907, and Rosing’s protege Vladimir Zworykin, who brought those ideas to the United States in 1921.

Another Russian

But there is one other far less heralded Russian immigrant who had an equally undeniable impact on television in the 1950s and who, not coincidentally, shares his lineage with Rosing and Zworykin. 

Alexander M. Poniatoff was born March 25, 1892, in Kazan, on the Volga River in what was then the Russian Empire. He studied at the Imperial Institute of Technology in St. Petersburg – the same institution where Zworykin studied under Rosing – where he earned his certifications in electrical and mechanical engineering. 

Like Zworykin, Poniatoff fled Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, finding his way to the United States in 1927. In San Francisco, he worked for General Electric before founding the Ampex Corporation in 1944 – naming it from his initials A.M.P. and adding the ‘ex’ for excellence.

First, Just Audio… 

If you have ever seen footage of “live” television shows from the 1940s or early 50s (as opposed to programs originally produced on film like I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners) , then what you are seeing is known as “kinescopes” – footage filmed with a 16mm camera aimed at a cathode ray tube monitor.^⁠1  There was no direct way to record video until Alexander Poniatoff’s company attacked the problem.   

What the television industry needed was a video version of the kind of recording devices that were readily available for audio by the 1950s. 

Recording sound began in 1877 when Thomas Edison read the poem “Mary Had A Little Lamb” while turning a crank on a new invention he called the “Phonograph.” As the crank turned, a cylinder coated with tin foil was etched with fluctuations from a needle attached to the microphone Edison spoke into.  When he replaced the microphone with a speaker cone, the poem was heard back from the cylinder. 

Watch Spencer Tracy  recreate the invention of the Phonograph

Ten years later, in 1887, the German-born American inventor Emile Berliner took the Edison concept a step further with a flat disk rather than a cylinder in a device he called the Gramophone.^⁠2 

And In 1898, the Danish engineer Valdemar Poulsen introduced the Telegraphone, which recorded sound magnetically on steel wire. 

The next big breakthrough appeared in the 1930s, when the German-Austrian engineer Fritz Pfleumer, developed the Magnetophon, which recorded sound on plastic tape coated with iron oxide powder instead of wire.  The German army used Magnetophon technology extensively during World War II.

After the war, U.S. Army Signal Corps engineer Jack Mullin returned from Germany with two captured Magnetophon recorders and 50 reels of tape. He rebuilt and started to demonstrate the units in 1946. 

One broadcaster who was impressed by Mullin’s demos was Bing Crosby, who disliked performing live radio broadcasts.  Crosby had a running feud going with NBC over his insistence on using transcription disks for his broadcasts, which the network insisted delivered inferior sound quality.  When Crosby heard that the audio quality from Mullin’s Magnetophon was indistinguishable from live over-the-auir, he figured his problem was solved. 

At first Crosby hired Mullin to record his radio show with the captured and restored German machines.  Then he joined forces with a still-tiny company in California called Ampex.  Crosby’s investment and endorsement was enough for Alexander Poniatoff’s engineers to develop the Model 200 – the first professional-quality American tape recorder, and deliver the first production units to Bing Crosby in 1948.

Success in audio recording provided the expertise and capital for Ampex to make a run at video recording – which presents monumental challenges of bandwidth and storage.  

A high-fidelity audio recording can be easily stored on just a quarter inch of magnetic tape. But at 525-lines-per frame and 30-frames-per-second, a video signal requires orders of magnitude more capacity any audio tape could handle.

All of the engineering challenges boiled down to one governing factor: speed:  Audiotape recorders rely on a single, fixed, magnetic head to encode sound by magnetically rearranging the iron oxide particles adhered to the plastic tape. But in order for a single, fixed head to work with a video recorder, the tape would have to fly by the head at something approaching a measurable fraction of the speed of light. 

…Then Video 

A team of engineers at Ampex came up with a solution. 

First, project leader Charles Ginsburg, calculated in 1952 that with a single fixed head, the tape would need to move at more than a thousand inches per second. 

Then two other engineers, Shelby Henderson and Charles Anderson, proposed a novel alternative: keep the tape running at a conventional 15 inches per second, but spin multiple heads across it with a rotating drum.  Another young engineer fresh out of Stanford, Ray Dolby, helped design the electronics and servo systems that made the spinning-head system workable.^⁠3

The Ampex team developed a system called “quadraplex.” The ingenious approach started with a drum that spun at 14,400 rpm (240 revolutions per second) to spin four heads perpendicular to 2-inch-wide tape that could turn past the drum at a manageable 15 inches per second.

The world’s first videotape recorder, the  Ampex VRX-1000  was unveiled on April 14, 1956, at the Chicago convention of the National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters (NARTB, now just the NAB). 

Rumors had been circulating through the industry that Ampex was working on “something magnetic,” but almost no one outside the company knew that Ampex had cracked the code,

The VRX-1000 was a behemoth the size of a large refrigerator laid on its side and weighed more than half a ton. It used 2-inch-wide magnetic tape on a 14-inch reel capable of recording an hour of both video and audio. 

To demonstrate their new machine, Ampex engineers played back a prerecording of the previous day’s session. The picture quality was astonishing—clear, steady, and virtually indistinguishable from a live video camera feed.  

With hardly a moment’s notice, the kinescope film recording of television shows was tossed into the bin of obsolescence. 

When the playback demonstration ended, hundreds of broadcasters, including executives and engineers from RCA, NBC, CBS and ABC, rose to their feet in an ovation that lasted nearly a minute. 

Ampex founder and CEO Alexander Poniatoff stood by, beaming proudly with the team led by Charles Ginsburg, along with Alex Maxey, Fred Pfost, Shelby Henderson, and Charles Anderson – the core engineers who had perfected the machine just weeks earlier. Fred Pfost, who actually pressed the “Play” button, said it was “the greatest day of my life.” ‘

Later that day, CBS vice president Bill Lodge told reporters and colleagues, “Gentlemen, this changes everything.”

As soon as they went on sale later that year, NBC, CBS and ABC purchased the first production units for $45,000 – roughly half-a-milliom in 2026 dollars.  

Time-Shifting

Just a few months after the NAB unveiling, CBS and NBC were using the Ampex machines to time-shift Douglas Edwards and the News and Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts to the West Coast.^⁠4 The next year, NBC’s Truth or Consequences was the first show aired in all U.S. time zones from prerecorded videotape. Within a year, “quad” was the de facto standard for time-zone delay, and over the ensuing decade “recorded live” became as common as programs produced on film. 

The VRX-1000 was an unquestionable breakthrough in TV technology. It was also a bit of a bear to operate.  Before recording or playback, operators took several minutes to calibrate azimuth, guide positions, head currents, servos, and other circuits. And the guts of the VRX-1000 relied on nearly two hundred hot vacuum tubes, which prompted one early operator to joke that the machine was “half recorder, half space heater.”

Video recording became standard operating procedure.  When Jack Paar took over from Steve Allen in 1957, NBC’s The Tonight Show began recording for rebroadcast to the West Coast.  CBS began videotaping selected episodes of its prestigious Playhouse 90, starting with The Miracle Worker in 1957. Soap operas, game shows and variety shows all shifted from “live” to pre-recorded by the mid 1960s.  

The 2″ quadruplex format dominated video recording for almost 20 years. Starting in the mid 1970s the industry turned toward  “helical scan” recorders, which used just two recording heads situated 180º apart that spun across the tape horizontally instead of vertically.  By then solid state circuits  (transistors and integrated circuits) had mostly replaced vacuum tubes and machines like videotape recorders became much more compact and reliable. ^⁠5

A New Medium

In the 1970s, videotape had become a medium in its own right, and producers began to explore its unique ability to emulate the immediacy of “live” television for narrative drama.

Trailer for Missiles of October

Over two nights in October, 1974, ABC broadcast what is widely considered the first “motion picture for television produced on videotape.” The Missiles of October was a dramatization of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 starring William Devane as John F. Kennedy and Martin Sheen as Robert Kennedy.  Two years later PBS aired The Adams Chronicles for the United States’ Bicentennial. Chronicles borrowed many set design, lighting, and editing techniques from film, but producing station WGBH Boston heralded the program explicitly as “a motion picture for television recorded on videotape.”

Alexander Poniatoff was not directly involved in the day-to-day engineering of Ampex’s pioneering video recorders, but he was the company’s president and guiding light. He fostered the creative environment in which skilled engineers like Ginsburg, Henderson, and Dolby could take on the sort of ambitious, costly risks it took to produce the first videotape recorder.  Not even the mighty RCA could get into manufacturing video recorders until it reluctantly licensed the quadruplex patents from Ampex in 1957. 

Video recording has become one of the staples of the modern world, as ubiquitous as the screens themselves.  The first machines were huge and complex, but now it’s all digital, and everybody with a smartphone has the equivalent of an Ampex VRX-1000 in their pocket. 

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¹ The term “kinescope” is the name RCA came up with ca. 1929 for Zworykin’s somewhat improved version of the cathode ray tube.

² Thomas Edison was the first to record sound with a tinfoil-covered, cylinder-based device he called the “phonograph” in 1877.  Ten years later in 1887, German-American Emile Berliner invented the gramophone, which introduced a lateral groove on a flat disc. Berliner joined forces with Eldridge Reeves Johnson in 1901 to form the Victor Talking Machine Company, which quickly became the dominant U.S. phonograph and record company.  The annual awards for achievement in music are called “The Grammys” after Berliner’s gramophone.  Imagine what they’d be called if they’d been named for Edison’s phonograph.

³ If the name Ray Dolby sounds familiar, that’s because after earning  a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Cambridge, he founded a company called Dolby Laboratories in London in 1965.  His company introduced Dolby Noise Reduction (1966), which revolutionized magnetic tape recording, followed by innovations such as Dolby Stereo for film soundtracks and Dolby Surround and Dolby Digital—technologies that defined high-fidelity audio in cinema, music, and home entertainment for decades.  Now you can tie his name into the beginnings of video recording, too.

⁴ CBS made broadcast history when they replayed ‘The Evening News With Douglas Edwards’ to the west coast on November 30, 1956.  After recording the live feed from the network line from New York at 4 p.m. Pacific time, the program was played back three hours later. 

(source: eyesofageneration.com)

⁵ Left out of this entire narrative is the transistor, the first “solid state” device that began to replace vacuum tubes after its invention in 1948.  It is indisputable that the introduction of the transistor transformed the entire field of electronics, leading to the development of integrated circuits, microprocessors, and all of the digital technologies in the world today.  Somebody else can write that book.

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[milestone_featured]

_______________________

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 are 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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As we have worked our way through the evolution of television and its impact on the world, we have talked mostly about the technology and the earliest forms of programming.  

Today we’re going to talk about the actual viewing experience. 

By the mid-1960s In the U.S., there were somewhere between 35-50 million television sets in American homes, representing between 75 and 80% of total households.  

In Britain, where regular programming  had been introduced several years before the U.S., some six million sets represented less than 40% of total households.^⁠1  Service expanded slowly beyond London after the war, just reaching the Midlands in February of 1956 and Northern England in May. A large portion of the U.K.  still had no television at all.

Screen sizes varied from 7″ measured diagonally to 21″, and in the U.S. fewer than 25,000 of those nearly 40 million televisions were in color, which had been introduced just two years earlier.  That $1,000 price tag for a 19″ color set still represented nearly a whole year’s salary for the average worker, leaving color mostly a curiosity in department store windows. 

The typical television in the mid 1950s was equipped with a dial that could only tune into twelve channels^⁠2, and too often even that was easier said than done.  You have to be of a certain age to remember rooftop antennas, or all the hacks homeowners used to improve TV reception, like tin foil wrapped around the tips of set-top rabbit ears. 

Early television broadcasting was notorious for interference between stations. That meant that empty channels had to separate the channels you could get, which typically meant that only three to five channels were available in any given metropolitan area – usually the three national network affiliates and a couple of local stations.  

To further avoid interference between adjacent channels, those in-between channels were  relegated to other, distant markets.  For example, in the nation’s largest market, New York City, television was broadcast on channels 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11 and 13.  Channels 3, 6, 8, 10 and 12 were assigned to stations in Philadelphia.  If your father was clever enough to pick up a Philadelphia station in New York, then he was probably an electrical engineer with a degree from MIT. 

During the mid-1950s, television service spread slowly around the rest of the world.  For those countries that did have the new medium, the content covered the now familiar spectrum of sitcoms, variety shows, quiz shows, westerns, police and crime shows, children’s and family programming, and news and documentaries. 

But wherever in the world televisions could be found, regardless of nationality or content, the viewing experience had one thing in common:  the television sat on one side of the room and was watched from a couch or chair on the other side of the room. That meant that if you wanted to change the channel,  somebody had to get out of their seat, cross the room, and twist a knob. 

Then you futzed with the antenna to get a decent picture.  And if the sound wasn’t loud enough when you returned to your seat? Well, up you go again. 

Not much changed until the fall of 1956, when Zenith introduced the first invention that truly altered the viewing experience: the Space Command – the first practical TV remote control. 

The Zenith Radio Corporation – like RCA – traced its roots to the dawn of radio. The company was started as the Chicago Radio Labs in 1918 by two radio enthusiasts, Ralph Matthews and Karl Hassel, who built their first products on a kitchen table.  Hassel operated an amateur station with the call sign 9ZN.  A now-unknown employee playfully added “ith” to the the call sign, giving the fledgling company its first brand name: Z-Nith

In 1921 Matthews and Hassel teamed up with Eugene McDonald, a flamboyant, self-made millionaire and Navy veteran who was known as “The Commander.”  McDonald’s flair for innovation and energetic style eventually found their way  into the company’s products and advertising. 

With “Commander”  McDonald at the helm, Zenith grew into one of America’s leading manufacturers of consumer electronics like portable radios, FM stereo systems, and early color TVs. When the company took the plunge into television in the early 1950s, it staked its reputation on a quest for convenience as well as performance, which led Zenith to develop the first TV remotes. 

The Space Command was not the company’s first attempt to offer a remote.  As early as 1950, Zenith offered the Lazy Bones remote, a wired device that let users turn the TV on and off and change channels. While innovative for its time, the Lazy Bones was tied to an electrical cord – both unsightly and potentially hazardous –  between the controller and the TV.  

In 1955, Zenith tried again with the Flash-Matic,^⁠3 which used a beam of light aimed at photocells on the TV – but that design didn’t work well in bright rooms and could even be confused by sunlight.

In June of 1956, Zenith’s assistant director of research, Dr. Robert Adler, filed a patent for a remote control that used ultrasonic sound waves – mechanically generated signals rather than wired or optical signals – to transmit commands.  

Once it was offered to the public as part of Zenith’s premium line of new TVs in the fall of 1956, the ultrasonic Space Command quickly became the first widely used wireless TV remote control. It allowed viewers to change channels and adjust the volume with a satisfying metallic “click” from aluminum rods inside the remote  – a sound so iconic that the early remotes became known as “clickers.”

Adler’s elegant design was quickly integrated into high-end Zenith models, paving the way for a new fixture in American homes.  In the early 1980s, the industry shifted from ultrasonic remotes to infrared (IR), which enabled whole new levels of control, convenience and affordability. With IR, remotes became ubiquitous to the point that every American household had a junk drawer full of them.

As the remote control moved from novelty to standard feature, the culture of television viewing shifted in profound ways. Viewers could change channels, change the volume, and turn the power on and off without leaving the couch. 

And, as one TV commercial noted without irony, the remote would “shut off the sound of loud, annoying TV commercials.”   

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A 1972 commercial for the Zenith Space Command, the gizmo that could turn off the sound of TV commercials.

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This new level of convenience naturally lent itself to satire, which eventually became part of the vernacular. 

On July 15, 1976, California counter-culture humorist Tom Iacino called his friend, the cartoonist Robert Armstrong.  Iacino and Armstrong were part of a humor club called the “Boob Tubers,” whose mission was to sit on a couch, watch TV and eat junk food.  So when Armstrong’s girlfriend answered the phone, Iacino said, “Hey, is the couch potato there?” She looked at Armstrong sitting on the couch and started laughing.

When the laughing stopped Iacino and Armstrong collaborated to turn the idea into a lumpy potato-on-a-sofa with The Potato Press, an underground newsletter. With comics and merchandise, they made “Couch Potatoes” a tongue-in-cheek social club that celebrated watching TV as its own peculiar art form.

The TV remote has come a long way since Zenith’s Lazy Bones, Flash-matic and Space Command. With the proliferation of new technologies like WiFi and Bluetooth, by the 21^st century the  average home had upwards of a half-dozen remote controls.  Today’s smart-TV ecosystems allow voice control, motion control, and integration with home-automation systems like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s HomeKit. 

The television remote introduced a profound shift in how viewers interacted with the screen. Like Winky Dink^⁠4 in 1953, the introduction of the Space Command in 1956 foreshadowed the ultimate direction that television would take and the role video would come to play in modern life: not just a passive, sit-back-and-watch experience but a fully interactive environment that would eventually integrate into almost every aspect of daily existence. 

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Former Zenith engineer Robert Adler discusses the invention of the Space Command as part of the TV Academy Foundation’s Interviews series.

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¹ Regular television service was introduced in London in 1936, as  covered in Milestone #95; RCA introduced limited service to the public in 1936, as covered in Milestone #94.  Television in both countries was suspended during World War II and resumed in 1946.

² Those 12 original channels occupied a portion of the spectrum known as Very High Frequency (VHF), from 54 to 216 MHz. In 1952, the FCC expanded the television spectrum to include another 70 channels in the Ultra High Frequency (UHF) range, from 470 to 890 MHz. Most television sets of the 1950s lacked UHF tuners, so viewers who wanted UHF stations needed a separate converter box – but those signals were notoriously weak and easily lost to distance, terrain, or even bad weather.

After the passage of the All-Channel Receiver Act of 1962, manufacturers were required to include UHF tuners in all new sets, leading to gradual growth through the 1960s and ’70s. Still, VHF stations dominated ratings and advertising. By the time UHF gained technical parity in the 1980s, cable television had already made the distinction between VHF and UHF largely irrelevant. A few UHF pioneers – most notably Chicago’s WGN and Atlanta’s WTCG (later WTBS) garnered large national audiences once their signals were distributed by cable.

³ Caption: Flash-Matic, was invented by Eugene J. Polley.

⁴ Winky Dink – the first ‘interactive” television experience, is covered in Milestone #66.

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