100YearsOfTV

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September 7, 2027 will mark 100 years from the day when electronic television made its first appearance on Earth.  To generate interest in the Centennial,  this website and accompanying podcast 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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Like most of his colleagues in the motion picture business after the war, Walt Disney was wary of the impact that the small, new screen was going to have on the big, old one.  

Disney’s career began in the early 1920s, creating ads and title cards for the Kansas City Film Ad Company.  

Walt took a reel of unfinished animation to Hollywood in 1923. With his brother Roy, he formed the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio and enjoyed some early success with The Alice Comedies, a series that combined live action with animation^⁠1.  In 1927, the rechristened  Walt Disney Studios accepted a commission from Universal Pictures to create their first animated character: Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.

In 1927 and ’28, Walt Disney Studios churned out 26 Oswald cartoons for producer Charles Mintz at Universal.  When the Disney brothers discovered that Mintz had locked up all the rights to the Oswald character, Walt started sketching a new character that would be entirely his own. Only this time, instead of a rabbit, Walt started drawing a mouse. 

Mickey Mouse made his debut as Steamboat Willie on November 18, 1928, at the Colony Theatre in New York City.  The eight-minute cartoon not only introduced one of the world’s most enduring characters, it was also the first cartoon with sound and music synchronized to the picture – just a year after Al Jolson broke the cinema sound barrier in The Jazz Singer.

Just as synchronized sound made Steamboat Willie a breakthrough in the art of animation, Mickey Mouse was also cast in an unheralded role in another new art: television. 

By the time Steamboat Willie debuted, it had been more than a year since Philo Farnsworth had proven the essential principles of electronic video in his lab at 202 Green Street in San Francisco. 

Sometime in 1929, Farnsworth and his “lab gang” rigged a motion picture projector to an Image Dissector, building what was likely the first “film chain” to convert motion pictures to television. Steamboat Willie  served as one of the film loops that ran continuously through the new contraption as the lab gang experimented with the circuits and tubes. 

Walt Disney had no idea of the role his first Mickey Mouse cartoon played in the development of television, but by 1950, he had decisions to make about how the new medium was going to fit into his expanding entertainment empire.  He probably  regarded television with the same suspicion as most Hollywood moguls: as a threat to their box office, giving away for free what people should be buying tickets for.

In 1950, Walt Disney Studios was putting the finishing touches on its latest release, Alice In Wonderland – the studio’s 13th animated feature, based on Lewis Carroll’s 1865 children’s book.  The film was scheduled for theatrical release in the summer of 1951 when Walt decided it was time to put a cautious toe in the electronic waters of television.  

Disney chose to explore TV first as a promotional tool. Alice was already proving to be the most ambitious and expensive animation Disney had ever produced. Its budget more than doubled the $1.5 million cost of his previous biggest gamble, 1939’s Snow White. 

The word “buzz” had not found its way into the cultural vernacular yet, but that’s exactly what Disney set out to generate with television.  

Disney approached NBC with the idea of creating an hour-long special that would air the night of Christmas, 1950. When families would be looking for something to do after the gifts and feasts, Walt Disney figured to give them a preview of the Alice – a full seven months before its scheduled release. 

NBC arranged for Coca-Cola to sponsor the program. The tie-in was a natural in light of both companies’ pursuit of a family friendly corporate image.  Coke underwrote the cost of the broadcast; Disney provided product placement in return. 

When One Hour In Wonderland aired at 4:30 PM on December 25, 1950, it announced the arrival of a cultural force that would feed – and be fed by –  television for generations to come. It was Disney’s first production created specifically for the small screen; it was aimed squarely at families gathered around their TVs during Christmas; and it established Disney as a presence in TV-equipped homes across the entire country. 

Even though Alice in Wonderland was still months from completion, Disney had enough footage in the can to show clips  – most notably from the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, one of the visual centerpieces of the film.  A short film with Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy and a couple of classic, holiday-related Disney animated shorts like Pluto’s Christmas Tree filled up the rest of the hour. 

And, perhaps most notable of all, Walt Disney himself served as the Master of Ceremonies, debuting in the avuncular role that he would reprise for decades to come. 

With his first initiative into the new electronic firmament in the rear view mirror,  Disney began to see the medium as less a threat than a megaphone. By the time Disney’s Peter Pan opened in 1953, Disney’s thinking about the two mediums had turned inside-out.  Not only would the magic not end at the movie palace—it could begin in the living room.

But by the early 1950s, Walt Disney was pondering an ever bigger idea than any of his films or television.  

He wanted to build a park, and populate it with his films’ characters and themes – a place where parents could bring their children to see stories brought to life.

To do that, he would need far more financing than even his most ambitious films had required. But his usual sources of funds like banks weren’t buying it:  Amusement parks were risky, and the vision Walt was expressing for “Disneyland” was the riskiest venture imaginable. 

So Walt turned, once again, to television. 

In 1953, he approached the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) with an offer the fledgling network could hardly refuse:  To fund the park’s construction, Disney offered ABC a one-third stake in the park venture for $500,000 in cash. T o get the network on board, he offered to produce a weekly TV series for ABC.  

Construction of the Disneyland park started on July 16, 1954 in Anaheim, California. Disneyland the TV show premiered on the ABC-TV network three months later, on October 27, 1954. 

Just like One Hour In Wonderland was a preview of the film, the TV show was a preview of the park. Each episode featured one of the park’s four sections:  Adventureland, Frontierland, Fantasyland, and Tomorrowland. And the man the nation would come to think of as “Uncle Walt” introduced each segment personally.^⁠2  

YouTube offers a compilation from early episodes of Disneyland.

Needless to say, Disneyland the TV show was a hit for the network, and Disneyland the park was even bigger when it opened in the summer of 1955.

By 1960, Walt Disney was a 20^th century’s version of Alexander The Great – ruling a vast  empire with his park, his movies, his television shows – and the imagination of an entire nation.  

In 1961, the TV show was rebranded as Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color and jumped networks to NBC, a cornerstone of NBC owner RCA’s campaign to promote their expanding line of color television sets.^⁠3 The new show, airing in vibrant hues, featured documentaries, animated shorts, nature films, and serialized dramas like Davy Crockett and Zorro.  The Wonderful World of Color gave Disney a weekly showcase for its entire catalog, and was a considerable factor in color TVs becoming commonplace by the end of the 1960s. 

A heavy smoker, Walt Disney died in 1966, but his brother Roy survived him and continued to build the empire.* 

In 1983, as cable became the way to tune into television, the company launched The Disney Channel, its own premium cable service.  That toe-hold on the new frontier eventually spread to include ABC Family, Toon Disney, Disney XD, and more. Disney was now vertically integrated as a producer, distributor, and broadcaster.

Acquisition became central to the empire’s conquests, culminating in 1996 with the acquisition of ABC – the network that put Disneyland the park on the map and Disneyland the TV show on the air. 

The expansion continued in the 21^st century with the acquisition of vast film libraries to bolster Disney’s own, including the Marvel “cinematic universe,” Lucasfilm and its Star Wars franchise, and most of the 20^th Century Fox catalog. 

This Empire of Franchises sealed its dominion in 2019 when Disney launched Disney+, its long-anticipated streaming service.  This king of the digital hill reached over 100 million subscribers within two years.

A century after his birth, Walt Disney had not just conquered television—he had helped invent its future. From a one-hour experiment on Christmas Day to a planet-spanning content empire, Disney’s role in the screen culture of the 21^st century is unparalleled. 

And, yeah, it all started with that damn mouse – that made its first appearance on a video screen at 202 Green Street in San Francisco in 1929. 

¹ The Disney Brothers Studio was established in Los Angles on October 16, 1923, the date now officially recognized by The Walt Disney Company as the date of its founding.

² Though Walt himself passed away in 1966 at the age of 65, that persona returned in some form ever Sunday for decades to come.

³ In 1960, Disney bought out ABC’s stake in Disneyland for $7.5 million. ABC gained a 1,500% return on on its original $500k investment, and Disney restored full control of its properties, leaving it free to take Disneyland the TV show to NBC and rebrand it as Wide World of Color.

*For decades, Walt Disney reportedly went through multiple packs of unfiltered cigarettes every day.  His cause of death was officially listed as acute circulatory collapse brought on by lung cancer. He died on December 15, 1966, at St. Joseph Hospital in Burbank, California, just across the street from the Disney studio lot at the age of 65.  . The cancer was discovered only weeks earlier, after he was hospitalized in November 1966 for tests and surgery. 

Roy delayed his retirement after Walt’s death to oversee the completion and opening of Walt Disney World in Orlando Florida. Roy died on December 20, 1971, at age 78, just a few months after the new park opened. 

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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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Everybody remembers Rocky and Bullwinkle.

But who remembers Crusader Rabbit and Rags the Tiger? 

After earning a Harvard MBA in 1947, Joseph “Jay” Ward was opening a real estate business in Berkeley, California when a runaway truck crashed into his office and pinned him to a wall.  The accident broke his legs, leaving Ward immobile for several months.  Unable to seek his fortune in real estate development, Ward made the obvious career pivot – to producing cartoons for television. 

During his convalescence, Ward called on Alex Anderson, an old childhood  friend. Alex had been working for his uncle Paul Terry, whose Terrytoons company produced animated cartoon serials for the movies, chief among a smiling rodent with superpowers called Mighty Mouse.  When he returned from the Navy after World War II, Anderson proposed making cartoons for television but his uncle – leery of jeopardizing Terrytoons’ theatrical distribution with 20^th Century Fox – rejected the idea. 

The Wheels of TV Destiny

When Alex and Jay Ward reconnected, the wheels of TV destiny started turning.  

With his Harvard MBA, Ward had the wherewithal to arrange financing, production and distribution for a joint venture; Anderson went to work on a character he called “Crusader Rabbit” – a pint-size crusader with big ears in shining armor who teamed up with a sidekick from the circus, Ragland T. Tiger, aka “Rags.” 

Anderson was the trained artist and animator, with industry experience at Terrytoons. He designed the characters for Crusader Rabbit specifically for serialization on television;  Ward handled everything else: business strategy, distribution, legal filings, and production logistics.

Anderson and Ward devised an approach to animation uniquely suited for the small screen and modest budgets.  Rather than the labor intensive, frame-by-frame technique pioneered by Walt Disney and other early animators, Anderson’s Crusader Rabbit adopted an approach called, literally “limited animation.” With moving backgrounds, limited action, and of little more than the character’s mouths moving, that was enough to deliver weekly, four-minute episodes on a tight schedule. 

Still living in their home town of Berkeley, Anderson converted a garage into an animation studio and churned out a pilot anthology – The Comic Strips of Television – that included Crusader Rabbit. 

Enter The Rabbit

From his time with Terrytoons, Anderson had sufficient credibility to pitch his idea to NBC, which was intrigued with the low-cost approach to supply some light-hearted filler. But the network – still relying heavily on proven talent from radio – had reservations about taking on the unproven creative team. Rather than sign them directly, NBC asked Jerry Fairbanks, an independent producer with strong ties to the network, to package the show for syndication.  

The first episode of Crusader Rabbit aired on Los Angeles station KNBH on August 1, 1950 – the first animated series produced specifically for television. It was not broadcast nationally by NBC, but other NBC affiliates could pick it up through syndication.  Each episode ran just four minutes but was packaged in serialized “crusades” of 10–35 chapters each. 195 episodes of Crusader Rabbit aired in weekly syndication from 1950-51.

The opening credits for Crusader Rabbit show a “Television Arts Cartoon” – that was  Ward and Anderson’s partnership – but “Produced by Jerry Fairbanks” – who had arranged the show’s syndication. That arrangement would eventually lead to conflicts – and the creation of some of television’s most enduring cartoon characters. 

The trouble started when Jerry Fairbanks Productions declared bankruptcy and defaulted on loans from NBC.  When the network foreclosed, it assumed control of Ward & Anderson’s Crusader Rabbit library.  Reruns of the cartoons continued to air, but no new episodes were produced while NBC and Fairbanks wrangled over unpaid debts and rights issues.

In 1954, NBC secured the rights to Crusader Rabbit and sold them to another independent producer, Shull Bonsall, who also acquired Ward and Anderson’s Television Arts Productions and rolled it all into his own company, Consolidated Television Sales.  

Starting in 1956, Bonsall commissioned another 260 episodes of Crusader Rabbit in 13 serial arcs, this time in color.^⁠1 That was not the only change Bonsall made. Lucille Bliss, the actress who voiced Crusader in the first 195 episodes was quietly replaced by veteran voice actress Ge Ge Pearson.^⁠2 Bliss, whose voice had given the original series much of its charm, was disappointed not to be included in the revival, and filed a complaint with the voice actors’ union, but nothing came of it.  

The new color episodes of Crusader Rabbit did not begin airing until 1959, but never caught on like the original black and white series. Fans and historians point to the voice cast change as one reason the revival never captured the magic of the original.  

From Rabbit to Squirrel

Crusader Rabbit and Rags The Tiger were retired for good in 1960 – by which time Anderson and Ward had passed their comic DNA on to a new creation:  Rocky and Bullwinkle. 

The similarities are inescapable:  Crusader Rabbit was a small, smart, idealistic rabbit; Rocket J. Squirrel was a small, smart, idealistic flying squirrel^⁠3.  Crusader’s sidekick Rags was a tall, loyal, but dimwitted tiger; Rock’s sidekick was Bullwinkle – a tall, loyal, but dimwitted moose.  Both shows relied on episodic cliffhangers, corny, pun-filled comedy, and budget-conscious animation.  Where Crusader spoofed adventure tropes, Rocky spoofed the Cold War and pop culture. 

By the time Rocky and Bullwinkle started to emerge from the drawing boards, Alex Anderson had moved on to a career in advertising.  In his absence, Ward teamed up with Bill Scott, who had learned animation making training films for the Army Air Force during the war. 

Scott and Ward led a team that included the veteran radio actor   Conrad  actor as the ever-present narrator, legendary voice actor Paul Frees in several roles, and veteran radio and cartoon voice actor June Foray playing Rocky and other female characters.  When it was time to record audio for the pilot, Scott asked Ward who would play the role of the moose.  Ward said “I thought you were!” So Bill Scott became the voice of Bullwinkle. ^⁠4

Rocky and His Friends premiered on November 19, 1959 on ABC. General Mills signed on as sponsor on the condition that the episodes be broadcast in the late afternoon, when children would be most likely to see them. In September 1961, moose and squirrel moved to NBC as The Bullwinkle Show, airing Sunday evenings.

The Bullwinkle Show was a hit, but the network had problems with some of the irreverent – and topical relevant – content.  The producers had many run ins with the network’s “Standards and Practices” department – otherwise known as “the censors” – before the network finally canceled the show in 1964. 

After its cancellation, reruns aired well into the 1970s and beyond, fixing the squirrel and moose as icons in American cartoon culture alongside such villainous characters Russian cold warriors Boris and Natasha Badanov. 

Over the decades since, Jay Ward is the name that is most frequently associated with Rocky and Bullwinkle, but it was really Alex Anderson who dreamed up the characters in the form of Crusader Rabbit and Rags The Tiger.  The rights to the rabbit and the tiger got caught up in Hollywood legal machinations, which inspired the pivot to the new characters and storylines. 

Alex Anderson created the characters, but Jay Ward controlled the narrative. Ward built a studio. He was the producer, the financier, and the operator behind the scenes. He handled the deals, filed the copyrights, and secured the syndication. As the shows became popular, Ward’s name appeared in the credits while Anderson stayed in the background.

Jay Ward died in 1989, but in 1991 Anderson successfully sued Jay Ward Productions for legal credit as the creator of both Crusader Rabbit, and Rocky and Bullwinkle.^⁠5 

Alex Anderson died in 2010, at the age of 90, but the characters that he and Jay Ward created live on in the immortal world of TV syndication – forever smart, silly, and subversive.

This is a video history of Jay Ward Productions including  interview footage with Alex Anderson.

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¹ The 260  episodes produced in 1956 were indeed in color—though very few households could see them that way. They were meant for future-proof syndication; as color broadcasting gradually expanded, stations would have showcased color-capable content. Most viewers still saw them in black-and-white.

² Ge Ge Pearson was a veteran radio and animation voice actress, known for roles on shows like The Red Skelton Show and later as the voice of Penny on Inspector Gadget.

³ In an interview for the Archive of American television, Anderson said that after working with his uncle on Mighty Mouse, “I could never understand how a mouse could fly.  But it did occur to me that there were flying squirrels…”

⁴ Bill Scott voiced other characters in the Jay Ward canon, including Dudley Do-Right and Mr. Peabody.

⁵ Alex Anderson (and Jay Ward) also created the cartoon character Dudley Do-Right, but there is only so much you can stuff into one of these milestones.  George of the Jungle is in there somewhere, too.

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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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It looks like CBS is getting with the program.

Just a week after posting Centennial Countdown # 77: Gibberish, the esteemed  program CBS Sunday Morning aired a segment about Sid Caesar and Your Show of Shows – the groundbreaking comedy and variety show that set the template for sketch comedy on television for decades to follow. 

From the CBS Sunday Morning YouTube channel: 

Comic Sid Caesar (1922-2014) was a master of humor, slapstick and accents, whose 1950s series Your Show of Shows and Caesar’s Hour rewrote the rules of comedy in the new medium of television. Correspondent Mo Rocca talks with David Margolick, author of the biography When Caesar Was King, and with comedian Robert Klein, about the unique gifts of Caesar (whose reputation has been eclipsed by the writers he hired, including Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Larry Gelbart, Woody Allen and Neil Simon); and how the hard work of seemingly effortless laughs took its toll on the comedian.

And here, the complete segment: 

And, while we’re at it: while scrolling through the CBS Sunday Morning YouTube Channel, we also found this longer segment from 2001 with extensive footage of Sid Caesar himself and still more footage from the original 1950s shows:

It is gratifying to see an institution like CBS Sunday Morning validate the work we’re doing here (however unwittingly).

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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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Meet Mr. Nielsen

After graduating from the University of Wisconsin in 1918 with a degree in electrical engineering, Arthur Charles Nielsen started his career in product testing. In 1923, he launched the A.C. Nielsen Company to apply scientific methods to measure consumer behavior and provide data-driven insights into companies’ product and marketing strategies.

Originally focused on testing things like floor wax, detergent, and cereal sales, Nielsen began measuring radio audiences in the 1930s, just as the medium became a dominant cultural and economic force. By capturing a representative sampling of what audiences were listening to, Nielsen could charge both broadcasters and sponsors for something priceless: numbers.

In 1936, Nielsen introduced the Audimeter, a device placed in a select number of households attached to their radios to record what stations they listened to and when. The data was stored on a rotating paper disk or film strip inside the device.  Starting in 1942, this data was compiled into the “Radio Index” that ranked the popularity of programs and stations. 

Nielsen’s only real competition in the 1930s and 40s was The Hooper Ratings. Created by Claude E. Hooper in 1934, his system employed banks of telephone surveyors who called households and asked, “What are you listening to?”  Hooper’s method was fast and cheap, but seriously flawed:  it relied too heavily on listeners’ memory, couldn’t sample people without phones, and couldn’t track actual tuning behavior.

A Technical Marvel

The Hooper system was no match for the Audimeter, which was a technical marvel in its day. The Audimeter’s automated tracking provided far more reliable data than Hooper’s phone surveys, and quickly became the industry standard for broadcast ratings.

By the time Americans stopped staring at their radios and started gazing at glowing cathode ray tubes, Nielsen had a near monopoly on the ratings business, and was ready to turn his own gaze – and metrics – toward the new frontier.  

Likewise, the networks were desperate to prove television’s viability to radio advertisers, who needed convincing before taking on the added expense.  The networks turned to Nielsen to justify the premium ad rates they wanted to charge for television.  Nielsen had the infrastructure, so when the networks, sponsors, and Madison Avenue needed him, A.C. Nielsen was already in the catbird seat. 

In the spring of 1950, Nielsen retrofitted the Audimeter to detect which channel a TV set was tuned to.  As with radio, the channel-switching data was recorded on film or paper and retrieved periodically by field agents. Nielsen added another audience-tracking innovation when they asked their registered households to keep a daily diary of viewer numbers and demographics. The result was a hybrid system that delivered the most reliable television audience data available at the time.

The networks didn’t just adopt A.C. Nielsen – they anointed him. His numbers became holy writ, marking a pivotal moment in the ascent of American television. 

The Center of the Media Universe

The Nielsen ratings became the sun around all the planets of television revolved. Time slots, cancellations, renewals, writing, casting, and directing were all governed by the numbers. In the world of television, a high Nielsen rating meant job security; a low rating meant unemployment. 

With the Nielsen ratings as the shining beacon, the purpose of broadcasting was no longer to deliver programs to the viewers, but to deliver viewers to the advertisers.

In subtle ways, the ratings began to influence the content. In their quest for the highest ratings, the networks created programs with the broadest possible audience appeal, in effect programming for “the lowest common denominator.”  And that programming was increasingly targeted toward the coveted 18–49 demographic who bought the most of what the advertisers were selling.  

Nielsen’s hybrid system – the Audimeter-generated data combined with viewer diaries – remained the industry standard for decades, regardless of any lingering concerns about accuracy or reliability.

An improvement of sorts came in 1987, when Nielsen introduced the People Meter.  The upgrade from the decades-old Audimeter automated both tuning detection and viewer data. Each household member was assigned a button on a unit connected to the TV; viewers were instructed to press their button when they began watching and again when they stopped. This allowed Nielsen to collect demographic data in real time, reducing the reliance on memory and hand-written diaries. 

The New Frontiers

With its origins in the 1950s, Nielsen’s business was built for an industry dominated by three networks and a nationwide matrix of affiliated local stations. Ironically, the People Meter arrived just as that model reached its peak.

From the 1980s onward, television continued to evolve, and Nielsen has struggled to maintain its relevance – let alone the monopoly-like dominance it enjoyed for more than thirty years. 

The rapid growth of cable-TV in the 1980s fragmented the audience. Now the once mighty networks had to compete with dozens, then hundreds of niche cable channels. Nielsen responded by refining its sampling, increasing its reporting frequency, and tracking cable viewership.

The emergence of VCRs and DVRs further complicated the picture. Time-shifting threw a wrench in the basic premise of real-time audience measurement. Nielsen began tracking “live plus 3” and “live plus 7” metrics, accounting for those who watched within a few days of broadcast. But the genie was out of the bottle. Viewers were no longer tied to the broadcast schedule – or the ratings. 

With the dawn of viewing-on-demand services like Netflix, Nielsen devised tools to measure digital viewing, but the data is often incomplete or proprietary. Unlike broadcasters, streaming platforms don’t always publish their numbers, and when they do, they’re quite opaque. 

Nielsen has managed to endure and remains the industry standard for the network, local, and cable businesses now lumped together under the rubric of “linear” or “legacy” television. More recently, the company has begun to measure “total audience,” compiling a unified accounting across multiple platforms – broadcast, cable, and streaming.

Regardless of its future, Nielsen’s role in television’s ascent is indisputable. For more than 70 years, the fate of television programs, their creators, and the executives who scheduled them – has depended on what a relatively small group of households happened to be watching on a given night. That’s the peculiar legacy of the Nielsens: a quiet, methodical power broker whose black box helped build a golden age of television, even as it helped define the medium. 

Click here for an illustrated history of the A.C. Nielsen Company. 

Arthur Nielsen appeared on the TV Show What’s My Line in 1955:

 

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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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This time, the Jew didn’t have to change his name or conceal his ethnic heritage.  

His father did that for him, long before he was born. 

Isaac Sidney “Sid”  Caesar was born in Yonkers, New York, on September 8, 1922.  Immigration records show that Sid’s father, Selig Ziser, was born in 1874 in Galicia, a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in what is now southeastern Poland. Selig emigrated to the U.S. with his mother Dora when he was about 9 years old. ^⁠1 

By the time Selig Ziser applied for citizenship in 1896, he was using the name Max Caesar. 

The Mimic

Max and his wife Ida ran a small, 24-hour diner, catering to Yonkers’ working‑class  immigrant clientele with a kosher-style menu of sandwiches and soups like matzo ball.  Isaac Sidney spent many hours of his formative years behind the counter, carefully observing the patrons’ multilingual speech patterns. It wasn’t long before he began mimicking their Polish, Russian, Italian, and other European accents and developing the double-talk routines that eventually became central to the act that made him famous. 

Before any of that, though, Sid studied music at Juilliard. He played the saxophone well enough to join the Shep Fields Orchestra in the late 1930s. During World War II, he served in the Coast Guard, and was stationed at a Brooklyn training center, where he began getting laughs imitating officers and perfecting his many accents. 

Sid Caesar first came to national attention in 1946 in Tars and Spars, a Coast Guard Revue adapted into a feature film by Columbia Pictures, with Caesar co-starring with Janet Blair and Allyn Joslyn. ^⁠2

One of the Hollywood insiders who caught Caesar in Tars and Spars was producer Max Liebman, who produced revues at the Tamiment Playhouse in the Poconos, where he worked briefly with Caesar and saw in him a one-man comedy juggernaut.  

In the late 1940s, Liebman was hired to develop variety programming for NBC television.  The network was also looking for a sponsorship vehicle for Admiral Corporation, a confluence which neatly illustrates this unique moment in America’s culture and commerce.  

Selling Televisions

Founded in 1934, Admiral was one of the “Big Four” American TV manufacturers, alongside RCA, Philco, and Zenith. By 1948–49, they were riding the early wave of TV adoption and pouring money into advertising to sell more sets.  NBC asked Max Liebman to develop a variety show that Admiral could sponsor. 

Liebman proposed the Admiral Broadway Revue as a showcase for both the brand and the medium.  For a headliner, Liebman suggested Sid Caesar.  But it may well be his next suggestion that struck an artery of TV comedy gold. 

In addition to Caesar, Liebman had worked with a comedienne named Imogene Coca. By casting them opposite one another, Liebman balanced Caesar’s linguistic acrobatics and explosive energy with Coca’s rubbery facial comedy, singing, and razor-sharp timing. 

Admiral Broadway Revue first aired on Friday, January 28, 1949. In an unusual arrangement, Admiral insisted the show air on both NBC and, in some markets, on  the DuMont network, in order to ensure their advertising dollars reached the widest possible audience. 

The show was a revelation: Caesar and Coca’s chemistry set a new standard for live television comedy. And by all accounts (including Sid Caesar’s own memoir) Max Liebman was the glue that brought the show together – not just casting it, but shaping the tone and pacing, and writing many of the early sketches.^⁠3

Ironically, the show’s success planted the seed of its demise just 19 weeks later.  According to one account in the trade press, “The demand for Admiral TV sets increased so dramatically that the company could no longer justify spending money on programming.” Instead, Admiral redirected its ad budget to ramp up production, choosing to sell more TVs rather than continuing to advertise them. 

Live from New York!

But the experiment proved that Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca could carry a show – and that live television comedy could be something more than vaudeville in a box.

Starting on February 25, 1950, NBC broadcast Your Show of Shows, live from Manhattan’s International Theatre. Every Saturday night, Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca and a supporting ensemble offered 90 breakneck minutes of comedy sketches, musical performances, and theatrical send-ups.  

Your Show of Shows’ distinguishing quality was its sophistication. Rather than relying on burlesque or slapstick, Caesar and his co-conspirators created parodies of foreign films, literary classics, and operas. The show recreated domestic situations and let characters unravel in real time. Sid Caesar could play a bumbling German professor, a neurotic husband, or a pompous film director—and often did, all in the same night.

Front and center was Caesar’s original party trick: his virtuosic delivery of nonsensical monologues in pitch-perfect mimicry of everything from German and Italian to Russian and French – orations that sounded utterly fluent though they consisted of nothing more than pure gibberish. 

Just treat yourself to seven minutes of Sid Caesar’s double-talk

And week after week, it was all live. There were no cue cards, no tape delays, and no do-overs. The audience wasn’t just watching comedy; they were watching comic trapeze artists performing without a net.

The Writers Room

That electronic immediacy was created by a cast and writers’ room that assembled a virtual “who’s who” of late 20^th Century American comedy, including:

• Carl Reiner – a regular member of the original cast, who went on to create The Dick Van Dyke Show, co-write and perform The 2000 Year Old Man with Mel Brooks, and directed hit films like The Jerk with Steve Martin;^⁠4
• Mel Brooks – an EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony) -winning writer-director, known for genre-smashing films like The Producers, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein;
•  Neil Simon – one of the most successful playwrights in American history, known for Broadway hits including The Odd Couple, Barefoot in the Park, and Lost in Yonkers;
• Danny Simon – Neil’s older brother, a respected comedy writer and teacher whose mentorship influenced dozens of later sitcom writers, including Woody Allen; 
• Larry Gelbart – best known for developing M*A*S*H into one of the most acclaimed sitcoms of all time and writing the hit Broadway musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum;
• Lucille Kallen – one of the few women in the room, went on to write novels and scripts for television dramas and comedies, and later became a respected mystery novelist;
• Mel Tolkin, the head writer for much of Your Show of Shows, continued in television and helped shape All in the Family, bringing his sharp political and cultural satire to a new generation.

Your Show of Shows ran from 1950 to 1954, when it was succeeded by Caesar’s Hour, which ran until 1957.  A different format gave Caesar a bit more breathing room – though  much of the team remained intact – and the quality of the sketches arguably deepened.

But Caesar was not immune to the pressures of television stardom. After Caesar’s Hour ended, he never quite regained a similar stature.  Attempts at a comeback fizzled, and he struggled with alcohol and prescription drugs throughout the 1960s.  

After recovery, he appeared in films like Grease (1978) and Mel Brooks’ History of the World, Part I (1981), and was rightly canonized as a pioneer of American television. He lived long enough to witness the lionization of his career before he died in 2014 at the age of 91.

The Legacy Lives On

The legacy of Your Show of Shows runs deep. Its DNA appears in successors  like Saturday Night Live, SCTV, The Carol Burnett Show, Key & Peele, and Inside Amy Schumer, to name just a few.  Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, and company proved that small-screen comedy could be more than pratfalls and pie fights; it could be witty, literate, musical, and deeply human.

Perhaps no one captured the spirit of the show better than Carl Reiner, who based The Dick Van Dyke Show on his own experiences working with Caesar. The fictional Alan Brady Show was essentially Your Show of Shows, with Reiner in the background as the show’s mercurial star, and Dick Van Dyke playing the exhausted head writer.

Mel Brooks once said of Sid Caesar, “He gave us the green light. We knew we could go wherever our brains would take us, as long as it was funny.” 

And go they did—to Broadway, to Hollywood, to sitcoms, to stand-up, to the very core of American humor, carrying the torch Sid Caesar lit along their way. 

¹ Immigration records are unclear on the status of Max’s father—whether he arrived in the U.S. before or after his wife and son remains undocumented.

² The unusual title “Tars and Spars” derives from two slang terms for Naval and Coast Guard personnel:  “Tars” refers to sailors, a call back to Jack Tar,” a nickname for seamen who used tar to waterproof their clothes and hair.

“Spars” was nickname for members of the U.S. Coast Guard Women’s Reserve, established in 1942. The term is actually an acronym derived from the Coast Guard’s motto: Semper Paratus – Always Ready

³ Sid Caesar’s memoir, Where Have I Been?,  published in 1982, offers a candid, often harrowing account of his rise to fame, his battles with addiction, and his eventual recovery. He also co-authored  Caesar’s Hours: My Life in Comedy, With Love and Laughter, published in 2003, which focused more on his television work and writing process, especially from Your Show of Shows.

⁴ The name “Reiner” will come up again when we get to the 1970s and All In the Family, in which Carl’s son Rob Reiner played the central role of Archie Bunker’s nemesis Michael Satiric, aka “Meathead.”

⁵ Winning  Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony Awards over the course of his career makes Mel Brooks one of only 19* “EGOT”s in TV, recording, film, and stage history. 

*as of July, 2025 when this was written

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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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Tillie Edelstein was born in 1899 to Russian parents living in the polyglot, working-class New York neighborhood of East Harlem, amid large Jewish, Italian, and German immigrant populations. She was raised in a culturally hybrid household that spoke both English and Yiddish, the common language of Eastern European Jews. Her mother Dinah died while Tillie was young. Her father Jacob worked in a Manhattan candy factory in the fall and winter. In the spring and summer he managed Fleischmann’s, a small lodge in the Catskills.  

The Borscht Belt

Inns and boarding houses like Fleischmann’s offered accommodations for Jewish families seeking respite from the sweltering summer in the city. In the 1920s and ’30s, these farm-like retreats evolved into modest resorts with kosher kitchens,  family-style dining, and entertainment in an area of the Catskills that became known as the “Borscht Belt” – for the Eastern European beet soup often served at meals.  

They also became the breeding ground for a uniquely Jewish kind of entertainment and humor. 

In this incubator for Jewish singers, writers, and comedians, Tillie learned the rhythms of the stage.  She had no formal theatrical training, but she readily absorbed the cadences of Jewish-American life, and incorporated them into stories and sketches, drawing on themes of ethnic heritage, generational bonds, and maternal wisdom.

In 1929, Tillie Edelstein changed her name to Gertrude Berg, and wrote a radio script based on character sketches she had performed for patrons in the Catskills.  The central character was Molly Goldberg, a warm-but-meddlesome Jewish mother, and her family’s life in the Bronx – all based on Tillie-now-Gertrude’s experience growing up in East Harlem. 

Chutzpah

Although she had no background or training in broadcasting, Gertrude approached NBC with the concept.  

To say this was a bold move for an industry outsider—especially a woman in the 1920s—would greatly understate the chutzpah Gertrude had to muster.

But somehow her pitch resonated with the programming executives who heard it. 

On November 20, 1929 – just a few weeks after the Wall Street crash that triggered the Great Depression – The Rise of The Goldbergs premiered locally on WJZ, NBC’s flagship station in New York. 

By 1931, The Rise of the Goldbergs was broadcast from coast to coast on the NBC Blue Network^⁠1 with sponsorship from Pepsodent, a toothpaste famous for its minty flavor and the totally fabricated claim that it contained an ingredient called “Irium.”  

Gertrude Berg was the creator, writer, and producer of the show.  She wrote the first scripts by hand on legal pads, often while cooking or watching her children. She is believed to have written over 5,000 scripts over the show’s eventual long run. She managed production logistics, negotiated with sponsors, and insisted on retaining creative control—rare for anyone at the time, let alone a woman in a male-dominated industry.

More importantly, Gertrude voiced the role of Molly Goldberg herself.  Her warm, lyrical voice and endearing stories of a Bronx housewife with one foot in the Old World and the other in the New, found their way into living rooms across the country. 

At a time when Americans needed sources of comfort, The Rise of the Goldbergs became a staple of nightly radio, running for nearly two decades. In the mid-30s, as the family’s “rise” was firmly established, the name was shortened to just The Goldbergs, and offered a compelling look into Jewish immigrant life.  The Goldbergs reached millions of listeners with universal stories about family, sacrifice, ambition, assimilation, and love.  And Gertrude-as-Molly, with her lilting mix of Yiddishisms and motherly wisdom, was as recognizable in American households as Franklin Roosevelt’s voice or Jack Benny’s fiddle.

As The Goldbergs continued to run on radio throughout World War II, Gertrude remained loyal to NBC.  The show became one of the most beloved programs on the air, to the general benefit of brands like Pepsodent, Dr. Lyons Tooth Powder, and Sanka.  But the show went off the air between 1945 and 1948, in part due to sponsor disputes, but also because Berg had her eye on the new kid in town: television 

As the war was winding down, it was obvious to Gertrude that television was poised to become the next big thing, and she began exploring how she could adapt The Goldbergs.  Her primary goal  was to maintain full creative control over the transition.  She wrote a pilot and produced test episodes as early as 1946, envisioning The Goldbergs for television with the same warmth and humor that defined the radio show.

Despite her sincere loyalty and long history with  NBC, the network was hesitant to commit to a prime-time TV slot for The Goldbergs.  Network executives expressed doubt about the show’s footing in the new medium and harbored concerns about its ethnic appeal – despite more than a decade of radio success to the contrary. 

A New Network for TV

CBS, on the other hand, under the guidance of its founder and president William S. Paley (who was also Jewish), was aggressively building its television brand and looking to lure established talent from radio to TV. ^⁠2 Paley and programming executive Frank Stanton offered Berg everything she wanted:  a weekly evening time slot, all the money she needed for production, and creative control of the program. 

The television premiere of The Goldbergs – broadcast live from New York on CBS on February 7, 1949 – was a landmark occasion for several reasons:  It was  the first situation comedy on television, and the first to be centered on a Jewish-American family. Once again, Gertrude Berg not only starred as Molly, she also wrote and produced every episode, becoming a trailblazing role model for generations of women to come. 

Episodes of The Goldbergs typically opened with a line carried over from the radio version, when Molly leaned out her apartment window and called out to her neighbors, “Yoo hoo… is anybody there?” 

A Victim of the Red Scare

The Goldbergs was never formally “cancelled” in the modern sense, but its demise is attributed in part to one of the darkest chapters in early television history: the blacklisting of co-star Philip Loeb during the McCarthy era.

Phillip Loeb played Molly’s husband, Jake Goldberg.  When he was named in Red Channels – a red-baiting pamphlet that listed alleged Communist sympathizers in the entertainment industry – big TV  sponsors like cereal maker General Mills pressured CBS to remove Loeb from the show. Gertrude resisted fiercely, even offering to forgo her own salary to keep Loeb in the cast, but the network caved in to sponsor pressure. Loeb left the show in 1952 under duress. His life unraveled, and he died by suicide in 1955.

The show lost momentum after his departure. Audience interest waned and The Goldbergs ended its run in syndication in 1956.

The Goldbergs’ faded from the cultural landscape, but Gertrude Berg remained a respected figure in American entertainment.  In 1959, she starred on Broadway in A Majority of One, a role that earned her a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play. The show tackled themes of intercultural romance and postwar reconciliation between Americans and Japanese. She published her memoir, Molly and Me, in 1961, chronicling her life, the show, and her approach to storytelling. Though she made occasional guest appearances on television into the early 1960s, she never piloted another show of her own. 

When Gertrude Berg died in New York on September 14, 1966 – from heart failure at the age of 67 – she left behind a profound legacy as one of the first women to create, write, produce, and star in her own nationally broadcast show on either radio or television.

Some will credibly argue that The Goldbergs was not the first sitcom on television. Mary Kay and Johnny first aired on the DuMont network starting in 1947, two years earlier than The Goldbergs. Starring real-life couple Mary Kay and Johnny Stearns, their show centered on domestic life in a Manhattan apartment and is remembered as the first TV show to depict a married couple sleeping in the same bed. ^⁠3 It was also the first show to incorporate a real-life pregnancy into the storyline, when Mary Kay became pregnant with their son.

But Mary Kay and Johnny was created out of whole cloth for television, and did not have the pre-history or cultural consequence of The Goldbergs.

And, there were other comedy-oriented programs that made the transition from radio to television, like The Jack Benny Program in 1950, Burns and Allen in 1950, and Amos ‘n’ Andy in June 1951, But The Goldbergs was the first scripted domestic sitcom to make the jump from radio to television. 

Gertrude Berg – née Tillie Edelstein – arguably created one of the most enduring forms of entertainment in the world today, the family-based situation comedy or “sitcom.”  She helped define the format that shows like I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, and All in the Family would refine and expand in the decades that followed. 

In 1950, Gertrude Berg became the first woman to win an Emmy for Best Actress in a Comedy – an accolade that acknowledged the more than two decades of vision, talent, and labor, she had poured into the uniquely comic borscht of The Goldbergs.

¹ At the time, NBC operated two networks: NBC Red carried the more commercial, high-profile lineup; NBC Blue featured more experimental and culturally focused programming. In 1943, antitrust pressure from the U.S. government compelled RCA to sell NBC Blue to Edward J. Noble, the millionaire owner of Life Savers candy and a radio entrepreneur, for $8 million. In 1945, the Blue Network was officially rebranded as the American Broadcasting Company (ABC).

² William S. “Bill” Paley was the heir to his family’s prosperous Philadelphia-based Congress Cigar Company. When the company began advertising on radio in the mid-1920s, Paley noted the boost in cigar sales and concluded that broadcasting, not cigars, was where his own future lay. With support from the family business, in 1928 Paley acquired the combined interests of the faltering United Independent Broadcasters and the Columbia Phonographic Company, renamed the network the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), and began building a broadcasting empire rivaled only by NBC in its size, scope, and ambition.

³ For years married couples on TV slept in adjacent single beds – including Lucy and Desi on I Love Lucy – and even when Lucy was pregnant.

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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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There are three reasons why the name of Philo T. Farnsworth is not more familiar, despite his having invented what is arguably the most transformative technology of the 20^th Century, if not the entire millennium. 

First, Farnsworth rarely sought the spotlight, although he did enjoy what recognition he received.  A glowing profile in the October, 1936 edition of Collier’s Weekly described him as “an emerging force in the burgeoning television industry” – which was “destined to find its way into many American homes by Christmas 1937.”  This prediction reflected a common sentiment in the mid-30s that commercial television was “just around the corner” – a corner that turned out to be World War II.  And in 1939, biographer Durward Howard named 33-year-old Farnsworth one of “America’s Top Ten Young Men” alongside such household names as Lou Gehrig and Spencer Tracy.  

The Pretenders: RCA and Baird 

Second, there were numerous pretenders to the throne. Chief among those was RCA, David Sarnoff, and Vladimir Zworykin. Sarnoff wanted to be remembered as “the father of television,” and Zworykin was more than willing to go along.  In litigation with Farnsworth in the 1930s^⁠1, RCA tried to use Zworykin’s 1923 patent application to pry Farnsworth from his patents.  The litigation failed on all the counts that mattered, but RCA still managed to get that 1923 date into the historical record.

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At ~2:20 into this RCA-produced 1956 documentary, Zworykin and Sarnoff reminisce about how they fabricated their story of the origins of television.

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Across the Atlantic, the Brits still insist that John Logie Baird invented television, despite his reliance on a mechanical system that  Farnsworth rendered obsolete in 1927. Baird was compelled to license Farnsworth’s patents in 1934 in order to stay in the business, though he still lost out when the BBC began regular television programming with equipment from EMI – an RCA ally – in 1936

These and other competing claims have fueled the perception that that television was “too complex” to have been invented by any single individual.  

And while it is undeniable that television is a complex technology, there was one pivotal invention that made it possible, and one inventor who showed the rest of the world how it would ultimately be done. 

It Takes a Company

But the third and most compelling reason Philo Farnsworth’s name is not more familiar is that he was not survived by a company that could preserve his legacy. 

Think, for example, of Walt Disney, who died in 1966 but left behind a corporate legacy that has lasted for generations.  You might reasonably expect the same for the man who invented something as world-changing as television. 

Philo Farnsworth never wanted anything more than to be an inventor.  His idols were Edison, Bell, Marconi, and the other pivotal figures of 19^th century science and invention.  But by the time Farnsworth was able to set up a proper laboratory in 1926, the companies formed by his predecessors dominated a landscape that was already carved up among a handful of large companies like RCA, AT&T, General Electric, and Westinghouse. ^⁠2

As an independent operator with no manufacturing base to draw on, Farnsworth was always hard-pressed for funds.  There’s no question that television was a capital-intensive invention, but the fact that his patents were tied up in litigation stalled the prospect of collecting royalties on those patents.  Consequently, he frequently fought with his own investors over funding for his operations.

A Battle on Three Fronts

Farnsworth was embattled on three fronts:  

• His natural habitat was his laboratory, where he and his small but dedicated “lab gang” built daily improvements into the humming electronic gizmos on their workbenches.  The camaraderie also gave Farnsworth occasional opportunities to explore new frontiers.  

• He was much less comfortable in the depositions and legal proceedings required to defend his patents. 

• And then there were the frequent demands of his investors to cut back on his expenses that were financed out of their pockets or by selling stock in a company that had no revenue. 

The End of The Dream

It all came to a head in 1936, right after the patents for radar were abandoned, when Farnsworth’s principal investor, a man named Jess McCargar, stormed into the laboratory and fired the entire staff.  ^⁠3Farnsworth managed to persuade some to return, but he and his trailblazing operations never fully recovered. 

A resolution of sorts was arranged with the formation of Farnsworth Television and Radio Corporation.  Investment bankers from New York arranged the acquisition of The Capehart Company, a  phonograph and jukebox manufacturer in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and with an IPO of $3 million (roughly $70 million in 2026 dollars), “FTR” began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on March 31, 1939.  

Farnsworth was never keen on the sort of enterprise he derided as “tacking on the shipping room door.” His instincts leaned toward building a pure “invention factory” like Thomas Edison once operated in Menlo Park, New Jersey.  But absent the revenue from patent royalties, manufacturing – first radios and phonographs, and televisions when the market finally opened – offered the soundest course for building a lasting enterprise 

By the time all the operations were relocated to Indiana, Farnsworth was suffering health issues from all the stress and retreated to a homestead in the woods of Maine.  There was not much more he could do personally to advance television, but he was starting to have other ideas that he needed time and space to explore.  

In addition to building a fully equipped private laboratory on his Maine property, he dammed up a stream and spent the war years fishing for trout – and for the mysteries of the universe his inventions had revealed to him. 

Though his thoughts were focused elsewhere, Farnsworth didn’t  ignore the war altogether.  He and his brothers started a wood mill and selectively logged the property for pine to make “boxes for bullets” that were shipped to the front. 

I Want Nothing to Do With It 

In 1941, he was invited to join a secret project in Los Alamos, New Mexico. “I think they’re going to build an atomic bomb,” Farnsworth said to his wife, “and I want nothing to do with it”. That made him the most renowned scientist of the day who did NOT participate in the Manhattan Project. 

In Fort Wayne, the company that now bore his name produced military communications and radar equipment worth more than $100-million over the course of the war. But the company took on too much debt to acquire the added capacity. When the war ended and the economy returned to a peace-time footing, FTR was slow to retool its operations or shore up its balance sheet.  By 1949, the company that had been formed to meet the demand for televisions with products branded for its namesake inventor was on the verge of bankruptcy – just as the industry he had created was taking off. 

Farnsworth returned to Fort Wayne to lend whatever support he could to restoring the company, but it was already too late.  Rather than file for Chapter 11, the Board of Directors accepted an offer for acquisition from the International Telephone and Telegraph Company for what amounted to pennies on the dollar. 

On February 7, 1949, the ticker symbol “FTR” quietly vanished from the New York Stock Exchange, and  Philo Farnsworth spent the remainder of his career as an employee of ITT.

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¹ That “Zworykin invented the Iconoscope for RCA in 1923” is still found in accounts of TV’s origins, though the statement is loaded with historical inaccuracies: Zworykin was not working at RCA in 1923, he did not have a working Iconoscope until the early thirties, and the patent office ruled in 1935 that the device that he did disclose in 1923 was inoperable.  Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln…

² See the footnote re: the Consent Decree of 1926 in #88, Kraft Television Theater.

³ See Countdown #90, TV In In Trenches

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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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Irna Phillips was the youngest of ten children, born in 1901 to a large Jewish family on Chicago’s West Side.

Irna’s girlhood dreams of becoming an actress seemed dashed when acting schools rejected her, for what she later attributed to her plain looks and nasal voice. Instead, she earned a teaching degree from the University of Illinois, but did go on to study drama at the Universities of Wisconsin and Iowa.

In 1930, Irna was freelancing at Chicago radio station WGN^⁠1 when she drew on her own family experience to create Painted Dreams, a 15-minute radio drama featuring an Irish-American widow and her multigenerational household.  

WGN executives were skeptical that a daily serial about anything as prosaic as family life could attract listeners or advertisers, but Phillips persisted until WGN agreed to a trial run that went on the air on October 20, 1930.  To everyone’s surprise, the audience response was immediate and enthusiastic.  Painted Dreams quickly became a fixture on the station’s schedule.  Irna Phillips herself starred as the widowed matriarch, Mother Moynihan, whose relationship with her daughter provided emotional resonance to the everyday drama.

Even though Painted Dreams was a hit for WGN, the station’s executives resisted Phillips appeals to take the show into national syndication.  And, despite their reluctance, the station claimed ownership of the show and all its characters. Phillips abruptly left WGN in 1931 and sued the station for the rights to her creation in 1932.^⁠2

A Genre Is Born…

Phillips took her concept to WMAQ, the NBC-owned Chicago station where executives were much friendlier to the show’s commercial prospects.  With the ownership and control of Painted Dreams in dispute, Phillips reworked her creation with new characters and storylines. Renamed Today’s Children, WMAQ began airing the retooled program on March 11, 1933. 

By early 1934, Today’s Children was being broadcast over the NBC network to a national audience.  The show caught the attention of advertising executives at Proctor & Gamble, the largest manufacturer of household products in the country, and one of the most influential advertisers radio.  P&G could readily see the potential in Phillips’ serialized storytelling aimed at homemakers.

Once Proctor & Gamble signed on to Irna Phillips’ creation, the conception of a new genre was complete. Daily serials aimed at a largely female audience became known as “soap operas.” 

Today’s Children ran until NBC chose not to renew it in 1937, but that did not deter Irna Phillips. Before Today’s Children aired its final episode, Phillips had already conjured up her next project.  The Guiding Light premiered on WMAQ January 25, 1937. The story of Rev. John Ruthledge  mined themes from Phillips’ own struggles with faith.  After switching to the CBS radio network in 1947, it and ran every weekday until 1956.^⁠3

Before its cancellation, Today’s Children had reached a large national audience.  It also caught the attention of executives at NBC, who called on Phillips when their attention turned toward original daytime programming for television.  The network gave her the green light on an entirely new program.  

…and comes to TV

The soap opera came to television when NBC’s flagship Chicago TV station WNBQ began airing daily episodes of These Are My Children at 5:00 PM on January 31, 1949. 

Phillips borrowed elements from her earlier creations, Painted Dreams and Today’s Children, for the new show.  Norman Felton, a Chicago-based producer/director, ran the show’s day-to-day production as it followed another Irish widow, this one named Mrs. Henehan, and her boarding-house family. 

For reasons both creative and technical, These Are My Children aired for only five weeks, until March 4, 1949.  One issue that arose was AT&Ts limitations on using its coaxial cable for weekday Chicago-to-East Coast television distribution.  That undermined NBCs commitment to producing programs out of Chicago rather New York. 

Though short-lived, These Are My Children was the first daytime serial created specifically for television,  and the die was cast for one of the medium’s most enduring formats.

Other networks quickly followed suit. On February 21, 1949, the DuMont Network launched a daytime drama called A Woman to Remember, which ran until early July, 1949.  On December 4, 1950, The First Hundred Years premiered on CBS – the first daytime serial with a multi-year run, until June 27, 1952. 

The daytime drama format did not really find firm footing until Phillips herself brought her well established radio program, The Guiding Light to TV in 1952.  That was followed by As The World Turns, and soon an entire afternoon lineup of soap operas filled the schedule. 

The Guiding Light premiered on CBS on June 30, 1952, making it the first daytime serial drama to air simultaneously on radio and TV. When the last TV episode faded to black on September 18, 2009, it left the air as the longest-running drama in broadcast history, spanning more than seven decades across two platforms.

A 1953 episode of The Guiding Light can be found on YouTube

Irna Phillips pioneered familiar narrative devices like the organ music fade-out, cliffhangers, overlapping dialogue, and the use of inner monologues.  If she is remembered today as the “Mother of The Soap Opera,” then she was a fruitful parent. Among her prolific heirs was Agnes Nixon, with whom Phillips created Days of Our Lives, which is widely regarded as the most popular soap opera of all time. 

Pushing The Envelope

In addition to co-creating Days of Our Lives with Phillips, Nixon is responsible for such long running daytime serials as One Life to Live (1968), All My Children (1970), and Loving (1983)

Agnes Nixon pushed the envelope of daytime storytelling by introducing controversial contemporary topics like racism, abortion, AIDS, Vietnam, sexual identity, and domestic abuse – long before these subjects were common in mainstream TV.  Nixon’s forté was strong, complex female characters that kept the genre relevant for a new generation of audiences.^⁠4 In short, if Phillips invented the form, Nixon elevated and modernized it – bringing relevance, diversity, and cultural urgency to the world of daytime drama.

Many of Irna Phillips’ and Agnes Nixon’s successors live on to this day.  Days of Our Lives has been on NBC since 1965 and has brought the genre to its streaming service, Peacock; General Hospital has been on ABC since 1963 (who can forget Luke and Laura’s Wedding in 1981?); The Young and The Restless, created by William J. Bell, has aired on CBS since 1973; and The Bold and the Beautiful, created by William J. Bell and his wife Lee Phillip Bell in 1987 is one of the most-watched programs in the world with a global audience of  30+ million. 

Some of the conventions that Irna Phillips and Agnes Nixon pioneered soon spilled into primetime.  In the 1970s and early 1980s, the serialized drama found its way into primetime.  Dallas became a cultural juggernaut, drawing international notoriety when more than 80 million people tuned in to learn  “Who Shot J.R.?”  Knots Landing followed, along with Dynasty, which turned excess into art and gave viewers something glamorous to gossip about. These shows borrowed the emotional core of daytime soaps and dressed it up in oil wealth, fashion, and melodrama.

Just as the soaps reached zenith in the late 1970s and early 80s, the genre turned on itself with satire and parody. 

From 1977 to 1981, ABC’s primetime Soap skewered the genre’s conventions—affairs, amnesia, secret twins—while still managing to tell emotionally grounded stories. Soap also starred Billy Crystal as one of television’s first openly gay characters, and handled sensitive topics with surprising grace for a comedy in that era. 

Even Norman Lear (creator of All In The Family, etc.) got into the act with a short-lived prime-time soap opera satire called Mary Hartman Mary Hartman.  Louise Lasser portrayed Mary as a neurotic, overwhelmed housewife navigating bizarre and often disturbing events in her small-town life (while hanging up: “I can’t talk to you right now, I’m on the phone…”). Lear syndicated the show to local stations around the country who aired it in late-night time slots, typically around 11:00 PM. The unusual scheduling—essentially creating a “prime-time soap opera” that wasn’t on a network—was part of producer Lear’s strategy to bypass network censors and reach a more experimental, boundary-pushing tone. Mary Hartman Mary Hartman ran 235 episodes from January, 1976 until Mary “left town” in May, 1977.

¹ WGN (AM 720) was one of a few dozen “clear channel” radio stations in the U.S., authorized by the FCC to broadcast at up to 50,000 watts with no other stations on the same frequency for hundreds of miles. These powerful signals served vast areas, especially rural communities and particularly at night, when AM signals can travel hundreds of miles.  

WGN, owned by the Chicago Tribune (the call letters stood for “World’s Greatest Newspaper”), gave the paper enormous regional influence during the golden age of radio in the 1920s and 1930s.

² Painted Dreams did eventually land a sponsor—Mickleberry Products Company—late in  1931,  The show ran until July 1943 and went on to inspire dozens more by Phillips and her protégés.

³ For a time in the early 1950s, Irna Phillips had shows on both NBC and CBS, which was not unusual in that era. Unlike today’s more exclusive network deals, television and radio writers often worked across multiple networks, especially if they were as prolific and in-demand as Phillips.

⁴ Not the least among Agnes Nixon’s creations was Erica Kane, the long suffering heroine of All My Children performed for 41 years by Susan Lucci.  Lucci brought her own behind the scenes drama to the genre:  She was nominated for a daytime Emmy Award 19 times before finally taking home the trophy in 1999.

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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 is going to Count Down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television over 100 weeks until September 7, 2027.
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Though he is largely forgotten in the public imagination, it is genuinely intriguing how often the legacy of Philo T. Farnsworth drifts in and out of the history of television.  Reminders of his inventions can often be found  lingering on the periphery of the industry if you know where to look.

Television’s annual Emmy Awards is a good example.  Fittingly, the story begins with another relative unknown. 

During World War II, Sydney (Syd) Cassyd worked with the U.S. Army Signal Corps, writing and directing training films and learning the logistics of production.  After the war, he worked in development at Paramount Pictures during the period when the film industry was trying to sort out how television was going to fit into its business.  

Syd Cassyd was neither a celebrity nor a mogul. He was a networker, driven by the firm conviction that television could serve civic and educational purposes in addition to its obvious potential for entertainment.  In this regard he shared the vision that had partially motivated Philo Farnsworth – that TV could elevate public discourse and human understanding.  Cassyd’s background in film, and working out of Los Angeles rather than the broadcast corridors of New York, gave him a different perspective on the industry’s promise. 

When he observed how little community structure existed around the new medium, Cassyd began inviting writers, producers, engineers, and executives to informal meetings to talk about television’s potential and the need for industry goals, education, and recognition.  

In November, 1946 these informal gatherings led to the formation of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (ATAS). The name was an echo of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), the organization that began awarding the trophies known as “Oscars” in 1929.  

As the titular founder of ATAS, Syd Cassyd at first resisted the idea of creating an award like the Oscars.  He did not want ATAS to become a self-congratulatory trade group. He hoped instead to foster a forum for discussion, education, and other scholarly pursuits. And he disliked the idea of competition in the arts, especially for a new medium that was still finding its creative footing. 

Despite his reservations, it did not take long for Cassyd to realize that awards could help legitimize television and elevate its reputation for lowbrow entertainment. In 1948, the Academy set out to create an award for Outstanding Achievement in Television.

All they needed was an actual trophy – and a name for it. 

In 1948, the Academy established a nationwide competition to find a design that would reflect the both the traditions of art and the new technology that defined the medium.

From 47 submissions, the winning design came from Louis McManus, a television engineer and art director who had worked on early broadcast graphics. McManus submitted a sketch of a winged woman holding aloft an atom. The wings represented the muse of art;  the atom symbolized the electron and the scientific breakthroughs that made television possible. 

McManus used his wife, Dorothy, as the model for his design, which stood out for its elegant reflection of the Academy’s mission to promote both creative excellence and technical innovation.

Once the design for the trophy was settled on, all that remained was to decide what to call it. 

The first idea was to call the new award “Ike” after the Iconoscope – the camera tube that RCA introduced in the 1930s.  There’s no direct evidence that RCA or David Sarnoff advocated for the name, but RCA still had a huge influence on the technical vocabulary of the industry, so maybe the reference seemed a natural fit for some Academy engineers. 

The idea was quickly rejected, though, if for no other reason than because “Ike” was already widely associated with General Dwight D. Eisenhower, a national icon even before seeking the presidency in 1952. Nor did it seem like a good idea to burden the statuette of a winged female with an ostensibly male-sounding name.

The gentle push for a less masculine but still technically grounded name came a source within the Academy’s membership whose roots go back to the earliest days of the medium. 

In 1929, Harry Lubcke was an electrical engineering student at U.C. Berkeley. He  wasn’t necessarily looking to be a pioneer in television, but he got a job at a small laboratory at 202 Green Street in San Francisco, where he found himself working on the most novel electrical project of the day alongside none other than Philo T. Farnsworth. 

Under Farnsworth’s encouraging eye, Lubcke built scanning and synchronizing circuits for the first electronic television systems.  In 1930 he co-authored a pioneering technical paper with Farnsworth, The Transmission of Television Images, which was published in the February issue of San Francisco Engineers. 

Harry Lubcke was intimately involved in the technology that brought television to the point where, in 1948, the industry he’d helped create was ready to hand out awards.  So it comes as no surprise that it was Harry Lubcke who first suggested that, rather than the outdated Iconoscope, the trophy be named for the dominant camera tube of the day, the Image Orthicon.  

And the Image Orthicon, you’ll recall, was named in part for Philo Farnsworth’s original camera tube  – the Image Dissector – the breakthrough device he first he conceived as a teenager in 1921 and delivered on his workbench  in 1927.  And, the Image Orthicon was, in fact, based on a 1935 Farnsworth patent disclosed notable improvements to the Image Dissector. 

Lubcke’s first suggestion was to call the TV Academy’s new trophy “Immy,” and that was easily feminized to “Emmy.”  

The first Emmy Awards were presented on January 25, 1949 at the Hollywood Athletic Club.  The ceremony was largely a local affair, recognizing achievement only in the Los Angeles area.  It was hosted by Walter O’Keefe, tickets cost just $5, and a total of six categories were awarded.

Among the honorees were Shirley Dinsdale, a ventriloquist, who won for Outstanding Personality; the game show Pantomime Quiz Time won Most Popular Program; and KTLA, recognized for overall TV station performance.^⁠1 A special award was given to Louis McManus for designing the Emmy statuette.

Ironically, the first Emmy Awards ceremony was not telecast anywhere.  Televising the event did not begin until 1953.  By then, there were two Television Academies – the original ATAS in Los Angeles and the sister National Academy of Television Arts And Sciences (NATAS) in New York. 

On January 23, 1953 Los Angeles station KTTV was the first to carry any Emmy ceremony on the air, though it was still a local affair.  

On March 7, 1955, the two branches joined forces for the 7^th annual Emmy Awards, the first to be televised nationally, on NBC. That broadcast ceremony marked the Emmys’ transition to a national, primetime-focused event, aligning with the explosion of coast-to-coast network broadcasting in the early 1950s. 

Assuming the tradition continues, the Television Academy will present its 79^th Emmy Awards in the fall of 2027, just as (OK, “electronic”) television itself observes its Centennial.  

In 2003, the Academy finally recognized Farnsworth himself with the creation of the Philo T. Farnsworth Award for Corporate Achievement in Science and Technology.  That year, the first Farnsworth award was presented to the Sony Corporation in recognition of its long history of novel contributions to television technology, including advances in broadcast equipment, cameras, recording formats, and consumer video technologies.

In the meantime, it seems important to remember that every one of the thousands of local and national Emmy statuettes that have been awarded for every aspect of the art and science of television since 1949 bears, however faintly, the imprint of its true inventor.

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at ~9:30 into this interview for the Television Academy Archives, Pem Farnsworth shares her recollections of Harry Lubcke, the Image Orthicon Tube, and Harry’s role in naming the Emmy Awards.

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¹ There were other experimental TV stations in the Los Angeles area starting in the 1930s – most notably Don Lee Broadcasting’s W6XAO – but these broadcasts were non-commercial, irregular, and reached only a handful of receivers. KTLA is generally recognized as the first commercial television station in Los Angeles.  Owned by the Los Angeles Times, the station conducted experimental broadcasts in the early 1940s with the call sign W6XYZ, and began regularly scheduled programming on July 22, 1947.  The call sign was changed to KTLA when the FCC granted its commercial license later that year.   The “K” was designated for stations west of the Mississippi; the “TLA” stood for “Television Los Angeles.”

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[milestone_featured]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

³ More on Clark when we get to American Bandstand

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