100YearsOfTV

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

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

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

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

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

The war put the whole proposition on hold. 

First, A Public Service 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wait, We Can Make Money With This!?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Say Cheese!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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[milestone_featured]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– an electrical image

– a charge-storage target

– a low-velocity scanning beam

– a secondary-emission electron multiplier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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[milestone_featured]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Electron Bunching 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blips on a Flickering Screen 

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

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

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

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

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

Boxes for Bullets 

Philo Farnsworth also flourished during the war.  

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

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

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

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

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

What Did you Do In The War, Daddy? 

David Sarnoff assumed a somewhat higher profile during the war.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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[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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From 1939 through 1941, RCA’s experimental New York TV station occasionally broadcast local baseball games – mostly the Yankees and Dodgers, with the Giants appearing now and then.

Just before the Dodgers – Philadelphia Phillies game on July 1, 1941 viewers witnessed another historic television first.  For about ten seconds starting at precisely 2:29 PM, a clock face superimposed over a map of the United States appeared on the screen.  After five seconds of silence, an authoritative voice announced: “America Runs on Bulova Time.”  

Congratulations, America!  You have just seen your first television commercial!*

It was fortunate for Bulova that the 10-second spot only cost them $9.00^⁠1 because hardly anybody saw the ad. 

Expensive Furniture

When the FCC adopted the NTSC 525-line standard that March, the fewer than ten thousand television receivers in the New York metropolitan area were still operating with RCA’s proprietary 441-line format.  When the Commission ruled that commercial broadcasts had to use the new standard, all those early adopters suddenly found themselves  the proud owners of an elegant but useless piece of furniture.

With its formidable corporate resources, RCA was able to retool quickly.  Weeks after the new code was mandated, RCA was aggressively marketing their new TRK line of 12-inch, 9-inch and 5-inch receivers in advance of the July 1 launch of commercial broadcasting. Other companies like General Electric, DuMont and Philco quickly followed suit. Still, it is likely that fewer than 1,000 televisions were even capable of seeing that first commercial.

Production ramped up quickly through the remainder of 1941. Nearly ten thousand new sets were sold in the last half of the year as consumers rushed to adopt what was now a settled and promising new source of information and entertainment. 

Later that same July evening, CBS’s WCBW (now WCBS-TV) also launched its first day of scheduled programming, though it took a more conservative approach than NBC. The programming included news segments and a discussion show. It also included the one-time experimental broadcast of a game show called Truth or Consequences – the first game show on American television.  But CBS refrained from selling any commercial advertising until later in the year. 

With the airing of that first Bulova commercial in 1941, let’s back up for a second and revisit the purpose of this project, which is unashamedly dedicated to commemorating the invention of television and recognizing its actual inventor, Philo T. Farnsworth

Centennial?  What Centennial? 

The merit of Farnsworth’s achievement is a source of endless debate – and often outright dismissal – among the few who care to give the topic any consideration at all.

All of those mechanical systems became obsolete after 1927.  Over the past century electronic video has been the only kind that truly matters.

Some of the controversy stems from the prior achievements of others – like Britain’s John Logie Baird or Herbert Ives, Ernst Alexanderson, and Charles Jenkins in America – who did, in fact, manage to transmit blurry mirages over wires and wireless prior to 1927.  But all of those mechanical systems became obsolete after  1927.  Over the past century electronic video has been the only kind that truly matters. 

Video capable of transmitting clear and recognizable images requires scanning them with something other than perforated spinning wheels, and Farnsworth was the first to demonstrate that it could be done by scanning the actual electrons. It is just unfortunate that the fact of this revolutionary breakthrough has been buried under decades of corporate subterfuge, mostly promulgated by the likes of RCA.

While others were still struggling with, well… mechanical mechanics, Farnsworth was the first to apply the quantum mechanics of the 20th century to what has since become the most ubiquitous appliance on the planet. The significance of this breakthrough should not be lost to history because somebody else managed to use 19th century physics to transmit a picture in 1926 or – even worse – because somebody else applied for a patent in 1923.

In case you missed it: this is “the moment video arrived on the planet” – as recreated for the 50th Anniversary in 1977

The point through all of this is that Farnsworth’s first electronic video transmission on September 7, 1927 – how ever crude it was – was actually some kind of big goddammed deal, and not just another link in a long chain of inventions that led to formal television service in starting 1936 or 1939 or 1941.  

But Wait… There’s More!

Farnsworth’s first patents were the long-sought missing link. His first Image Dissector tubes were by no means perfect, but I’ll be making the case in future episodes of this podcast that the presence of his seminal ideas in later developments – most notably the Image Orthicon tube that created so many of the memorable television images of the 1940s and 50s – are further proof of the of the indispensable elegance of Farnsworth’s inventions.

And, then, there is the argument addressed in this episode that the advent of television should not be celebrated until the technology was refined enough to actually begin broadcasting programs, like radio had been doing for two decades before TV was ready for the marketplace. 

Historians too often refer to RCA’s use of television at the New York World’s Fair as the beginning of regular television service in the United States – precisely as RCA President David Sarnoff intended with his gun-jumping stunt in 1939.   

Rather than the 1939 World’s Fair, July 1, 1941, should be remembered as the day television truly entered American commerce. From Philo Farnsworth’s workbench in 1927 to a 10-second Bulova commercial in 1941, it had taken fourteen years for television to become a business, a medium, and a fixture in the nation’s living rooms.

It all came to a screeching halt five months later, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

*  A persistent industry legend asserts that the first Bulova TV “commercial” was actually  a modified test pattern displayed at the start of WNBT’s broadcast day—a full minute of a Bulova clock sweeping past 2:29 P.M. Contemporary documentation doesn’t support that story. NBC’s 1941 traffic logs and Bulova’s own advertising records describe only the ten-second graphic slide—map, clock, and tagline—aired just before the Dodgers–Phillies telecast . The test-pattern tale seems to be a later conflation of Bulova’s well-known sponsorship of radio time signals and the fact that television stations occasionally sold sponsored test patterns years later. The authenticated first paid commercial is the ten-second “America Runs on Bulova Time” spot that aired at 2:29:10 P.M. on July 1, 1941 as cited above.

¹ $9.00 in 1941 translates to roughly $200 in 2025.  For comparison, in 2025 ten seconds of advertising for a local sports broadcast will typically cost $1,500 – $2,500.  National broadcasts can cost $25-60,000 for a 30-second spot.

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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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When RCA began its experimental television broadcasts in the spring of 1939, the pictures were transmitted using a standard of RCA’s own design: 441-lines-per-frame at 30-frames-per-second.  Since the rest of the fledgling  industry had yet to adopt that or any other signal standard, RCA was on its own and lobbying mightily to make theirs the national standard.  

Despite RCA’s imperious influence, the Federal Communications Commission was not inclined to act hastily.  

Although RCA was the dominant player in the nascent field, it was not the only player.  Among its competitors was the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), under the direction of its own high-powered founder and CEO, William S. Paley.   

As early as 1931, CBS began experimenting with television under the leadership of Dr. Peter Goldmark, who had his own ideas for television.  

By 1940, Goldmark had developed a color television system, but it used a mechanical component – a spinning wheel of red, green, and blue filters that scanned the image sequentially to encode color into the video signal. Given that it was a mechanical throw-back, Goldmark’s system was not remotely compatible with the receivers RCA was starting to sell to the public. 

This emergence of at least two competing, incompatible systems made clear that a unified national standard was essential before television could proceed as a mass medium.

RCA lobbied heavily for the adoption its  441-line standard.  The company was, after all, heavily invested in the format, selling receivers to well-heeled first adopters, building out infrastructure and staging high-profile demonstrations.  Sarnoff and Co. waged a pragmatic argument: Let’s just get commercial television broadcasting started with the technology and audience base we have now. 

What Sarnoff did not bargain on, though, was one James L. Fly – President Roosevelt’s appointee to chair the FCC starting in 1939 – not long after RCA’s little show at the World’s Fair. 

James Fly was a lawyer, not an engineer, which made him less susceptible to RCA’s dazzlements. More importantly, Fly was the kind of New Deal-era trustbuster who took a dim view of monopoly power.  His first instinct was to resist Sarnoff’s advocacy of the RCA standards, rightfully anticipating that the extension of RCA’s control over radio patents and infrastructure would lead to yet another private monopoly over television.

Sarnoff, though not overtly partisan, was seen as an ally of conservative business interests, and quite publicly conducted himself as a corporate empire-builder.  He was already accustomed to operating a quasi-monopoly over radio, and showed every determination to expand his empire.

In this a contentious climate, FCC Chairman Fly froze the rollout of television, insisting that the industry adopt a universal standard before any commercially sponsored broadcasting could begin.  

In March 1940, the FCC announced the formation of the National Television System Committee (NTSC) to confer with the various interests and negotiate toward the kind of nationwide hardware compatibility television would need to proceed.  

Standards arrived on March 1, 1941, with the formal adoption of the system henceforth known by the acronym for the Committee’s name, NTSC. The new, official, nationwide standard called for a television signal comprised of 525 lines and 30-frames-per-second – not the 441 that RCA was already propagating into the market. 

The format was chosen in part to work within the United States standard 60 Hz AC power cycle.  To minimize interference between television signals and the electrical grid, the NTSC’s engineers synchronized the frame rate with the power frequency. 

To conserve bandwidth and reduce flicker, the NTSC  adopted interlaced scanning, in which each frame is divided into two interwoven fields, displayed at 60 fields per second to align with the 60 Hz power cycle. The signal was assigned 6 MHz of bandwidth for each of 13 (later 12) television picture-and-sound channels in a technically elegant system that harmonized television with the rhythm of the nation’s electric infrastructure.

Of course, the new standard had an immediate impact on the existing equipment base.  Companies who had invested prematurely in RCA’s 441-line format were forced to retool to match the new 525-line standard. Experimental receivers became outdated overnight, but the reset finally cleared the path for the first licensed commercial broadcasts to begin later that year. 

In 1953, the NTSC reconvened to add color to the system, remarkably doing so in a way that preserved compatibility with the black-and-white standard adopted twelve years earlier.

The NTSC’s 1941 framework proved to be much more than a technical achievement.  It laid  the foundation for a new medium that would shape American culture for generations, in everything from the nightly news to sitcoms, drama, sports, and entertainment. 

The NTSC standard remained in place for over four decades, defining the look and structure of American television until the advent of digital broadcasting in the late 1990s.

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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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The enduring relationship between television and professional sports in America began on August 26, 1939, when RCA’s experimental television station W2XBS broadcast the first televised Major League Baseball games – a doubleheader between the Cincinnati Reds and the Dodgers at Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field.

However, the Reds-at-Dodgers games were not the very first sports event broadcast on American television.  That distinction goes to a college baseball game between the Columbia Lions and the Princeton Tigers on May 17, 1939.

Shortly after the unveiling of television service at the New York World’s Fair (Countdown #94, Now We Add Sight to Sound), RCA showed their new-fangled medium to Bob Harron, the sports information director at Columbia University, who posed the obvious question:  “Did you ever think of doing a sporting event?”  

About two weeks later, RCA set up cameras at Columbia’s Baker Field to broadcast the second half of a Columbia-Princeton doubleheader with sportscaster Bill Stern calling the action. The telecast received considerable media coverage, including stories in the New York Times and Life Magazine reporting on Columbia’s 2-1 loss to Princeton in a 10-inning game.

Satisfied with the results of the Columbia experiment, RCA and NBC pitched the Brooklyn Dodgers about televising home games from Ebbets Field.

The double header between the Reds and the Dodgers was transmitted on RCA’s experimental station W2XBS from an antenna atop Manhattan’s Empire State Building.  Anyone within a roughly fifty-mile radius could watch the games, provided they were among the few hundred people fortunate enough to own – or have a neighbor who owned – a TV.

The games were covered by two cameras. One was fixed on the upper deck behind the batter’s box, providing a view of the entire field.  The other was stationed behind the visiting team’s dugout along the first-base line covering the action around home plate.  Once a ball was in play, the feed switched from the close up of the plate to the wide angle from the upper deck. 

Those video images were supplied by RCA’s temperamental Iconoscope.  Bright, sunlit portions of the field contrasted with creeping afternoon shadows, which video engineers struggled to balance.  Still, viewers could see the batters swing, the fielders in motion, and even an occasional if fuzzy glimpse of the ball itself. 

The box score for the historic first game reads like a comedy of errors – most of them performed on the field by the Brooklyn Dodgers:  walked-in runs, dropped flies, wild pitches, and passed balls at the plate.  The final score was Cincinnati 5, Dodgers 2.  

The Dodgers recovered in the second game, outscoring the Reds 6-1 to split the doubleheader. 

Play-by-play commentary was provided by Red Barber, already a well-known voice in radio who brought his legendary Southern drawl to the new medium.  Between the two games of the doubleheader, Barber kept the broadcast going with interviews in the stands and the press box.

There was no instant replay or fancy graphics, but this embryonic broadcast was enough to demonstrate how television could bring ‘the national pastime’ straight into the nation’s living rooms. 

The timing of the milestone is also significant: These games were played just a few months after RCA’s widely publicized TV launch at the New York World’s Fair – and less than a week before Hitler’s invasion of Poland and the start of World War II. 

The war postponed the widespread adoption of television for  another six years, but this first Major League Baseball broadcast established a template for what would eventually become one of television’s most enduring staples. 

From Ebbets Field in 1939 to global satellite broadcasts decades later, television and baseball grew up together. Those flickering images added a new visual dimension to the sport’s ‘golden age’ in the 1950s and 60s. 

Television changed the way fans saw the game. Over the ensuing decades, the revenue generated from television would reshape the economics of not only baseball, but all of America’s major sports. 

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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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If David Sarnoff can be recalled for any single ambition, it is his desire to be remembered as the man who singlehandedly delivered television unto the world.

By 1939, Sarnoff was the president of the Radio Corporation of America, the world’s largest manufacturer of radios and phonographs, and the parent company of NBC, the America’s largest radio network.

Over more than a decade starting in the late 1920s, David Sarnoff had spent an estimated $10 million of RCA’s profits (that’s roughly $240 million in 2025 dollars) on television research. Much of that money was spent developing an in-house alternative to Philo Farnsworth’s patents with Vladimir Zworykin’s Iconoscope;^⁠1 the rest was spent on litigation to invalidate or commandeer those patents.  By 1939, RCA’s Board of Directors was starting to question when they might see some sort of payoff from all that investment of time and treasure. 

A Quirky Bit of Gear

The Iconoscope of the mid-late 1930s worked about as well as Farnsworth’s Image Dissector.  Both tubes required prodigious amounts of light to produce a usable picture. But the Iconoscope was a radically different configuration, owing in part to the imperative of circumventing Farnsworth.  But the Iconoscope was such a quirky bit of gear that one RCA engineer expressed his frustration with it by saying “Getting a decent picture out of an Iconoscope took a miracle, a sweat towel, and a stiff drink afterward.”

Meanwhile, Farnsworth had won all but a few very minor cases in his ongoing litigation with RCA . 

By 1939, Farnsworth and his tiny ‘lab gang’ had compiled a portfolio of more than 100 U.S. and foreign patents that covered all the essentials of electronic video: scanning, synchronization, electron beam deflection, and the novel but indispensable sawtooth wave.  On top of the patent office’s 1935 decision (Countdown #97, Priority of Invention) this collection of patents made Farnsworth’s grip in the new art of television all but impenetrable.

All of this uncertainty around the technology meant that the industry could not even discuss the kinds of standards that would necessary for an orderly introduction of the new medium. 

Nevertheless, Sarnoff informed his Board that he was going to launch commercial television, and he had the perfect venue in mind: the 1939 New York World’s Fair. 

The Fair opened to the general public on April 30, 1939.  Sarnoff opened the RCA Pavilion in front of an Iconoscope camera.  

“Now we add sight to sound,” Sarnoff proclaimed, boldly declaring the arrival of “a new art so important in its implications that it is bound to affect all society.” At least he was right about that much, if premature by nearly a decade. 

Sarnoff’s proclamation was followed by a brief address by Franklin Roosevelt – the first appearance on television by a sitting U.S. president.  

What RCA’s cranky Iconoscope could not reveal was that the Federal Communications Commission had yet to grant anybody permission to engage in any kind of commercial television broadcasting. 

Only a few hundred people saw the inaugural broadcast, transmitted live by RCA’s experimental station W2XBS^⁠2 in Manhattan to a few hundred receivers scattered around the fairgrounds and selected venues in and around New York City. 

For the moment, Sarnoff’s quest was strictly symbolic.  As noted, there were still no national television signal standards, and there were fewer than 1,000 TV receivers, most of them owned by RCA or department stores.  The sparse programming RCA offered in the months that followed was still strictly experimental, cobbled together from news summaries, boxing matches, and vaudeville acts.

You Spent How Much??

The true nature of the World’s Fair event was spelled out in the May 1939 edition of Fortune magazine, with a headline that called the future of television “A $13,000,000 ‘If.'”  

Most of that gamble was attributed to the fortune that Sarnoff had spent on television technology and litigation over the previous decade.  In contrast, Fortune estimated Farnsworth’s expenditures at something in the neighborhood of just $1 million.  Such is the difference between actually inventing something and trying to engineer and litigate around it. 

Unfortunately, the Fortune article also helped shape much of the public’s early grasp of television’s origin story, by introducing at least two lingering  myths. 

In the first paragraph, the article says that… 

Long after the World Fair has become one of grandfather’s stories, April 30 will still be the day when they formally started television service in the US. 

In fact the occasion only signaled the beginning of a new phase of experimentation, one in which the public was invited to participate so long as they could pony up between $200 – $600 ($5,000-$13,000 in 2025 dollars) for a 5″ to 12″ television set. 

Then, in one of its more enduring misstatements, Fortune asserts that… 

…television is not an invention at all, but the product of thousands of often unrelated experiments … pieced together with the painstaking care of a paleontologist assembling the brittle, calcified shards of a dinosaur’s skull.

So begins the false construct that television was “too complex” to have been invented by any single individual.” 

While it’s true that television in the late 1930s was the culmination of a broad and costly engineering effort, Fortune conveniently ignores Farnsworth’s profound, singular breakthrough – the one invention that made everything that followed possible – including and especially the so-called “launch” at the New York World’s Fair in the spring of 1939. 

That event was very much unlike what had transpired in Britain three years earlier.  There, trials were conducted, technologies were evaluated and selected, and only then did the government agencies authorized to do so permit the BBC to begin regularly scheduled broadcasting.  

The comparison makes Sarnoff’s World’s Fair gambit seem all the more desperate.

Tears In His Eyes

That Fortune article does, however, offer the first hint of what was soon to come. After years of contentious litigation, the article speculates that “a cross licensing agreement between RCA and Farnsworth is imminent.” 

Indeed, a few months after the Fortune article, RCA accepted the first license in its corporate history that required the company to pay royalties for the use of an outside inventor’s patents, to the tune of at least $1 million.  

Legend has it that RCA’s attorney had tears in his eyes as he signed the agreement.  

But that was in late September, 1939 – just a couple of weeks after Hitler’s invasion of Poland.

The real advent of television in America would have to wait until World War II was over.  

The 1939 World’s Fair did not in fact mark the true birth of a new mass medium^⁠3. But it was a turning point — the moment television was publicly declared not merely an experiment, but as a promise of corporate destiny bearing a presidential seal of approval. 

Newsreel footage of the 1939 World’s Fair he literally cost us six months what was he gonna do not sure narrate

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¹ The history promulgated over decades by RCA cites Zworykin as the inventor of the Iconoscope. But the defining feature of the Iconoscope  – the “storage principle” – was first discovered and patented by the Hungarian physicist and inventor Kalman Tihanyi. In 1926, Tihanyi filed a patent describing a system with a mosaic photoelectric ‘modules’ in which each element “stores” a charge proportional to light intensity. He subsequently filed related patents in Britain (1930), France (1931), and the United States (filed 1930, granted 1938) under the title “Radioskop.”

Tihanyi’s innovation added an important improvement to existing video camera technology (i.e. Farnsworth’s Image Dissector) by generating a stronger electrical signal from available light. RCA and Vladimir Zworykin later incorporated this same charge-storage principle into the iconoscope, which is why Tihanyi is often regarded as the uncredited engineer whose insight made Zworykin’s camera tube truly functional.

It should also be noted that that the “storage principle” is one of several components designed into the Image Orthicon tube of the late 1940s and early 1950s, while other elements derive directly from Farnsworth’s Image Dissector. 

² RCA started conducting television transmissions in 1931 with an experimental transmitter licensed as W2XBS located atop the Empire State Building. The call sign meant “W-2-Experimental-Broadcasting-Station.  When the FCC finally authorized commercial TV broadcasting – two years after Sarnoff’s NY World’s Fair “launch” – W2XBS became WNBT, for “NBC Television.”  This is the station / call sign from which all of NBCs early programs – Texaco Star, Theater, Howdy Doody, The Today Show, etc.– were broadcast to the New York metropolitan area.  In 1954, the station changed its call sign to WRCA-TV in order to align with NBC’s parent company. In 1960 the call letters became WNBC-TV (or  just “WNBC”), which the station still uses today .

³ In 1989, People Magazine published a special edition observing “TV’s 50th Anniversary” – pegging the occasion to “4/30/39: Commercial TV begins at the N.Y. World’s Fair.”  The statement is false on its face. The FCC did not permit commercial time to be sold on television until 1941.

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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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Despite the tremendous engineering strides made in the decade after its invention, by 1936 the commercial adoption of television in the United States remained mired in litigation between Farnsworth – who had invented it – and RCA’s David Sarnoff – who wanted to control it.

There were no such impediments in the United Kingdom, where John Logie Baird started using the BBC radio airwaves for experimental television transmissions in 1929.

At the start, Baird’s mechanical ‘Televisor’ was capable of only 30-lines per frame, producing blurry, flickering silhouettes not much larger than a postage stamp.

By the mid 30s, Baird’s system was capable of 240 lines at 25 frames per second, but even that herculean achievement paled in comparison to fully electronic systems on both sides of the Atlantic that were already producing more than 400 lines at 30 frames per second.

Sticking with his antiquated approach cost Baird dearly.

The Race Is On

In 1933 his floundering enterprise was rescued by British Gaumont, the U.K. branch of the French Gaumont Film Company, founded by Léon Gaumont in Paris in the 1890s.  Gaumont’s primary interests were in film production and exhibition, but they were also wary of the impact that television could have on their business. This concern prompted their alliance with Baird who, if nothing else, had become a recognized name in the industry.

The good news for Baird was that for the first time he had sufficient capital to continue developing his mechanical television system. The bad news for Baird was that his new benefactors could see what an anachronism they’d invested in, and, after reducing Baird  to a nominal role in his own company, they went looking for something closer to the state of the art.

And here, not surprisingly, is where the race for television in Britain begins to unfold along the same lines as the race in the United States.

By 1934, RCA had finally developed a video camera tube that served David Sarnoff’s quest to ‘work around’ Farnsworth’s patents – Vladimir Zworykin’s awkward but useful ‘Iconoscope.’  At about the same time,  Britain’s Electrical and Musical Industries (EMI) began experimenting with an identical tube it called the ‘Emitron.’  The common lineage of the Iconoscope and the Emitron is too complex to go into here, but suffice it to say they were the exact same tube.

With television on its corporate horizon, EMI formed an alliance in 1934 with British Marconi, the venerable pioneer in wireless communication.  Under the umbrella of a new subsidiary called Marconi-EMI Television Co., Ltd., EMI contributed its research facilities, where Isaac Shoenberg led its television laboratory; Marconi contributed its radio transmission and broadcasting expertise, and – most importantly – its close personal and corporate connections to the BBC.

Well Surprise Surprise!

In addition to close ties to the BBC, EMI was closely affiliated with… wait for it… whole else but… the Radio Corporation of America!

RCA and EMI were very similar companies with very similar pedigrees operating on opposite sides of the Atlantic.^⁠1  Their oddly incestuous  relationship went a step further in 1934, when the two corporate behemoths negotiated a patent cross-license.  That arrangement gave RCA access to EMI’s cutting-edge audio technology.^⁠2 in exchange for EMI gaining access to RCA’s electronic video technology – including the recently introduced Iconoscope.  It wasn’t long before the Iconoscope’s twin, the Emitron, started showing up in experimental British television studios.

The arrangement created dire consequences for John Logie Baird.

All of its alliances and resources gave Marconi-EMI Television access to the state-of-the-art in both content production and broadcasting.

Baird, on the other hand, was still strapped to his spinning wheels and mirrors.

There was only one place British Gaumont could turn to keep the Baird name competitive: to America, and Philo T. Farnsworth, who was invited to sail across the Atlantic to showcase his system in 1934.  Two weeks later Farnsworth and Company sailed back to America with his first bona fide patent license – and a check for $50,000 cash. 

It was not hard to see the limitations of Baird’s mechanical system, but the BBC had to be judicious in its proceedings.  In 1934, the British Post Office — which regulated broadcasting  like the FCC in America — created the Television Advisory Committee, chaired by Lord Selsdon, to evaluate  the competing systems and recommend how the BBC should proceed.

But between Marconi-EMI’s access to RCA’s technology – and their long standing relationship with the BBC – Baird never really stood a chance.

The BBC built two studios at the Alexandra Palace, on a hilltop on the outskirts of London: Studio A for Baird, and Studio B for EMI.  From an antenna atop the “Ally Pally,” the dueling signals broadcast over a radius of 30 miles, effectively covering all of greater London.

Though still technically just the start of the competitive trial, EMI treated its inaugural electronic broadcast from Studio B on November 2, 1936 with the enough pomp and fanfare to infer that it was truly the official start of television service Britain.  Most historians recognize that broadcast as the world’s first regularly scheduled television broadcast service.

On The Air!

In a documentary film of the event – produced by focusing a 35mm film camera at a cathode ray tube display – you can hear the voice of BBC radio veteran Leslie Michael announce “Vision is on… Sound is on. ” Then stage hand blows a whistle, signals a thumbs up and “the station goes on the air.”

On roughly 500 television sets scattered around London – in dealers’ showrooms, laboratories, and the homes of BBC executives and  staff – probably fewer than 1,000 actual viewers saw a white-tied orchestra conductor wave his baton, followed by the satin gowned figure of renowned English actress and singer Adèle Dixon stepping before the camera to sing a song composed specially for the event:

A mighty maze of mystic, magic rays 
Is all about us in the blue…

A filmed-from-the-screen record of the first BBC-TV broadcast

Baird also transmitted something that day, but he was still relying on a 240 line mechanical scanner and could only transmit film, rather than a live studio scene like the EMI broadcast.

Despite his license with Farnsworth, Baird was unable to make effective use of the Image Dissector – even after Farnsworth himself retuned to London in the summer of 1936 to try to get Baird back in the game.

Within three months, the results of the trials were so lopsided that the BBC stopped using the Baird equipment entirely, formally ending the “trial” in February 1937.

The BBC’s adoption of EMI’s electronic television effectively marks the end of the mechanical era of television that began with Paul Nipkow in the 1880s.

In 1937, the BBC settled on the EMI 405-line system, making it the world’s first electronic TV standard to be adopted for regular broadcasting. Over the next two years, programming ran at least two hours every day with adaptations of theater, light musical revues, cooking demonstrations, newsreel,  commentary, and interviews. In 1938, the BBC produced its first original television play, The Maker of Dreams.

And then, like everything else about television, the service was suspended with the outbreak of World War II in September, 1939. 

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In the years that followed, nearly every other industrialized country launched some kind of ‘official’ television service.

In the U.S., RCA attempted a premature launch of television service from the New York World’s Fair in April, 1930, well before any signal standards had been settled or the FCC sanctioned commercial television broadcasting. That event will be addressed in Countdown #94.

Want more on the BBC launch in 1936?  I just found a whole documentary about it on the YouTube, but it will not permit an embed so you’ll just have to click here and go there. 

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1. RCA was, in fact, the RCA/Victor Company, the “Victor” part derived from its acquisition of the Victor Talking Machines Company in 1929.  Both Victor Talking Machines and EMI traced their origins to the inventor of the Gramophone, Emil Berliner, and both used Berliner’s logo and motto: the white terrier “Nipper” cocking his head in front of a gramophone speaker and listening to “his master’s voice.” 
2. Among the EMI patents RCA cross-licensed were Alan Blumlein’s 1931 patents for “binaural sound,” which laid the foundation for modern stereo recording and reproduction, describing not only two-channel audio but also methods for cutting stereo grooves into phonograph records. His concepts predated widespread stereo use by decades, yet proved invaluable once magnetic tape and LP technology caught up after World War II. Tragically, Blumlein was killed in 1942 while testing radar equipment, leaving others to profit from ideas far ahead of their time.

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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 the summer of 1936, athletic spectacle, technical innovation, and political propaganda converged in Germany for the first-ever televising of an international sporting event: the Berlin Olympics.  All the major players in the global race for television were on the scene, including the man whose invention nearly ten years earlier made the moment possible: Philo T. Farnsworth. 

Germany’s National Socialist government (aka ‘the Nazis’) – eager to showcase its technological superiority – invested heavily in a television initiative led by Fernseh AG.  Fernseh organized a consortium that combined the engineering expertise of Bosch with the optics of Zeiss Ikon and the radio capabilities of Telefunken.  

Despite all the German expertise, the breakthrough that made the television broadcasts possible came from abroad: In 1934, Fernseh secured a license from Philo T. Farnsworth for the use of his Image Dissector — the revolutionary camera tube at the heart of all electronic video.  For Farnsworth, the license provided some funding for his ongoing legal battle with RCA; For Fernseh, it gave German engineers the technology they needed to accelerate their television development in time for the Games.

Of course, television receivers had yet to find their way into any German homes, so the regime built 25 public viewing halls — known as “television parlors” — in Berlin and Potsdam. These venues, outfitted with projection screens and receivers, allowed audiences of 40 to 100 people to watch the Games in rotating shifts. 

The Fernseh-led consortium employed a hybrid system, utilizing both film and live video.  In some cases, Olympic events were recorded on film, quickly developed and then transmitted through film chains that employed the Farnsworth Image Dissector. While not as immediate as the live transmissions, the workaround improved image quality and reliability.

Notably, Philo Farnsworth and his wife ‘Pem’ (nee Elma Gardner) were present in Berlin during the Olympics. As a guest of Fernseh AG, he witnessed firsthand how his invention was used — not in American living rooms, but in the heart of Nazi Germany. 

Only select events were televised, including track and field, boxing, rowing, and gymnastics. The broadcasts were transmitted via VHF and received via closed-circuit transmission only in the official parlors. For the first time, a relatively large audience could witness live sports from a distance, a feat previously unimaginable.

The 1936 Olympic broadcast was as much propaganda as it was progress. It was designed to project an image of German supremacy in both sport and science. But behind the scenes, the televising was powered by American innovation, and personally witnessed by the inventor whose own country had yet to fully recognize or benefit from his work. 

Over the two-week span of the Olympics, more than 150,000 viewers tuned in as Jesse Owens – a black man from America – won the gold medal in four prestigious track events.  History has long since noted the irony of this black American track star dismantling the myth of Aryan supremacy that Hitler’s Games were meant to establish. And all the drama unfolded through the cameras and viewing halls that were themselves based on an American invention. 

The legacy was immediate and far-reaching. The BBC launched its regular television service the following year, having observed the Berlin model. NBC would follow three years later in the U.S.  

[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 April, 1934, the United States Patent Office held its final hearing in Patent Interference No. 64,027 on the “issue of… a transmitting apparatus for television.”  

The contenders in this case were  Philo T. Farnsworth and the engineer spearheading RCA’s television program, Vladimir K. Zworykin.  At issue was Farnsworth’s patent #1,773,980, which was first filed on January 7, 1927 and granted on August 26, 1930 – eight months before one of his backers sent a telegram to another backer declaring “the damn thing works!” 

On the other side of the case, RCA was defending an application that Zworykin had filed for a television system while he was employed by Westinghouse in 1923, which, the patent office would eventually rule, did not work. 

The point of contention  was Claim 15 of the Farnsworth patent, which describes…

“An apparatus for television  which comprises means for forming an electrical image, and means for scanning each elementary area of the electrical image, and means for producing a train of electrical energy in accordance with the intensity of the elementary area of the electrical image being scanned.

This paragraph, first composed by Farnsworth patent attorney Donald Lippincott in 1927, is the legal language that announces the arrival of electronic video on the planet – first in the summer of 1921, in the mind of a 14-year-old farmer’s son, and in the summer of 1927, on a workbench in San Francisco.  

Claim 15 describes the indispensable principle that made real television as know it   possible:  Where the spinning disks of the mechanical systems scanned the light,  Farnsworth’s system was the first that scanned the electrons. 

In 1930 – seven years after applying for his patent – Vladimir Zworykin visited Farnsworth’s laboratory in San Francisco.  At the time, he was still employed by Westinghouse, and was given a three-day tour of Farnsworth’s operations with the understanding that Westinghouse was considering taking a license for Farnsworth’s patents. 

When he was handed a freshly-fabricated Image Dissector tube, everybody present heard him say

This is a beautiful instrument.
I wish that I had invented it.

 Four years later, RCA tried to make the case that he had.

While it’s true that Zworykin did have a working camera tube by 1934 – the Iconoscope – the documentation proves that it was not the same device he’d applied for a patent on in 1923.  That did not stop RCA from making the case, but the evidence was slim, to put it mildly.  

Farnsworth’s case was supported by extensive laboratory records, including the historic note that “the received line picture was evident this time” from the evening of September 7, 1927. 

RCA, on the other hand, was unable to produce any meaningful documentation of Zworykin’s case.  They could not produce a tube from 1923, 1924, or 1925. There were some vague verbal accounts, but those were dismissed by the examiners as unreliable, having been “influenced by later events and knowledge.” In other words, when it mattered most, RCA was unable to produce any evidence that would support Zworykin’s claim to have invented a working Iconoscope in 1923.

RCA tried to derail Farnsworth’s testimony that he had first conceived of his Image Dissector tube as a high school freshman.  Farnsworth’s story stood in stark contrast to Zworykin’s extensive credentials, his education, and his years of service with companies such as Westinghouse and RCA.

Unfortunately for RCA’s attorney’s, Farnsworth clearly recalled discussing his ideas with his high school science teacher in Rigby, Idaho in the late winter of 1922.  A team of attorneys representing both sides of the case ventured out to Salt Lake City, Utah, and tracked down Justin Tolman, who clearly recalled the freshman who had cajoled way into his senior science classes.  Tolman then produced a sketch that Farnsworth himself had drawn for him after class one day.  

Tolman’s recollection, and the sketch he produced, were not instrumental in the Patent Office’s deliberations, because Tolman was not an expert his field.   But that did not preclude a decisive decision on Farnsworth’s favor.  

In its final ruling rendered on July 22, 1935, the patent examiners ruled that “Zworykin had no right to make the case” because

• his 1923 application lacked any language that described the pivotal “electrical image” included in Farnsworth’s patent,
• because the technology described in the application could not produce an electrical image, and..
• because the device now in evidence (the Iconoscope) did not operate in the same manner as the device described in the application. 

After a few more pages of legal discourse, the decision ends with an unequivocal declaration:

Priority of invention is awarded Philo T. Farnsworth.

Unfortunately, this resounding proclamation was followed by one more little sentence: “Limit of Appeal: August 22, 1935.” 

In other words, RCA could still appeal the case; the company waited the full six months to file their appeal, which was not heard until January 1936. The patent office took two months more to consider the appeal, finally upholding the original decision in March, 1936, 

After the initial appeal was denied, RCA’s still had an option to take the case to a civil court – and took another six months before deciding not to. 

This news was welcomed by the beleaguered Farnsworth camp, but there was little cause for celebration, for the pattern was clearly drawn: Farnsworth’s entanglements with RCA would go on for years and placed the future of television in a perpetual state of suspended animation.

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