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

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

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

Problem Solved

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Putting The Cable in “Cable”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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