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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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