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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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