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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 W2XBS2 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 medium3. 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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