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Thursday Night TV History: TV Could Have Shaped the ’30s and ’40s
In last week’s premiere edition of Thursday Night TV History, we talked about the little-known, dollars-and-cents realities of how television came to smaller cities and rural areas between the coasts. Many commenters on that thread contributed their own memories of what the first generation of TV viewers thought about what they were seeing. That was the start of American television as we know it. But what about television as we don’t know it? What about the forgotten What-Ifs that could have happened differently? This week’s TV History is a couple of examples of paths not taken, or long abandoned. First of all, television might have come to the American home much earlier; fifteen to twenty years earlier, in most cases.
Here’s history as it was: A relative handful of rich or fairly well to do people had TV in their homes before World War II. (One of them was Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had a set at his Hudson Valley estate.) The price of a television set had dropped since they first went on sale in 1939, but was still roughly half as much as a car. Of the roughly 5,000 U.S. sets sold by late 1941, about 2,000 were in the New York City area, more than half of them in bars or a handful of other public places like hotel lobbies, department stores, or the YMCA. The other 3,000 were split between Schenectady-Albany, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles. There, too, most people’s first encounter with TV wasn’t in someone’s living room, but in a bar watching wrestling. Pictures were small—about the size of a 12- to 14-inch screen today—but clear enough to be seen halfway down the bar.
The war froze TV in place, like many other civilian industries that used strategically important materials. When the war ended, it took years to get television going. As late as 1950, most homes did not have TV, and many if not most people outside of major cities hadn’t seen it yet even then. The times when that all changed across America was the subject of last week’s post, and the national, coast to coast television culture that rose afterward in the Fifties played a major, lasting role in shaping American politics and history. Suppose all of that happened in the Thirties instead of the Fifties. It could have happened.
Herbert Hoover, in 1927 still only the Secretary of Commerce, spoke in Washington and was seen in New York in the most well-publicized of early TV demonstrations. In 1928, when the National Broadcasting Company was not quite two years old, its visionary boss David Sarnoff declared that the United States could have a workable television system, complete with strong stations and affordable home receivers, ready by 1932. We now know that in reality, it would take another seven years just to get a start, and another twenty years—1948–before a combination of much cheaper sets and more available stations began the real television boom. Between these years, of course, there were two major, shattering events that Sarnoff could not have predicted: the Great Depression and World War II. They were the most important reasons why TV, anticipated for so long, took so long to arrive in most people’s homes.
But they weren’t the whole reason. Another major reason was rising expectations of what kind of picture quality the public would accept. By the early Thirties, electro-mechanical television, the kind that used a spinning disc to create a business card-sized picture, was literally fading from the picture.
Mechanical picture scanning at the TV station would hang on longer, but by 1931 it was understood that television would reach the home with picture tubes; silent, not nearly as prone to go out of adjustment, and bigger than a scanning disc’s picture. Not hugely so; a five- or six-inch round tube, looking much like an oscilloscope’s, would have a picture about the size of a postcard. You could have a small screen on the face of a table radio, about the size of the loudspeaker, or in a radio-style large console for the living room. To make the picture bigger for family viewing, the tube was placed facing straight up, underneath a hinged lid, like a phonograph’s. The bottom of the lid was a magnifying mirror. FDR’s set was one of those.
Here’s a lineup of sets ready to offer to the public in 1931, the end of the mechanical television mini-craze, and by now almost all of them have cathode ray “roundie” screens of the kind we described.
This Prohibition-era TV “showroom”, probably at a trade show, was already obsolete because Depression business conditions were about to send television back to the laboratories. What if Wall Street’s Black Friday, Tuesday, etc. arrived a few years later, or hadn’t been as cataclysmic? What if we’d settled for the kind of TV picture that would have been affordable in the Thirties, Depression or not?
Those dawn-of-television sets had a picture of 120 vertical lines and were shortly to jump to 160. That’s a cruder picture than we’re used to, but this is 1932 we’re talking about, and the smallness of the screen minimizes the defects. Lower picture detail means you can send it with less bandwidth, so the FCC will allow a frequency in the shortwave bands, way down where the entire country could tune in a signal, as opposed to the Very High Frequencies where TV would end up, signals that can only travel as far as the horizon. Networking wouldn’t even have been needed for superpower, clear channel stations with regional or even national range. “Low def” TV would have been much cheaper, for broadcaster and home viewer alike. Prices of electronic goods in that period tracked vacuum tube counts pretty closely. The most popular American radio chassis of 1935-55 used five tubes; RCA’s postwar mass produced VHF set would use 30 tubes to produce a 525 line picture. A 160 line set in 1932 could have used a dozen tubes. A TV set would have been twice as expensive as a radio, not six times as much. It would have been easier for families to get in on TV, and it would have caught on faster. Above all, it would have caught on earlier, with unpredictable historical effects.
Television would have grown up more or less alongside radio, probably by merely being there to broadcast a comedian’s monologue with sight as well as sound. Political candidates would have discovered the uses of TV a generation earlier. Would a man in a wheelchair have been able to get elected if the 1932 election had been televised? TV defenders say, of course, because the all-seeing Eye of the tube would put all of his positive qualities on even greater display. Regardless of how you or I feel about FDR, I’m not at all sure that’s true.
Apropos of Beto-mania. And BTW, Father is still voting Conservative.
I’m wondering if the lower barriers to entry on the consumption side would have been equally present on the production side, that is, would it have been possible to have a pirate TV station the same way you could have a pirate radio station? Or would the bandwidth and other requirements still be too closely regulated?
Everything would have been much cheaper, and probably would have followed radio’s more relaxed practices. Regular radio stations could be refitted for simultaneous TV; it wouldn’t have required a whole separate complex and set of equipment. Of course, the FCC (or its pre-New Deal equivalent at the Commerce Department) did track down pirate radio stations but plenty managed to stay on the air.
I assume some of the programming in the thirties dealt with politics. Did they show FDR in a wheelchair to that small group who were watching or did they hide it like the rest of the press?
I think they would have minimized it, but don’t forget, the press didn’t take orders from FDR or the Secret Service until he was elected, and much more so after he became truly popular. He’d have to have gotten elected first to have the clout to get that done.
Almost none of the earliest TV survives. There are a few primitive video discs of 1929-32 but they’re all British. US TV essentially stopped public demonstrations from about 1933 to 1936.
Sounds like more leftist fake news to me. Even back then.
Thanks for another illuminating post. I hope you don’t mind another space analogy. The first funder of my Dad’s predecessor system to GPS was Chester Kleczek of Naval Air Systems Command. In 1969, he was asked what a civilian receiver would cost once the system was operational. He estimated that it would be equivalent to a new color TV. Today, your GPS is free in your smart phone. A decade ago, your Garmin was about the cost of a color TV.
It’s an excellent analogy. Everything in tech is breathtakingly expensive until the point when it becomes jaw-droppingly cheap. I used to hold up a 1 gig micro SD chip and tell my kids, “You know how much this much digital storage cost when I was your age? One billion dollars.”
Your insider info is always so interesting!
Thanks, Righty!
Now here’s a country that was determined to get the most out of Thirties television:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQ208YIOK94
But if TV had spread earlier, would we have had Marx Brothers movies, or Gone with the Wind ? Tradeoffs ?
A new Silverspot Cinema just opened nearby. Their selling point is serving drinks and/or meals to your seat. Vs. TV dinners ? More tradeoffs.
The only time I see a bunch of other people during a TV show is the Superbowl.
Now with smartphones, you never even see anyone’s eyes.
The small screen, sorry, is the mark of the end of our civilization.
It’s a good question. TV was recognized as a potential threat to theaters as early as 1929. When studios first began putting TV broadcast rights in actors’ contracts, quite a number had no idea what it was. It’s doubtful that low definition TV, pretty much restricted to small screens, would have muscled the movies aside the way they did twenty years later. BTW, it was a screening of Gone With the Wind that gave CBS inventor Peter Goldmark the conviction that starting TV in black and white was a waste of time; better, he and CBS felt, to hold back TV until color was ready.
Small screen TV wouldn’t have had vistas like Bonanza; it would have been primarily a close up medium. And yes, higher definition TV would have eventually been demanded.
BTW, Richard, I recently found an issue of American Heritage’s Invention and Technology magazine with a letter to the editor from your Dad. He was remarkably patient about a misleading article about GPS. I was already steamed up about the article, which let one hambone steal credit for the whole thing, but I have to say Dr. Easton was a perfect gentleman, making his points as coolly as Mr. Spock.
Wow that was good. The emphasis on physical fitness (that TV show early in the video) – it is chillingly similar to the modern Left and their Nazi-like health stuff. Great footage of Mussolini and Hitler.
Here’s a rarely seen 1939 film, loosely inspired by Orson Welles’s The War of the Worlds broadcast of the previous October. It has a certain grim relevance today: a political machine has to somehow discourage voting, at any cost. So they take over the TV station and broadcast fake newsreels of the east coast being destroyed by tidal waves, causing mass panic across the nation. It’s the kind of spectacular disaster movie we’d associate with a later time in film history, but here it is.
From the TV angle, take a look at something unusually intelligent: almost all 20s–30s films that feature television have a vague mockup of a big screen that fades in with a picture of the future Leader. This one, as unpretentious as it is, has an actual sense of what real TV sets would look like: different in a classroom than in a plush apartment, different in a barber shop than in an office.
Red Wave ?
Surprising special effects
Comparing the low resolution of the early television to the experience in the local cinema would have probably doomed TV and smothered it in its crib. The novelty would have worn off pretty quickly.
I would like to commend the German cameraman from the Olympic soccer game footage embedded in the comments. If we only knew the identity of the man who invented the swishpan! Of course, those were all one camera shoots and it wouldn’t be until much later that a director would invent the phrases “Jesus, you’re on! Watch your (expletive) tally!” and a long time favorite of mine, “Jesus, focus is not (expletive) optional!” We are not an exceptionally reverent bunch in television, but there are a lot of directors who think Jesus should take control and save their show from the camera guys and they call on Him often.
This might explain the switch from R blue to red. A subliminal fear reference to the Reds are coming ! for voters who are of the age who vote ?
Actually, I think Nancy Reagan is to blame. Nancy became associated with the color. Somewhere between 1980 and the re-election in 1984 Republicans embraced “Nancy Reagan Red.”
As for your question, it is definitely the reason why the Cincinnati baseball team changed its name for a period of time in the 1950s. The club was known as the Redlegs from 1953-60 and then went back to Reds in 1961. Just in time to lose to the Yankees in the World Series in 5 games.
The Red Sox are doing OK this year.
The Germans, like the Baird company in Britain, used a variety of techniques to generate a picture, electronic scanning, flying spot electromechanical scanning for close ups and one shots, and intermediate film, maybe the maddest TV production format of all.
Germany’s official TV service was, at first, 180 lines in 1935. For the Olympics the following year AFAIK they made the big jump to 441 lines. They bought Farnsworth electronic cameras and got excellent pictures–something about buying from the likes of Sarnoff , Zworykin and Blumlein seemed to put them off.
But as is covered in Television Under the Swastika, intermediate film made it possible to have some of the best of both worlds, film and TV. A special 35mm newsreel camera on the roof of a truck feeds the film into a developing tank below, in the body of the truck, which 30 seconds later is scanned for broadcast, retaining a high quality pure film copy that can be reused, even in movie theaters–rare in the decades before videotape. Baird did this technique in their London studio but had a dreadful time with it. For some unexplained reason they didn’t get a good picture out of their U.S. made Farnsworth cameras, which seem to have been scapegoats for Baird’s many other problems, among them a 240 line picture compared to EMI’s electronic 405 lines.
John Logie Baird didn’t invent the concept of flying spot scanning, but he was certainly the one who made it famous, who rode the idea to reality and to fame himself. Flying spot scanners will be the subject of a soon-to-be edition of Thursday TV history, because they’re strange, cheap, and seemingly eternal. And who wouldn’t like to be that?
Films featuring television as an advanced technology of the future go back almost to the beginning of film, but it was a rare premise until radio became an everyday, in-home reality, circa 1921-25. Once it did, the natural question was “what’s next? when is radio vision going to arrive?” Video would be an occasional presence in movies like “Metropolis” (1927), “Just Imagine” (1930) and “Modern Times” (1936).
But one of the earliest and funniest is still “International House” (1933), slightly bawdy and naughty just months before the enforcement of the Motion Picture Code that as we all know, chased vice out of the movies forever.
To the degree that one should take the technology of a Prohibition-era comedy, “International House” is a peculiar blend of actual TV tech of the era (that big, arc light motion picture lamphouse feeding some sort of scanning disc) and an 1880–1910 popular conception of television as being like an infinite telescope, requiring no camera or transmitter at the “sending” end, just a receiver that could home in on anyplace in the world.
There is a 1936 film called Trapped by Television starring Mary Astor that was based on the early days race to produce the first viable television technology. Basically a rom-com with some gangsters providing drama.
Here’s one of the final and most vivid examples of that particular vision of creepy-peepy television: “O.B.I.T.”, an episode of The Outer Limits. Like The Twilight Zone, its role model, TOL often used science fiction to tell parables of current day life. Some of these themes or subjects have recurrent relevance, like this one, using the usual alien scare to make us consider the nightmarish possibility of government surveillance on a scale no one could imagine. The Kennedy-esque politician who forces them to open up is a figure of his time, but the show is crisp and well directed.
I drag it in because it does express, very well, one specific, almost primal fear of television itself.
That one’s got a much better than average mock-up of a TV set and one of the earliest classic TV plots, still used 30 years later on the “Mission: Impossible” TV show: trick the bad guy into revealing everything while he’s unaware that he’s broadcasting his “secret” confession to the whole city.
The “pilot” episode of the show Happy Days (really an episode of the anthology show Love American Style) plot revolved around the Cunningham family getting a TV set and a girl dating Richie just so she could see TV.
Did you do this?
The German broadcast of Hitler opening the 1936 Olympic Games is the vehicle that the alien race of CONTACT, uses to communicate with earth. It’s a well written scene where, after realizing what they are receiving is a TV signal, everyone is standing around watching the picture build dot by dot and line by line. Then it dawns on them that the image on the screen is the long dead Nazi dictator.
The Farnsworth camera used a different camera method (Image Dissector) that was less sensitive than the relatively contemporaneous Iconoscope of the 1930’s. What’s strange is that Baird’s flying spot cameras needed very bright light to function properly, much like the Image Dissector, so it should have been easy to convert to the electronic camera. I guess German precision in film cameras helped here!
An updated version of the Image Dissector brought us the first TV pictures on the moon, as it was a simpler device and less likely to overload in bright light, which is abundant on the non-atmospheric moon. Later moon cameras used a more standard color tube.
This is what I’ve always thought too. In the 80s a lot of women wore brightly colored suits, but red was always associated with Nancy Reagan. During the 2012 election in one of those man-on-the-street things, they showed people a picture of Nancy Pelosi in a red suit, and most people thought she was a Republican. (One of them thought Mitt Romney was a game show host. And these people are old enough to vote.)