Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
1946: Radio’s Futures
My 1946 TV, bought at a yard sale. Note that it tunes channel 1, as well as Frequency Modulation.
The theory after the war was, everything would soon go to the higher quality, static-free FM, leaving behind only a remnant of existing, high-powered AM stations to continue to provide radio to rural areas. The AM band was already crowded, so more stations were welcome. The future lifeblood of radio advertising, “drive time” AM radio programming, barely existed back then in the way we would come to know it. In those days, plenty of cars didn’t even have radios, still an expensive accessory. Before the superhighway era, suburbs weren’t as extensive, so drives to work tended to be shorter.
The big dispute roiling the FM postwar rollout was “high band” vs. “low band.” The FCC was forcing manufacturers and stations to shift all FM stations from 42—50 megacycles to 88-108, where it is today. The industry didn’t like it, and they were right. In 1946, the radio makers requested a reasonable compromise, dual-band sets for a transition period. Nothing doing, said the FCC; from now on, it’s high band or nothing. Disenfranchising what were already hundreds of thousands of prewar FM radio owners created so much bad will among the public that FM stumbled badly for decades thereafter. The public wouldn’t buy the new 88-108 megacycle FM radios, so there was no audience, and hence no advertisers. For the rest of the Forties and Fifties, an FM broadcast license was a license to lose money.
Facsimile printing direct to the living room, anywhere in the country, was something I’d read about, but not with this level of useful detail. I’d always liked the practical common sense of the pre-war radio fax business plan: use the little-utilized overnight time at existing radio stations to transmit morning newspapers directly to the home. The existing household console radio was connected to a fax printer in a separate cabinet.
Simple and neat—but by the time these broadcast fax systems were undergoing federal tests, the radio industry was quietly shifting to a more sophisticated but capable home system. It was all in one compact cabinet and much simpler to use—just set and forget, like a clock radio—and it was able to receive and print detailed pages much faster, because it was high bandwidth, in frequencies far above the AM band. Unfortunately, that negated the economic advantages that would have accrued by using existing stations, networks, and home radios. It would have been a better home fax standard to start with, also enabling the sale of more print ads, but it pushed the cost of a home radiofax receiver up to about half of what a TV set would cost. At that price, it wouldn’t sell, so the radio industry quietly backed away from the idea.
As we’ve long known, TV history, at least in the US, could have been very different. For example, it’s clearer now that the simple reason TV didn’t get off the ground even faster after the war was a lack of TV sets. No viewers equaled no stations, and no advertisers. It was well into ’46 before they started rolling off production lines in any numbers.
By comparison, the reason the car industry got into postwar production so much more quickly was the fact that a huge national market was eagerly waiting. It was worth spending big to tool up as fast as possible and grab all the market share they could. In contrast, the radio manufacturers, who converted their early TV assembly lines to radar factories during the war, didn’t have a huge readymade market waiting for TV sets, not yet. There were still very large profits to be made in radios and radio parts.
In the early postwar years, TV broadcasting had more quitters than joiners. Plenty of radio and newspaper publishing interests that had already made tentative prewar plans to go into television withdrew their postwar requests for TV broadcasting licenses, because it was much more expensive than predicted, and the growth of the advertising market would probably be slow. Break-even on the investment would take longer than anticipated. From the standpoint of 1945-’47, it wasn’t crazy to doubt the near-future profits of TV, but most of them would come to rue the day they pulled their applications. Many companies would wait five years for another chance at getting a license.
We think of those times as technologically backward, but the newsletter’s knowledgeable discussion of TV’s immediate future was surprisingly accurate. A lot of potential investors in the industry were holding back until it got resolved. The low band vs. high band description of the conflict within FM broadcasting was mirrored in television, where the prevailing prewar black and white TV standard was now called low band. Screen resolution was still open to question, with some high band color TV interests holding out for what we’d now call HDTV standards, right from the beginning.
We know who won that battle—low band black and white. Those are the TV sets we grew up with, and once color was added to that medium-definition picture, most people would be satisfied with TV pictures for the next half-century. Until screens got much larger, there were few if any complaints.
At this point, I jumped ahead, pushing the time lever forward, Rod Taylor-style, to the fall of 1951. A lot had changed; a lot of up-in-the-air issues had been resolved over the previous five years.
Late ’51 was a dramatic moment in the TV business. By then, regular black and white television was booming, making money almost beyond 1946’s most optimistic predictions. Night-time radio audiences were starting a plunge that wouldn’t bottom out for a decade.
Right after the war, the broadcasting and advertising industries expected the size of the TV audience to equal the size of the national radio audience by about 1956 or so, but that point was reached in only half the predicted time. What we think of as old-time radio still filled the evening airwaves in 1951, just as it had for nearly thirty years, but it wouldn’t for much longer.
The CBS color TV system, which was a major attraction and a major stumbling block to decision making in 1946, had just been tried on a national scale. It succeeded technically and failed financially. I’d gotten the impression that it took some time for those lessons to sink in, but TV Digest corrects that impression: nope, everybody knew right away. There was little doubt that color would be back someday soon, in a no-doubt better form.
By then, publisher Martin Godel had quietly taken “FM” out of the newsletter’s title, now calling it TV Digest and Electronic Reports. It was one more sign that FM radio, inadvertently almost killed off by federal action, had entered its two decades of financial purgatory. FM was eventually saved by stereophonic broadcasting, first for instrumental “beautiful music,” then by rock.
In 1951, the idea of radio facsimile direct to the home wasn’t dead yet, but there was barely a trace left of postwar optimism about it either. Over decades, business-oriented fax over phone lines came into limited use, so rare that in 1967, Bullitt spent a precious minute of action-movie screen time on showing how fingerprints were faxed between police departments. Faxes became much more popular in the Eighties and Nineties.
One 1946 enthusiasm for the future was still unresolved in the early Fifties: lavish, live television events in movie theaters. This ambitious plan, backed by Paramount and other studios, went well beyond what theater TV would be used for: boxing matches and rare special events. Entertainment spectaculars delivered via theatrical TV were regarded as a promising new hybrid art form that could enrich Hollywood and revitalize America’s downtowns. It could and probably should have happened, and it would have changed American popular history if it had. Yet, in one of those intriguing what-ifs, it never really got off the ground. That will be the subject of another post, The TV Curfew.
Published in General
Thanks, Gary.
I always look forward to reading your broadcast/movie history pieces, thinking, “This is going to be interesting!”
Now that I think of it, I also always look backward to reading your broadcast/movie history pieces, thinking, “That was interesting!”
This one was no exception.
Minor diversion
When I read a Ricochet Article, I always look for an error. I say to myself, “I wonder if there is an error in the Ricochet Article that I am reading?”
This time, I was reminded of an article I read long ago, but not reminded well. The article debunked a common myth. People like me, who always look for an error, love articles that debunk a common myth.
(Even if the author merely claims, “This article debunks a common myth,” I say to myself, “This is going to be good. I don’t think I will even look for an error in it!”)
Anyway, back to what I was going to very briefly say. The article claimed that FM is really NOT better at high-fidelity transmission, such as that required by music snobs, and also those like me who are not music snobs, but merely have superior taste.
No, it was just a historical accident that led to FM being good quality and AM being poor. A broadcaster could, to this day, put out good quality classical music on AM, if she wanted to, or he wanted to, if the broadcaster were male.
Could one of our Electrical Engineers (not like me–I mean the ones who actually learned how to do Electrical Engineering in Electrical Engineering school) educate us on this fascinating myth-debunk?
Hi.
Total bunk.
Decoding (we call it “detecting”) Amplitude Modulation is, by its very nature, sensitive to background noise, radio frequency interference, and static.
Detecting Frequency Modulation, assuming the signal strength is sufficient, is naturally impervious to all but the most extreme noise. You can muck up the modulated signal pretty badly and still accurately follow the frequency modulation.
So the Steely Dan song, “No static at all, FM” checks out.
But there’s more… FCC AM radio station specs have stations 10KHz apart, leaving a theoretical best 5KHz audio bandwidth. That’s kind of low for music. FCC FM radio stations work way up higher, 88 to 108Mhz, with stations 200KHz apart, as frequency modulation needs more room, and that leaves about 75KHz available for the signal.
Which means the opportunity for a compatible stereo transmission. The L+R signal, for mono listening, plus an additional L-R modulated on top above 19KHz.
Also note that FM radios are much more expensive to make. The frequencies are higher so the circuitry is more difficult, demodulating FM is more complicated, detecting a stereo subcarrier, demodulating the L-R signal, automatically switching between mono and stereo depending on conditions.
For comparison, it’s possible to build an AM radio with as few as 4 components. It’s called a crystal radio set.
I was getting ready to post that.
Note: This has got nothing to do with the OP.
While attempting to find an answer to my question without help from the experts, I came across an amusing bit of mathematical irrationality in the Wikipedia article on “FM Broadcasting”.
Unless I was groggy the day Teach covered the math, there is no such thing as “the instantaneous frequency of a transmitted signal” ;-)
I bring it up only to get one of these responses, in order from the most improbable to the most likely:
Because of the large electric motors in electric cars, they generate so much AM interference that electric auto manufacturers will probably be dropping AM radios.
Instantaneous frequency is completely real.
You’re probably thinking of a graphic of a sine wave over time, counting the number of cycles per second, and calling that the frequency. Not surprisingly, that’s an oversimplification made to present the basic concept, and the real thing is more nuanced.
Imagine you have a vinyl copy of a Steely Dan album, and you want to place it on your turntable. At 33rpm, the platter goes around 0.55 cycles per second. You can put a little mark on the edge of the platter and watch it go around in a circle, and count the number of times it goes around per minute.
As it spins it traces out a sine curve and cosine curve at right angles to each other:
You can also measure the speed of the perimeter of the platter, and calculate the rotating speed by dividing by the circumference.
Note that you are free to grab the platter and instantaneously move it around, like a mad DJ. That’s changing the instantaneous frequency.
And yes, you can go to negative frequencies.
That reminds me… I need to check my biorhythms.
Another awesome and informative post. Thank you!
I find it fascinating how everything takes too long – and then once the adoption switch “flips,” everything happens much faster than expected.
This is true across industries. Winglets on airplanes took decades to be adopted. And then they were adopted at warp speed. So were thinner airplane seats that added 1-2 rows to an A320/737. Everyone resisted. A few tried it. And then everyone had to have them as quickly as possible.
The problem is that predicting when the “flip” moment will occur is a black art, at best. So, too, it seems, for Radio, TV and Fax technologies. These things only seem clear in hindsight.
When I was a kid, the only times I ever heard an FM radio were in classrooms, where dreary educational stations were among the few hardy pioneers that stayed on the FM band. All the radios were the same brand, and it later turned out that the NYC public schools made a corrupt deal to buy them all from a local manufacturer. When I got to Catholic high school, I discovered that some employee of the Archdiocese had made the same crooked kickback deal with the same Long Island-based radio company.
In my podunk Blue town, Comcast paid politicians kickbacks to ensure that FIOS fiber from the phone company would never be available. So we live in a major market, with only two real options for solid internet: Comcast and now Starlink.
Not surprising when you consider the bootstrap operation necessary:
The FCC has to apply some force to make this happen at all.
Thanks Gary – very interesting. I’d never heard of the home fax newspaper scheme before. Nor the high band vs low band kerfuffle.
When I was doing multimedia video editing the 29.97 frames/second NTSC standard used to drive me nuts. I was disgusted that PAL video looked perfectly fine at a frame rate of 25. I’m so glad that NTSC is mostly gone and that we now have more sensical standards that look better. I sure you will cover that insanity at some point.
namlliT noD – Thanks for you explanatory comments also.
Cross-posted from the PIT: I admit it’s hard to get much poignance and drama out of it, but in the (understandable) rush to get the hell out of using vacuum tubes everywhere they could be dispensed with (not TV picture tubes, transmitter tubes, klystrons and a few other esoteric uses), our memories overlook the immediate pre-transistor era. Those great big radio tubes of the 30s and 40s, three or four inches tall, gave way in the 50s to compact vacuum tubes that were half that size, half that diameter, and generated a lot less heat. It’s those unsung, glowing little warmhearted heroes that first made possible the attractive plastic portable radios carried along on millions of Fifties picnics and to hundreds of thousands of ball games.
The truth is out there. About forgotten radio tubes.
My Dad had an old tube radio with about 10 bands. I guess to save space he took it out of it’s wooden stand (about the 2/3 the size of a refrigerator) and set it on his desk with all the guts exposed. I was fascinated.
There was some theatre-based tv transmission. In about 1966 or so, I watched the Indy 500 live in a theatre.
At Indymotorspeedway.com it says:
I could picture that being a pretty cool experience, especially given that the average TV screen back then was what, maybe 20″ or not much bigger?
And battery types you never see anymore.
Go looking for a Type B battery sometime.
We tend to think of fax machines as being “modern” inventions. In fact, the first commercial fax service was established in 1865, before the actual invention of the telephone.
At the American Film Institute we hosted Hollywood’s first-ever look at HDTV (an analog system that Sony later abandoned). That was in 1987. High definition scenes of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic games had us oohing and ahhing; no one even knew those cameras existed. It sure looked like high def was right around the corner.
I didn’t buy my first HD set until 2001, 14 years later, and few other people had it until the Beijing Olympics of 2004. By 2009 there was no analog TV being transmitted.
Like you said, progress takes forever but then appears to be instantaneous.
It was, especially with full theatre speaker sound.
Yep. Although there were a handful of 30 inch black and white sets sold in the Fifties, in the color era there was remarkable stasis: from about 1957 through the end of the century, TV sets rarely varied outside of 19 to 23 inches. It’s surprising that at a time of rapid change, that stayed pretty much the same.
The basic reason was geometry: with the CRT technology of the time, the wider the picture was the deeper tha cabinet had to be. Nobody wanted a TV that stuck out halfway into the room.
Interestingly, that wasn’t true in Europe or Japan, where even before higher definition TV came into use, you could buy sets with a wider aspect ratio screen (standard def, though).
Robert A, Heinlein’s Future History series featured a rebellion of Venus colonists. The rebels needed an untraceable two-way radio, so the story’s narrator recalls a long-obsolete method of radio called Amplitude Modulation, which the omniscient Company’s radios can’t detect.
My father was a design and later production engineer for auto radios and components in the late 50s and into the early 70s. The audio bandwidth limitation was taken into account, mostly in the interests of cheaper components, all the way through to the speakers. That’s one of the reasons that remasters of oldies sound so good: the versions we heard way back then had the high frequencies removed since they couldn’t fit into the station bandwidth anyway, and the lows attenuated since they would make the cheap speakers distort and rattle. One contributing factor to FM finally breaking through was semiconductors making it cheaper to deal with the higher audio bandwidth; the original car radios used good ol’ vacuum tubes.
One of Los Angeles’ smaller AM radio stations is owned by a single individual–pretty rare–and as his main business is on FM, he often restlessly changes formats on AM. For some time they reverted to a Fifties-style, old timey Top 40 oldies station. Making virtue out of necessity, they claimed “Our music was made for AM”. They were right.
One of the difficulties of vacuum tube car radios is that vacuum tube needs about 200V to operate, and the battery only supplies 12V. That’s DC, so a transformer won’t work.
So they had to use a device that operates like a little buzzer to turn DC into pseudo-AC. It was called a…
And because they were mechanical, they need be replaced every once in while:
“The more you know…”
KMDY was a little radio station in Thousand Oaks that ran comedy 24 hours a day. Unfortunately, the terms of their license meant that they had to cut back on their broadcasting strength when the sun went down, and it was weak enough that I couldn’t pick them up in Chatsworth just on the other side of the mountains.
The standard table or clock radio of the 1950s AM era was a “5-tube” design. When it quit working, you took out all the tubes and headed for the hardware store or the drugstore, where they had a “tube tester machine” (you can see an old version of a tube tester in this YouTube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJQvmel45CE).
Anyway, you’d plug in all five of your tubes, and run the test by setting several dials to their proper setting for that tube. Typically, one would fail. You would then buy a replacement and put all of them back in your clock radio. Then you are back in business.
I grew up not far from Emporium, PA – a small town with a Sylvania tube factory. One of the last of them, I suppose. I actually had an informal interview there when I was home for Christmas break as a BSEE near-graduate. I wasn’t terribly interested in them, and they weren’t terribly interested in me, so that was probably best for both of us. (I couldn’t think of anything useful to ask in a conversation with a tube engineer in the late 1960s. Like interviewing at a buggy manufacturer after the Model T was taking over the transportation market.)
I am reminded of one of the characteristics of vacuum tubes; they would not start working until they warmed up. So your radio or tv or stereo or car radio would take a minute or so before the sound or picture showed up, as the various vacuum tubes reached working temperature.
That was the standard AM license for small town radio stations. Powering down after sunset opened up the radio waves for the Clear Channel big boomers that would propagate signals for many hundreds of miles by bouncing the waves off the ionized bands in the upper atmosphere. In daylight hours, it doesn’t work.
I grew up in a house on a ridge in the northern Allegheny mountains in northern Pennsylvania. There were no cities for many miles from us. So I found entertainment on the Clear Channel AM stations after sunset. I could and did listen to the early celebrity DJs for rock music from Boston to NYC to Chicago. (I was listening the night that Dick Biondi on WLS in Chicago introduced The Four Seasons to the airwaves.)
From northwest PA I could on any given night (it was a crapshoot because the atmospheric bounce is not predictable) listen to stations from Boston to Nashville to St Louis. My now unreliable memory tells me I once caught a Denver signal.
I also listened to country on the Wheeling WV Barn Dance and the Nashville Grand Ole Opera.
And I got to hear Jean Shepherd do his long, meandering monologues from NYC. Surreal but amazing radio. I heard most of his characters that appear in The Christmas Story in those meandering tales. There is one thing that still sticks with me – and still amuses me – from his radio show. I’ll put it in quotes but it’s a rough paraphrase: “My old man would not ever understand why anybody would want a vanity license plate. His hope was that he would get a random plate that would be hard for the cops to memorize.”
That’s my philosophy.