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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
KOB AM in Albuquerque was one of the first radio stations between the Mississippi and Los Angeles, so powerful that the FCC required them to switch to a directional antenna after dark to avoid interfering with a New York City station, WABC. (WABC refused to do the same, which resulted in a long lawsuit.)
Anyway, KOB has always broadcast UNM sports, and growing up it wasn’t unusual to hear fans calling into the postgame shows from as far away as Seattle.
In fact, Mike Roberts, the long-time “Voice of the Lobos”, took a job covering UW Husky games in the 60s. But he missed New Mexico so much that after calling the Husky football games he would drive to the top of Queen Anne Hill to listen to the Lobos.
After a season or two, he moved back to Albuquerque and covered the Lobos for the next forty years.
The “thermotic” part of “thermotic valve.” Heat wasn’t a handicap. It was a requirement.
I could get a USAF veteran plate, but when I contemplate that I think of Jean Shepherd’s old man.
When the clouds were right, I could get Chicago stations on the radio in my grandfather’s house in Arkansas. When I was back in Chicago, I could get baseball games from the West Coast, some nights.
If you’re the kind of person who’d buy a vanity plate odds are good your vehicle is also fairly noticeable so you’re not really losing much by it.
If you’ve already got say a Maserati, there’s not a whole lot of those out there anyway and you might as well spend the extra money for the vanity plate. Looks kinda weird without one I think.
What years?
Car radios are often exceptionally good. They have to be, to deal with wavering signal strength in motion. From L.A. I can tune several San Francisco AM stations reliably, and a couple in San Diego, less of a stretch.
Since FM was broadcast on a much higher frequency, it has much less coverage area and there’s next to no “skip”, those odd occasions on a winter’s night when you can suddenly receive a distant AM station clearly.
As far as it goes I figure that one would be as likely to help as it would hurt with the cops.
The radiofax New York Times of 1948
Depends. I doubt CPKLLR will win you any friends.
I was out there from ’86 to ’88. I heard that they dropped the comedy format in ’91.
When I was in college, public transportation was brutally bad between my home and college. Bus or train schedules made for a 20 hour trip to go less than 300 miles, and usually involved sitting in a bus or train station for hours in the middle of the night.
When my dad got very ill, my parents bought me a car so I could drive back and forth. Cool, I thought. Now I’ll be up there with the rich guys. Well, not so cool. They gifted me a 1960 Corvair with a 2-speed auto transmission and a vacuum tube radio. This car was so anemic that it couldn’t go much more than 40 mph up the unending hills that filled the trips between home and college.
Well, you say, at least you could tune in entertainment on the car radio. Not so fast, my friend. The car radio was AM only, and the car heater (because the engine was air cooled and in the back) was a device that fired a little spark plug that burned gasoline to creat heated air for the interior. Whenever I needed heat, the heater spark plug overwhelmed the radio with electrical noise.
Eventually my dad took pity on me and drove the Corvair on his daily commute, and gave me his 1964 Malibu for my college car. Big upgrade! I could drive the speed limit the whole way with the radio on!
I grew up in Simi and don’t recall ever hearing about KMDY. The dueling stations for my crowd were KRLA and KHJ. Left town in ’74.
It ain’t the frames, it’s the lines. PAL came with 625 interlaced lines of resolution to NTSC’s 525. Motion pictures have even fewer FPS at 24. The resolution of film is counted much differently. The larger the film is physically, the more information it contains. Today a lot of “film” is actually video. After editing it is transferred to real film at the proper frame rate. Where television is a part of the story you’ll often see union credits for the people responsible for 24-frame playback.
As far as that odd .97 frame that’s part of the backwards compatibility issue with B&W television.
It wasn’t there too long – according to this, it started in 1984, though that might have been in reference to the format being changed. There’s another radio station with the same call letters, which suggests that it is no longer on the air, or at least not with those letters.
1960 was the first model year for Corvair, and there had been a lot of speculation about it in the press. It appeared in the fall of 1959. I was just old enough to have read about it in the car magazines at the barbershop.
It was an interesting car, but it shared with VW the problem with most of the weight in the rear and a kind of primitive suspension. I pushed mine into a downhill curve too fast one day and nearly lost it when the rear end wanted to become the front end. But, being a great driver, I recovered and proceeded on down the hill.
The 2nd generation (1964?) was a much better car. But Ralph Nader’s brutal (but mindless) attack on it probably doomed it. I would have loved to have had a 2nd gen Corvair with a standard transmission.
To be fair to Nader, the first generation Corvair did have that wheel hop problem. He didn’t make that up. However, the public reaction was irrational. The Corvair became the bad guy. In the meantime, the VW, which had the same problem, was a sentimental favorite. The “People’s Car” of the 30s European right became the “People’s Car” of the 60s American soft left.
Yeah, but I feel under no particular obligation to be fair to Nader. He was (and is) a jerk.
OK, can’t argue with that…but if it weren’t for Nader 2000, Al Gore would have been president.
Oh, man. Don’t make me re-think all my pre-ordained conclusions!
“BCB DXing” means listening to distant (“DX”) stations on the broadcast band (that is, ordinary AM radio). It’s like a very cheap version of shortwave listening. At night, especially in the wintertime, a regular kitchen table radio in New York could receive Council Bluffs, Iowa. It took a very steady hand on the tuning dial, and some patience.
And the weather or other atmospherics made it more of a crapshoot. Sometimes the Grand Old Opry boomed in like a local station, and sometimes I couldn’t get it.
Back in the day, I thought the best nights for listening were the cold nights with clear skies. But I wouldn’t want to make a bet on that proposition.
But all of the BCB DXing worked best in winter because thunderstorms were rare.
From childhood up through my teens, radio took some of the role that the internet would have for young people thirty years later. There was plenty of mainstream local and national information, but there was also a certain amount of dissent on the air, even back then. Being able to tune in the local stations of distant cities meant the sporadic treat of rock and roll direct from Cleveland or even St. Louis. That nearly passive act of tuning a plastic dial a millimeter to one side or the other felt adventurous, funny as that sounds now.
And that was before the big time, the major leagues of getting on the shortwave bands and hearing it all 24/7 direct from sober, serious London and the illicit transgression of listening to Radio Moscow.
I always expected to get an Amateur Radio license. But that was not to be. Instead, this here web took its place, not only in my life but in nearly everyone else’s as well.
Surely you mean “thermionic”?
And if it weren’t for Ross Perot, . . .
Prolly. Speling is a soar point. So is grammer.
I always found Radio Havana to be weirdly interesting. For brief periods of time.
We had a neighbor with a dipole antenna and Collins transmitter and receiver–the very best. His son was stationed at Guantanamo and they spoke once a week over the ham bands.
I used to listen to a radio meetup of Hams who IIRC called themselves the Monday Midnight Modulators. In some ways it was like the Ricochet PIT thread, or audio meetup of today.
Both are unprovable propositions. You cannot guarantee that any third party voter would A) still show up and B) vote the way you think they would vote (as we’ve seen the “burn it all down” mindset creates strange bedfellows.)
Al Gore couldn’t win his home state and George H. W. Bush… well, read my lips…