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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
They’re both unprovable, yes…but I don’t think they’re the same. For an incumbent president, GHWB got thrashed in 1992. It wasn’t close. Although Perot was probably more politically attractive to conservatives than liberals, and my guess is he pulled more votes from Bush than Clinton, Perot did have some substantial support from Democrats.
Whereas in 2000, it was extremely close in Florida, and unlike Perot, Nader’s votes came almost exclusively from liberals. Not just Democrats, but the leftmost tangent of them. True, there was also Buchanan hurting Bush, but in Florida Nader was a bigger factor.
An Eighties radio industry expression I don’t hear anymore: “Riding the bird”. Meaning, the local radio station takes most of its programming via satellite. This meant a “radio station” could now be no more than a control box behind the desk at a motel. The satellite dish was located at the motel, as was an MS-DOS computer that stored pre-recorded station IDs and commercials, and inserted them into the signal sent to the transmitter site.
Radio lovers did not love stations that rode the bird, as it reduced or eliminated truly local qualities, but station owners loved saving money, and there were plenty of rural stations that couldn’t have survived if they’d had to carry a full payroll.
My kindergarten class took a field trip to KOB, the station I mentioned earlier. Hubbard Broadcasting also owned an FM station and the local NBC TV affiliate, all at the same location. I had great fun playing with the control deck for the news studio, the blue screen used for the weather reports, and meeting the FM DJs.
The AM studio at that point was a reel-to-reel tape deck. The only programming done live there was the college sports on the weekends.
Promoters of money-saving station automation equipment had a sales slogan: “LIVE is EVIL”.
I don’t think my father ever ran the vibrator production line, but it was Delco where he worked, and at various points IIRC he ran the speaker, IF transformer, and power transistor lines, including very early silicon crystal growers. This was in the heyday of the UAW and I fairly often got an earful about outrageous work rules.
I had a Heathkit multiband receiver that I’d gotten real cheap since the first owner had botched the build. After dismantling and rewiring with decent solder joints, it was just fine. I was into QSLing shortwave stations, including East Bloc countries (wonder whose lists I ended up on). I could also pull in the clear channel stations from Chicago, Detroit and Boston, so I followed the Blackhawks, Wings and Bruins during the heyday of Bobby Orr and the like. I dragged the old Heathkit around for some years, until it finally fried a tube and it was more hassle than it was worth to track down a replacement.
Yeah, I noticed when some local stations became clones…
You can blame the payola legislation for that.
https://news.slashdot.org/story/01/06/05/1034234/payola-another-brick-in-the-wall
Slashdot! That takes me back two decades or more.
Well, it’s old.
Basically:
EJ Hill said it: A station’s customers aren’t its listeners or viewers. The station’s customers are its advertisers. That’s who they’re selling to. That’s who hands them the money.
Of course, more popular programming is generally more attractive to advertisers, but it’s not the only factor. A big audience, great. What kind of big audience? Are they in the right age range? Do they have money enough to consider buying the sponsor’s product? Rush Limbaugh had the biggest audience in radio, but he rarely attracted national brands–the Southwest Airlines, Ford Motor Company, Borden’s kind of advertisers. Limbaugh’s ads tended to be marginal companies: marketers of gold coins, mattresses, health supplements and golf accessories.
On TV, pro wrestling has the same problem on ad supported channels: a nice audience number, but discounted because advertisers don’t need the demographics it attracts.
I’m surprised they’re still around.
I know about the payola scandal. I was just surprised to see a link to Slashdot.
No radio discussion is complete without this classic from Strong Bad:
That summary was for the other folks, of course.
The moral of the story is that Congress jumped in to right some perceived wrong, and the blowback, following basic economic forces, was pretty much the destruction of the medium.
(Not that something else wouldn’t have damaged it.)
I was fortunate to grow up listening to WNEW-FM in the early 70’s, and it was such an enlightening experience. Free-form rock radio, especially British and progressive rock. The DJs were cool and mellow (and probably toasted), and they introduced me to all sorts of great music, and provided the cultural background. Late night DJ Alison Steele would start each show with some etherial sounds and a poetry read. And touring bands always coordinated with the station for interviews and such.
Utterly charming.
It wasn’t the only one; just my favorite. There were a bunch of great stations all over.
Yeah, the late 60s and early 70s were the peak of FM radio programming. Part of it was that the FM band was always a money loser, so why not put niche rock music and weird DJs on that channel. The alternative was just broadcasting the main AM signal simultaneously on FM.
Of course it helped that that era was the peak of rock music. I’m not predjudiced, it is just true. Prove me wrong.
The Nightbird! Alison Steele was the only survivor of a brief-lived “stunt” format of all female DJs. Her show did have that evocative opening every night. You felt part of her mysterious nighttime community.
Something like the government effect you describe helped destroy the streetcar networks that were glamorized in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Well meaning New Deal legislation that forced the electric companies out of the traction industry had the effect of cutting the rail lines loose from their increasingly reluctant and unprofitable bankrollers.
Our local CBS affiliate on AM. I always liked this photo; it suggests the dark power of modern mass communications, like an electronic citadel with a radio priest at the “altar”.
I watched the 1982 World Series on a 13″ black and white portable TV.
When my grandmother died in 1984 I “inherited” her 19″ color set.
In 1987 I bought a 27″ Sony Trinitron. The picture was “so big” it gave me headaches for the first couple weeks that I used it.
Circa 1992 or so I had lent a car to my brother while he was “in country” for a few months living in Washington DC. When he was done I flew out to pick it up and was driving it back to Wisconsin. I left DC late in the day, and was able to pick up WTMJ AM 620 out of Milwaukee and listen to most of the Brewer game broadcast as I drove west as I was driving I-70 across West Virginia. And they weren’t even a high powered station.
My dad had a Corvair convertible sometime in the late 1960s. I don’t think he kept it very long [not very practical with 4 kids at the time], but he liked that car and couldn’t stand Ralph Nader.
I bet you were sitting too closely to the screen.
I jus texted my siblings to ensure that I was remembering correctly about the Corvair. It was actually early 1970s after my brother was born, so five kids. According to my sister, my mom was NOT happy about the purchase and he didn’t keep it very long.
Per my sister: “the ‘conversation’ with mom was something like ‘Are you insane? You have 5 children who don’t even fit in that car'”
Around 1999 or 2000, plasma screens began showing up as background props on TV shows. They seemed exotic, kind of science fiction-ish at first.
Now when we see TV shows that are at least 15 or 20 years old, all the TVs are strangely big, heavy black boxes. They’ve become the odd thing that stands out.
Around 1973, the National Lampoon had an article listing overhyped disappointments. UHF TV was one of them (although cable would soon ride to its rescue), Another perennial let down was flat screen TVs, just around the corner since the late Fifties.
I still remember the first time I saw an HD plasma TV at a high-end stereo/electronics store. It appeared to me as if I was looking out a window instead of looking at a TV.
Sometime around the end of the 70s, Sinclair, the British electronics company, sold a transistor radio-sized hand held black and white TV with a tiny screen. Its main selling point? It was international; by pressing the right combination of buttons, it could work in Britain (405 lines or 625), France (819 lines or 625), or the US, Japan, Mexico, Canada and Cuba (525).