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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.
If you remember, I mentioned this a couple of years ago. Sounds like you managed to see it, which surprises me, given that I only know it because it was in a collection of (mostly crappy) old movies.
I did indeed, via YouTube. It’s a Columbia Picture, so Sony now owns the rights. They are more ferocious than most in hunting down copyright infractions, even concerning unknown films that will almost certainly never be re-made.
Zworykin said that his rival, Farnsworth, “had everything but storage”. The Iconoscope’s light sensitive plate could hold an accumulating charge; the image dissector used magnetic beams to sweep the entire picture’s electronic image up and down and back and forth over the one tiny detection element. But you’re right; there are special uses for insensitive but rugged camera tubes, and one of them is closed circuit control of furnaces and boilers, which would burn out normal cameras.
The Farnsworth cameras sent to Britain were checked out on 50 cycle current and UK voltage standards before leaving the States, so it’s still a bit mysterious why they had problems. One possibility was the low number of scan lines in the Baird system. Maybe 240 lines was too low for it.
Thanks Gary – here are some of my Dad’s comments from the Vanguard 50th celebration in 2008:
It must be good fun to makes things up. Even the British are doing it. In the October 2007 issue of Physics World, the lead article was titled: Sputnik’s Legacy, by Richard Corfield. In this article, he describes Vanguard One satellite as “a hastily put together contraption of wires and circuitry designed only to send the radio signals back to earth.” I’ve often wondered where else he would send it. But he made it up. For the Vanguard satellite was designed over several years, used the latest transistors developed by Bell Laboratories/Western Electric. It is no surprise to me that Mr. Corfield does not wish to answer my letter in print. I wouldn’t want to either. The thing I have not been able to figure out is why these authors have distorted so much. What do they have to gain? So, with these distortions, the question appears, ‘How do we counter them?’ The only answer I can come up with is to write letters to the editors. Initially, my letters were ignored, but lately they have been getting printed. Finally, one was printed in Invention and Technology on how GPS got started. This one contained an editor’s note to the effect that the Naval Research Laboratory participated in the invention of the global positioning system. This does not say we invented it, but it’s coming close. It’s even closer when Mr. Frederick Allen, editor of Invention and Technology, thanked me for global positioning. The last letter I will mention is one not yet published in Astronomy magazine. The article in question is pretty good, but the pictures shows the satellite with its attachment connected — the attachment is not present on the satellite in orbit– and I felt it gave the wrong impression. So I sent them a letter. I presume it will get printed.
As I’ve mentioned on this MB, there’s a new documentary coming out in two weeks about the invention of GPS. It has lots of errors. I’m finishing a review of it which you may find of interest.
As you point out in your book GPS Declassified page 25:
A success 100’s of times greater than Sputnik.
For many of our Anglophile friends, they seemed to be jealous of their offspring in the USA, including the famous WWII line “oversexed, overpaid and over here.”
Further comments from the Vanguard 50th.
In the Summer 2002 issue of Invention and Technology, there appears an article by John Perlin: Solar Power: The Slow Revolution. His article states that “when the Navy got the nod to launch Vanguard, it eschewed solar power as ‘unconventional and not fully established’ and chose relatively conventional chemical batteries instead (as had been used in Explorer 1, America’s first satellite).” –and here is where the description gets wild—“The Navy’s decision enraged the Army’s lead researcher on power devices, Hans Ziegler, and he won the support of the nation’s most eminent civilian space scientists for a power source that would last indefinitely and permit meaningful experiments in space.”
Now, Perlin made most of that up. Hans Ziegler had nothing to do with the decision to put solar cells on Vanguard. I finally got in touch with Mr. Perlin to get his side of the story and Mr. Perlin composed the document in which he says, “I am the world’s expert on the solar aspect of Vanguard, the most significant contribution it made to satellite technology.” He goes on to tell how he spent three weeks at Bell Labs trying to find the champion for solarizing the Vanguard. He says he found his man, Hans Ziegler. The only way I can justify two different courses of the solar panels on Vanguard is to consider them as two separate routes. The most important route, that through NRL, has the advantage of a historical thread leading to the final installation. And as how to Mr. Perlin and became “the world’s expert” on solarizing Vanguard, I’ll leave that to historians. Just let me say he never interviewed either myself or Marty Votaw.
It must be strange to have designed the Vanguard 1, including the solar cells, and read utter rot from supposed experts about it. Here’s another example:
The famous Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia quote applies here: “I believe everything the media tells me except for anything for which I have direct personal knowledge, which they always get wrong.”
In its day, 1985–2011, Invention and Technology was generally a good magazine, with a lot of the unknown stories that I enjoy reading. Unfortunately, the way they handled GPS is typical of a recurring defect of their that shows up from time to time: the desire to personalize, to focus the drama on someone with whom we can identify. Sometimes there really is a lone inventor. Most of the time, stories that take that approach flatten the facts to make them simpler and more digestible.
A non-GPS case was “How I Took Pictures on Mars”, an interview with the head of the imaging team of the MER rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. He repeatedly says that he personally accepted responsibility for the mission and “every one of the 200,000 images sent went through my laptop”. Then he goes on the say that the first pictures were a miracle, but the landscape was dull until “he” examined his imagery and decided where to send the rovers (!) to find more interesting stuff. In other words, you’d think he outranked the principal investigator, Steve Squires. He did not. The man also claims to be Mars’ first photographer, though the Viking landers happened 28 years earlier, and the Pathfinder mini-rover happened seven years before. He justifies it by saying that those were sterile scientific photos, whereas his were informed by a lifetime of interest in photography. In short, a massive overdose of “Vitamin I”.
FDR’s TV set.
Okay, I’m out of period but just ran across this:
See how many times you can spot Shelley Fabares.
Seeing these show intros reminded me of something: Man, I couldn’t wait to escape the Seventies when they were still going on. These promos are a public service announcement: Do Not Return to 1968-80.
TV’s pace was slower in those days and credit scenes tried to explain everything every time you watched the show. I remembered From A Bird’s Eye View, Bridget Loves Bernie (I have a particular soft spot for Catholic–Jewish romance), and vaguely recalled that there was an all Black Barefoot in the Park. The others are truly obscure, but one of the things that make this cavalcade of schlock worth watching is the surprise of seeing major writing and producing talent make some of their earliest appearances. (I doubt Steve Bochco went out his way to remind people about Turnabout.)
Some other things this reel brought to mind: Manhattan streets were dirtier and less fancy before the Giuliani renaissance; cars were bigger, of course, and color film stock was less sensitive. Studio scenes barely made a pretense of looking real. (By comparison, reruns of more modern comedies like Two and a Half Men, Two Broke Girls and How I Met Your Mother, all shot in the studio, look about as good as feature films.)
Yeah, I recognized three or four.
Three Shelley Fabares sightings.
I remember watching “Bridget Loves Bernie,” but I can’t remember why.
You have to wonder if it ever occurred to them that she was the problem.
Meredith Baxter.
Those theme songs … I can tell that they weren’t splurging on the music budget. “Hey, my girlfriend’s cousin is in a band. Let’s have him send over a demo tape and see what he’s got.”
Especially compared to the theme songs for some other show at the time. The Bob Newhart Show, Barney Miller, M*A*S*H, etc., etc., etc.
Now the only TV shows that have theme songs are the reboots. Ah, for the golden age of Mike Post.
That was all we had and we liked it.
Hey now, don’t mess with the Shel. How could she be the problem? She had what was probably the one and only Top 40 hit connected to The Donna Reed Show. “Johnny Angel” is actually kind of charming in an estrogen-drenched way, the kind of song that Gilda Radner, Jane Curtin, and Laraine Newman used to parody. But what I recommend it for is the moment early on in this flat, scratchy-looking 16mm clip where the person posting it dubbed in the lush stereophonic sound of the hit record. Stop your sneering, you hardened cynics–it’s now widely regarded as a classic of overdubbing, reverberation, and arrangement for stereo.
Or her aunt…
I dimly remember ever hearing of the Brian Keith Show and the Ted Baxter Show. I didn’t watch much TV in the 70s. What I remember is those fat Peter Max-looking type faces.
From High Treason, UK, 1929. Set ten years in the future, on the verge of a European war. This image is a real mixture: the woman’s hair style and clothes and the man’s John Gilbert Ruritanian uniform mark it as Jazz Age, but the two way TV monitor looks remarkably like a modern computer screen.
“For a girl.“
Aside from licensed amateur radio operators like @jasonrudert, few people know that amateurs ran personal television stations. This was especially popular in sparsely populated areas; being able, in effect to video conference with your statewide friends in 1959 was pretty hot stuff. But practically no one outside of the ham community was even aware it existed. (Amateur TV was also very popular in Britain).
Amateur TV was obviously more expensive than sound-only radio, but ham publications like QST had plenty of advice for scrounging parts and saving money. RCA even made a miniature iconoscope specifically for hams, but most people used closed circuit TV cameras, which by the mid-Fifties were coming on the market used.
The poor kid doesn’t look too thrilled with this exciting product of science.
Jason’s a ham? Well obviously, but he’s into radio?