The Columbia History of American Television

Gary Edgerton

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780231512183
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Television

Television is a form of media without equal. It has revolutionized the way we learn about and communicate with the world and has reinvented the way we experience ourselves and others. More than just cheap entertainment, TV is an undeniable component of our culture and contains many clues to who we are, what we value, and where we might be headed in the future.

Media historian Gary R. Edgerton follows the technological developments and increasing cultural relevance of TV from its prehistory (before 1947) to the Network Era (1948-1975) and the Cable Era (1976-1994). He begins with the laying of the first telegraph line in 1844, which gave rise to the idea that images and sounds could be transmitted over long distances. He then considers the remodeling of television's look and purpose during World War II; the gender, racial, and ethnic components of its early broadcasts and audiences; its transformation of postwar America; and its function in the political life of the country. He talks of the birth of prime time and cable, the influence of innovators like Sylvester "Pat" Weaver, Roone Arledge, and Ted Turner, as well as television's entrance into the international market, describing the ascent of such programs as Dallas and The Cosby Show, and the impact these exports have had on transmitting American culture abroad.

Edgerton concludes with a discerning look at our current Digital Era (1995-present) and the new forms of instantaneous communication that continue to change America's social, political, and economic landscape. Richly researched and engaging, Edgerton's history tracks television's growth into a convergent technology, a global industry, a social catalyst, a viable art form, and a complex and dynamic reflection of the American mind and character. It took only ten years for television to penetrate thirty-five million households, and by 1983, the average home kept their set on for more than seven hours a day. The Columbia History of American Television illuminates our complex relationship with this singular medium and provides historical and critical knowledge for understanding TV as a technology, an industry, an art form, and an institutional force.

PART I

GOING PUBLIC

AN IDEA WHOSE TIME HAD COME	1
Imagining Television—Before 1940

PREEMPTING THE WORLD OF TOMORROW

Today we are on the eve of launching a new industry, based on imagination, on scientific research, and accomplishment. We are now ready to fulfill the promise made to the public.
DAVID SARNOFF, “The Birth of an Industry,” 1939¹

The coming of television involved the most extensive and ballyhooed series of public relations events ever staged around any mass medium in American history. Throughout the 1920s and most of the 1930s, no new communication form had ever been more anticipated in the press—then postponed time and again for a variety of legitimate technological, economic, and cultural reasons—than TV. In the spring of 1939, David Sarnoff, the ever driven and increasingly powerful forty-eight-year-old president of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), had arranged his share of press conferences on television, often thinly disguised as scientific demonstrations. In the previous year alone, RCA conducted 134 such TV exhibitions “for audiences largely made up of important representatives of industry, advertising, engineering, and the press.”² His belief in the life-transforming possibilities of the medium was as genuine as his interest in its eventual windfall earnings potential for his corporation. More than anyone else in the United States, Sarnoff had become the public face of TV’s future promise as he relentlessly championed the nation’s next great social and consumer product innovation with near missionary zeal. The trade papers even started calling him a “televisionary.”

Through his leadership, RCA had been setting the agenda for television as an emerging technology and forthcoming commercial service for well over a decade. Other competing parties were also contributing mightily to this ongoing process. Some, such as inventor Philo T. Farnsworth with his groundbreaking all-electronic TV system, were even responsible for breakthroughs that were far more fundamental and consequential than anything ever achieved at RCA’s first research laboratory in Camden, New Jersey. Still, Sarnoff’s innate public relations skills and his lifelong obsession for self-promotion were legendary, having been honed when he was a young man making the improbable climb out of abject poverty on the lower east side of New York. He had once been a nine-year-old Russian immigrant boy who couldn’t even speak the language; now, less than four decades later, he was one of the most powerful industrialists in America. His rise to the top was truly amazing by any reasonable standard.

Way back in April 1912, for example, he exaggerated his role as the sole telegraph operator coordinating rescue efforts and tirelessly relaying word of survivors on the ill-fated ocean liner Titanic. As the story goes, he supposedly manned his post for seventy-two straight hours on the roof of the Marconi-owned Wanamaker’s department store in midtown Manhattan. Such embellishments were evidently pivotal in advancing Sarnoff’s skyrocketing career, particularly in the face of regular mistreatment by fellow employees who even referred to him derisively as “Jew boy” on occasion: “One story has it that Sarnoff’s coworkers would harass him by putting every bit of extra busywork on his desk. They stopped only when they realized he was doing all of it without complaint … developing a better grasp of the company … than anyone else at Marconi, including its president.”³

As a result, Sarnoff quickly became a personal favorite of Guglielmo Marconi, the company head and famed inventor of wireless telegraphy, who, in turn, served as an early mentor for the young man and a lifelong friend. Sarnoff rapidly ascended the corporate ladder from office boy to personal assistant to Marconi, eventually becoming commercial manager for the entire American Marconi Company. When in 1919 the United States government forced British Marconi to sell its American subsidiary to General Electric (GE), fearing that too many of the worldwide rights for wireless communication were falling into the hands of a foreign-held corporation, Sarnoff was swept in on the ground floor during the initial formation of RCA.

After considering and rejecting on philosophical grounds the prospects of establishing a public monopoly, the U.S. Navy created a privately owned trust under the auspices of RCA by pooling all of the wireless patents that it had developed during World War I. At first, RCA was comprised of only GE and all of the newly acquired resources that General Electric had absorbed from American Marconi. Within months, however, three other U.S. companies—Westinghouse, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), and United Fruit (an early developer of ship-to-shore communication for importing produce)—joined GE in a cross-licensing arrangement that enabled the four American partners to share more than two thousand electronic patents under the corporate umbrella of RCA.

In one bold and decisive move, the U.S. government produced a home-grown private monopoly that instantly became the American leader in wireless communication. This decision also secured RCA’s insider position and formidable financial standing to profoundly influence the nature and development of radio and television in America from that point onward. Thirty-year-old David Sarnoff was chosen commercial manager at RCA, the title he held earlier with the American Marconi Company. “While later described by others as the founder of both the Radio Corporation of America and the National Broadcasting Corporation [NBC, RCA’s broadcasting subsidiary created in 1926], Sarnoff was neither,” confirms media historian, Louise Benjamin. “These misconceptions were perpetuated because Sarnoff’s later accomplishments were so plentiful that any myth was believable. Indeed, his foresight and corporate savvy led to many communication developments, especially television.”⁴

By the fall of 1937, David Sarnoff was intensely pursuing a fast track to affect NBC’s transition from experimental TV to launching the first commercial television system in the United States. In August, he had traveled to Europe to see for himself what the current state of the medium was. His experience in London, specifically—where the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) inaugurated regularly scheduled telecasting to the general public some ten months before, on November 2, 1936—convinced him that America was now as ready as England to begin the long and arduous process of bringing television into homes across the nation.

On arriving back in New York on September 25, 1937, a spirited Sarnoff disembarked from the S.S. Paris and approached a bevy of reporters. The first question he fielded was the one on everybody’s mind: “Is England ahead of the United States in television?” His answer was that RCA was essentially at a point of technological parity with its British counterpart because of cross-licensing agreements where both corporations shared the same electronic television patents. More to the point, though, Sarnoff recognized that commercial TV in the United States ultimately required the creation of a workable distribution network, not merely the development of a technical infrastructure. “I firmly believe in the American system of private enterprise, rather than government subsidy,” he continued, contrasting RCA/NBC’s support structure with that of the BBC, while adding that he was also certain that “in due time we shall find practical answers to practical problems that now beset the difficult road of the pioneer in television.”⁵ Here Sarnoff was implying that he was TV’s principal trailblazer. That was the corporate image that he had been carefully cultivating for years, and few people watching him speak on that cool Saturday afternoon doubted his steely resolve.

Within a month, David Sarnoff had organized a promotional telecast from studio 3H in Radio City at Rockefeller Center over NBC’s experimental TV station, W2XBS, where he was to sign a contract ensuring RCA’s participation in the 1939 World’s Fair, although such corporate involvement was always a foregone conclusion. This international exposition, dubbed “The World of Tomorrow,” was the brainchild of an elite group of New York City businessmen, including the top executives at Chase Manhattan Bank, Consolidated Edison, the Manufacturers Trust Company, the New York Trust Company, and Macy’s, along with Mayor Fiorella La Guardia. They initially conceived of the fair in 1935 at the height of the Depression as a daring and inspired civic initiative that would both jump-start the local and national economies and stimulate increased investment in the future.

For his part, Sarnoff was invited to join the executive planning committee of the World’s Fair in his capacity as president of the Radio Corporation of America. He was already preparing an expanded role for television at the exposition well beyond its coming-out party at the RCA exhibit. He knew that, in December 1937, NBC was about to unveil the first mobile television station in the United States. Comprised of two large buses, this transportable TV unit would soon be available for remote telecasts—leading to similar kinds of on-the-spot reporting once the fair opened. Sarnoff “had studied the massive impact of Alexander Graham Bell’s telephonic demonstration at the opening of the Philadelphia exposition in 1876 and he was counting on igniting a similar brushfire of popular interest” with television.⁶

Sarnoff held court before an oversized RCA TV camera in studio 3H, sitting behind a large wooden desk and flanked on his right by Major Lenox R. Lohr, a military engineer who was then the newly installed president of NBC, and on his left by Grover Walen, president of the World’s Fair Corporation. In a telltale sign of the fair’s growing importance to Sarnoff, he had originally hired Lohr in 1936 because the former army officer had successfully organized and directed the 1933–1934 Chicago Century of Progress Exposition. Only a year later, however, Sarnoff was already growing disenchanted, “confid[ing] to public relations counsel Edward L. Bernays that Lohr showed little saichel, or shrewdness.”⁷

Once again, Sarnoff took charge, occupying center stage between the two men with a map of the proposed fair in the background, as well as miniatures of the three-sided obelisk, the Trylon, and its companion globe, the Persiphere, before him on the desk. Turning to Walen, he asked the one-time New York City police commissioner and recent head of Roosevelt’s New Recovery Administration (NRA) to comment on the models before them. The elegantly dressed and mustachioed Walen smiled broadly and explained that the actual seven-hundred-foot Trylon and the two-hundred-foot Perisphere, connected by a giant ramp called a Helicline, would serve as the focal point for the entire World’s Fair. He noted that these futuristic monuments sat at the place where most visitors would enter The World of Tomorrow. Painted fully white, he added, the Trylon and the Perisphere were already becoming the most recognizable symbols of the upcoming exposition, conveying the bright and optimistic future that lay ahead for the country, as well as the power of technology to solve many current problems and improve the daily lives of most Americans. Walen ended his remarks by calling the World’s Fair a blueprint for progress. The portly Sarnoff beamed approvingly at his guest, feeling that his own vision of television dovetailed perfectly with Walen’s upbeat and hopeful message about The World of Tomorrow.

As was the case with all of these experimental NBC telecasts, the audience was relatively small, composed mainly of two hundred to three hundred news people and public officials, along with several dozen other NBC executives and engineers watching on company sets throughout the New York metropolitan area. NBC’s studio 3H was originally designed for radio, but Sarnoff had ordered it remodeled for television back in 1935. It “was a two-story room measuring about 20-by-40 feet, with a control booth elevated on the second story level, and featuring a glass window.”⁸ Because of the cramped surroundings, the attending members of the press were escorted to various meeting rooms and halls inside the RCA building to comfortably view this early promotional telecast on an assortment of newly tested RCA model TVs sporting either five-inch, nine-inch, or twelve-inch screens.

The overall picture quality of RCA’s electronic television system was now getting better than ever, having increased in definition from 343 to 441 lines at thirty frames per second in just the last two years alone. The reporters present were duly impressed by the technical demonstration they were witnessing, although most were highly skeptical about the prospects of commercial TV actually being made available to average Americans by the opening of the World’s Fair. They had heard similar claims too many times before. Sarnoff clearly understood the legal and economic obstacles that still stood before his corporation. Nevertheless, he had given his senior staff their marching orders, and Sarnoff fully expected to be introducing television to the general public on April 30, 1939, no matter what challenges were being posed by a reluctant Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in Washington, as well as by RCA’s main industrial competitors in the field.

Sarnoff and his executive team had been intently working behind the scenes for well over a year, lobbying to have their own electronic television system adopted as the industry standard. Achieving this kind of acceptance was crucial in both getting the upper hand on RCA’s principal rivals—specifically, Farnsworth, Philco, DuMont, Zenith, and CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System)—and minimizing the inevitable consumer confusion that would hurt all parties involved if several incompatible systems ended up canceling each other out in the marketplace. Ultimately, too, the FCC had to formally approve the start of commercial service in America before TV advertising of any kind could officially begin.

Back in 1931, the Radio Manufacturers Association (RMA) had established its first nonbinding but generally accepted standard for television—forty-one lines at fifteen frames per ...