Looking at 50 Years of the Small Screen

Although this spring has been widely hailed as the 50th birthday of television, the world’s most powerful medium was not born in 1939. Indeed, it didn’t really have a birth, it sort of oozed out in bits and pieces from various laboratories and companies over several decades.

Milton Berle appeared on an experimental station in Chicago in 1929. At the time, 28 “visual broadcasting” stations had licenses in the United States. In 1930, a television outfit called Jenkins Broadcasting, using a soon obsolete mechanical system, sent out a polyglot of programs to the sets it sold in New Jersey. Hollywood put out a speculative film called “Trapped by Television” in 1936, the same year the British went on the air with scheduled broadcasts.

The date of April 30, 1939--when President Roosevelt was shown on TV opening the New York World’s Fair--is really not the birthday of television, but of television as we know it. With commercials, for one thing. RCA, the biggest and richest of the companies pursuing the television brass ring, weighed in with its first commercial broadcasts.

Larry Bird, a curator at the Smithsonian Institution, explained that three factors came together on that date for the first time in the United States--the electron-scanning technology, a manufacturing base that could turn out the sets and a program service that would provide something to watch on those sets.

“It was just a happy coincidence for RCA that they were in New York and ready to go when the fair was ready to open,” Bird said. Indeed, he reminded those of this TV-saturated age that Roosevelt was not there to appear on television, he was simply there to open the fair.

“When you see pictures of him opening the fair, there are dozens of newsreel cameras and one lone TV camera,” he noted.

Bird was standing in front of the television set that was the centerpiece of the RCA pavilion at that World’s Fair. It is now the first exhibit you see at “American Television from the Fair to the Family” at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History celebrating this 50th anniversary, an exhibition Bird spent about a year putting together.

The set is cloaked in Lucite to show its electronic innards. Its picture was directed upward and viewers saw it in an angled mirror, an arrangement dictated by the picture tube’s length.

RCA’s was not the only pavilion to feature television in 1939. General Electric and Westinghouse had it too. According to Bird, at all three exhibits you could walk by a camera and see yourself on TV. RCA handed out cards certifying that the bearer had been televised. They have one of those at the Smithsonian, along with a button given to early TV viewers that says, “I Have Seen the Future.”

“One of the ironies is that television eventually replaced World’s Fairs as the place where we see the types of things people used to go to the fairs for,” he noted.

Near that Lucite TV is one of the first figures to be telecast, a Felix the Cat doll that an RCA engineer purchased and put on a turntable for experiments with television in the early 1930s. Its crude image, which is preserved in a photograph, was broadcast to sets placed in the homes of RCA engineers and executives. The picture was formed by 60 lines of electronic scans; today, American TVs have 525 such lines.

Putting together an exhibition about television is especially difficult because TV is about images, not objects, which are the stuff of such exhibits. There are two TVs going constantly at the exhibition. One shows an ad from 1947 with Morey Amsterdam and Art Carney selling a Dumont set as “Your Window on the World,” and the other is a 15-minute reel with highlights of shows and ads from the last four decades. But Bird focused his exhibit on the physical objects that demonstrate the changing relationship between the country and the medium.

He pointed out that early advertisements show TV being sold as a step forward in the modern industrial world, much as High Definition Television, known as HDTV, is being marketed today. But the early ads also show an ambiguity about the new medium. Those first sets cost $600, about the price of a car, so they were aimed at upper-class consumers. Drawings and photographs placed sets in posh homes, but their design allowed them to be hidden behind doors or pushed down into consoles. Moreover, the furniture in the room was never arranged facing the TV.

World War II abruptly ended the growth of the medium. “Most of the cathode ray tube factories were put to work making oscilloscopes,” Bird said. But the war’s end brought a boom in the new technology.

“When you ask people where the first place they ever saw a TV was, it was either at a friend’s house, in a bar or at an appliance store,” Bird said. “We tried to re-create one of those environments.”

A wall of old sets, mostly vintage 1947 to 1953, stare at the viewer. After the war, there were about 140 different manufacturers, the price was down to $199, and returning GIs were eager to cash in their war bonds and buy one.

And the marketing changed. The advertisements Bird displayed emphasize that while the typical family was accustomed to going their separate ways to sporting events, the theater and the like, with television everyone could now sit down together to view such fare. It seems hopefully naive, but Bird pointed out that it is a rather standard ploy.

“You see computers being sold this way today,” he said. “It’s a big ticket item and the manufacturers know you’re only going to buy one of them so they want you to think everyone in the family will use it.”

Later, when companies were urging us to buy a second, portable TV, the ad chosen shows two happy teen-agers watching their own set as mom and dad look on approvingly in the background.

The TV exhibition incorporates the so-called “Wall of Entertainment” from the continuing “A Nation of Nation” exhibition about American immigrant life. Though it still has a variety of exhibits, it has been given a TV slant with sheet music of TV themes, the mileage sign from “MASH,” the Fonz’s leather jacket, Magnum’s Detroit Tiger hat, Mister Rogers’ sweater and the like.

Pictures show the way TV promoted its programs, and the way those programs represented American family life. Behind Archie Bunker’s chair are a few Nielsen audience measuring devices. The empty chair stares at the TV showing the highlight reel.

Bird said that ultimately what television has become is the manufacturer of the images we carry in our minds.

“Look, every image I have of President Bush or President Reagan I got from TV,” he said. “When I think of them, I think of their television images.”

The closest he can come to a three-dimensional representation of this phenomenon is a wall of theme lunch boxes, representing countless kids who traipsed to school with a television icon held close to their sides.

In the corner of a case filled with more recent technology, Bird points out a button handed out at a demonstration of HDTV on Capitol Hill. “I Have Seen the Future,” it says.

“We talked to the person who made up the button and she didn’t have any idea that it was the same slogan used at the 1939 World’s Fair,” Bird said. “We’ve come some sort of full circle.”

So soon, coming to a store near you, a $3,000 High Definition Television that will bring your family together to see this technological marvel.