The Unofficial History of Home Theater, Part II

By Mike McGann
Posted Thursday, November 30, 2006

Editor's note: this is part II of this story. If you haven't read part I, well, none of this will make any sense. Not that it would if you had read it, mind you, but you'll do much better on the quiz at the end.

If you hang around the Indianapolis headquarters of RCA, it is an article of faith that Russian émigré Vladimir Zworykin invented modern television with a team of RCA engineers. Decades of public relations efforts reinforced this story, told with a religious fervor by the RCA disciples.

It’s an entertaining story, compelling and legendary all at the same time. It’s also a bunch of malarkey.

In part because of family legend and in part by own research, I know the truth of the matter was a bit more complicated. Although a number of companies in the late 1920s, including RCA, worked on a mechanical television system — a very low-resolution system, typically 60 scanning lines — using scanning discs, as well know, mechanical television didn't really work practicably. I mean, who would want to watch video on a two-inch screen at low-resolution? Sorry, Video iPod owners, but it's true, but your method of watching "The Office" was deemed obsolete around 1932.

Electronic television was born in the middle of an Idaho potato field, as a precocious 14-year-old would-be inventor figured out the modern electron scanning system still in use today while plowing his uncle’s field. Of course, the farmland is probably now a Wal-Mart, so you’ll find the exact spot right next to some lovely plastic tea cozies, on sale this week.

When he got a bit older, 20, Philo T. Farnsworth did a bit more than figure things out in the middle of a field. After describing the device in detail to his high school chemistry teacher, it took him six years to get funding to prove his invention. In 1927, the year of the first “Talkie,” Farnsworth’s primitive television (yes, he even named it, mixing the Greek “Tele” which means roughly, “Oh my God, blind me now” and the Latin “Vision” which roughly means “Dude, did you see the melons on that chick?”) was demonstrated. Unfortunately, the first prototype was destroyed when the AFLAC duck kept appearing on screen.

Zworykin even visited Farnsworth’s lab in 1930, reportedly telling people he wished the system he was developing worked better, as it so far amounted to a blurry line on screen (still a leap beyond the current CW lineup), after seeing Farnsworth’s television in action.

“Inspired” by his visit to Farnsworth’s lab, Zworykin worked the bugs out his Iconoscope system for RCA. Patent fights and litigation filled the next decade, but the battle was really over before it began: Zworykin had a massive advantage, David Sarnoff, the Bill Gates of his era.

Radio Corporation of America was very much like the Microsoft of a decade ago, a giant monopoly that owned two radio networks, the “NBC red” and “NBC blue,” a giant music label, RCA Victor, a movie studio and chain of theaters, RKO, and of course, they made radios and were the top selling brand in the U.S. Very quietly, they bought Canada, too, but ultimately sold it back to the British, annoyed by the excessive use of “eh” on Toronto radio stations.

Much like the patent fights of the 1980s between Microsoft and Apple, RCA and Farnsworth slugged it out in the courts over royalties, before RCA finally gave in and agreed to pay in 1939. While RCA trumpeted the creation of TV at the New York World’s Fair, Farnsworth labored in obscurity, finally merging his company with International Telephone and Telegraph, where he worked with my grandfather in the late 1950s.

A handful of TV stations began to broadcast in early 1939, led by RCA’s New York City station, a direct ancestor of today’s WNBC. Another station, Philco’s WPTZ, broadcast from Philadelphia, a station that evolved into today's KYW. By late 1939, Television was regularly broadcasting in about a dozen cities, and it was possible to buy TV set from any number of companies. In both England and Germany, there were literally thousands of televisions and government sponsored broadcasts, all of which came to an end when Germany invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939.

Development continued in the U.S., with RCA beginning regular broadcasts from the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, N.Y. Including the first broadcast of a U.S. President, Franklin D. Roosevelt. History records no evidence of him wearing a flight suit at the time.

While Farnsworth could do nothing to stop RCA, Adolph Hitler was considerably more effective. Both Farnsworth and RCA (Sarnoff bullied his way into becoming an Army Reserve general, a title he used for the rest of his life) took up building electronic gear for the Allies, while only a tiny number of people continued the development of television. During the war years, a general ban was instituted on making TVs, although most existing stations continued a minimal broadcast schedule for the tiny number of sets in consumer hands. Still, the U.S. government tinkered with various frequencies, and ultimately made all of the pre-war sets useless by making room for FM radio. Color TV, in development from virtually the beginning of the TV era, all but stopped in its tracks, as the war effort took front and center keeping the world safe from Hilter and delaying the advent of true commercial TV.

Unfortunately, the war didn’t happen soon enough to prevent the development of the TV commercial.

We’ll be right back.
The TV call signs of late 30s and early 40s all had something in common, an X. X as in experimental, commercial-free. Kind of like HBO, except for the lack of good programming, although as I noted above, RCA on its WNBT station in New York, aired a Bulova commercial before a Dodgers-Phillies game. Bulova paid $9 for a 10-second spot. Interestingly, that date is also cited as the day WNBT (now WNBC) became a regular broadcasting station, having been the experimental W2XBS literally the day before. Of course, as WNBT transmitted on channel one, (a frequency today used for emergency radios and not TVs in the U.S.) more changes after World War II were in store.

While TV went into deep freeze during the war, RCA, Philco and other companies kept the flame alive, if barely flickering, in anticipation of the end of the war. Those in the industry recognized that there would be a giant audience for television in a post-war world, so development of both more refined black and white broadcasting systems and receivers continued along with color TV. Development on other key TV innovations, such as the infomercial, proceeded more slowly, and would remain stalled throughout the 1950s until the birth of Billy Mays, just outside of Pittsburgh in 1960.

While the most dreaded of commercials, the political attack ad didn't really surface until the late 1950s, Dwight Eisenhower used a festive cartoon, "I Like Ike" that showed the potential — not really fulfilled until Lyndon Johnson's "daisy girl" ad suggested that Republican Barry Goldwater was a nut who get us all killed in a nuclear holocaust. The leap from there to Willie Horton and "Swift Boat Veterans For Truth" proved a short one.

Men of color
But thankfully, people would be able to enjoy a distraction from such content: color TV.

While a lot of people know that RCA sold the first color sets in March, 1954 and began broadcasting on NBC earlier that same year, a lot of people don't know that RCA was spurred on by a at-first silly attempt by CBS to get the FCC to approve a largely non-compatible color disc system – with the idea that it spur RCA into getting moving on real research into a compatible color system, some suggest. As CBS' sytem varied little from the lame systems it proposed in 1941 and 1946, it was either a humorous attempt, or CBS thought the FCC was populated with morons, which as we all know, didn't happen until after 2000.

When the FCC approved the lower resolution (525 versus 405 lines) CBS color disc system as the official standard for color TV in 1950, the joke was on CBS, which lacked the research facilities to make such a product actually work — and not be the size of a small house in anything larger than a tiny screen (workable color wheel displays didn't make it to market until the 1990s, as part of the DLP projection system). But with visions of large patent licensing dollars — at that point largely the province of RCA — CBS started taking color TV very seriously. And so did RCA.

The CBS system was a robust failure. A total of 100 sets were sold and the network managed a few dozen hours of color broadcasts before cutting a deal with the government to prohibit further sale and development of color TV to preserve resources for the Korean War, the only such order issued for any industry since World War II.

Despite the prohibition, RCA got off it's duff, abandoned its first color system, which required three CRTs and worked a lot like later CRT video projectors (and current CRT-based rear-projection TV), figured out a way to transmit and decode color information as part of the current tv signal, and formed a working group, known as NTSC, to sort out a final standard for workable color TV. The FCC revoked the CBS approval and implemented the RCA system in late 1953 a few months after the prohibition order was vacated at the end of the Korean War. Ironically, CBS was slow to adapt to color, after having been responsible for pushing RCA — becoming frustrated that their silly system didn't become the standard. ABC didn't start seriously broadcasting in color until 1965.

This story continues in Part III, complete with car chases, wars and naughty bits. And a quiz.