The Unofficial History of Home Theater, Part I

By Mike McGann
Posted Thursday, November 30, 2006

Sure, it's fun to argue about home theater. Heck, go to any number of Web forums (including the one on our site) and you'll find people verbally abusing each other over whether their plasma TV is better than someone else's TV or fighting over DirecTV's low-resolution HD channels. As much fun as it is bludgeoning other people with an HDMI cable (and when you think about it, wouldn't a gun be cheaper?), there's a lot of misinformation out there, only some of which comes from enthusiast magazines.

So it seemed a good idea, as we kick this site off, to give our readers a firm foundation in the history of home theater. We hope to pursue other such pieces on the history of audio, but our lawyers are worried about causing heart attacks among the AES crowd. (If you didn't get that last joke and don't know who the AES crowd is, consider yourself very, very lucky and just keep moving).

The history of home theater, like that of man itself is chock full of stories about brilliant men and the marketing people who then took that simple, brilliant idea and made it confusing and utterly nonworkable. But enough about DTS. On with our story.

The first home theaters were, in fact, digital. At some point after the introduction of the first great analog lighting device, fire, somebody figured out how to use his or her fingers to make shadow puppets, probably to make fun of someone else:

“Look, this Grok face. Now, see Grok run. Now see Grok get eaten by wild ferret. Ha ha ha.”

The first surround sound was analog, supplied by the vast variety of body sounds, intentional and unintentional, from those gathered in the cave, with a few wild animals mixed in for drama, with virtually no calibration. This along with sex, pretty much covered the entire home entertainment field for a few dozen millennia, as man progressed from cave to hut. That continued until the wealthy were invented, shortly after the invention of money, but shortly before the advent of overpriced real estate, some of the first plots of which remain in California.

Wealth brought the first real divide in home entertainment comes. While the masses basically were left with shadow puppets, the occasional plague and their mates for entertainment, the wealthy could now afford live musicians, performers and concubines, and at the top of the economic food chain, royalty, could enjoy live in-home executions. This is a pattern that continued on through until the 20th Century, which is a really good coincidence, since that was when prerecorded music, radio, television and movies largely sprang into existence.

The first electronic geeks
If not for the telegraph, we might all be still be using shadow puppets, our spouses, or sitting in horse-drawn traffic, instead of enjoying modern home entertainment including any number of Fox shows featuring Paris Hilton and/or midgets. After the invention of the telegraph by Samuel Morse in 1837, which sent a series of on-off pulses through a wired network, countless inventors worked to improve the device, failing miserably at that, but they accidentally invented other devices that would make the telegraph obsolete.

Alexander Graham Bell’s tinkering with the telegraph led to the telephone, the first wired transmission of sound, and shortly thereafter, the first telemarketing call (“Sir, have you considered an extended warranty for your horse?”). Meanwhile, Thomas Edison’s messing about with telegraph led to the first devices capable of sending signals in two directions on the same cable at the same time, indirectly leading to the world being covered in America On-Line trial discs. If that’s not enough, Edison improved the telephone by inventing some of the first audio amplifiers, though it's doubtful he invented the process of exaggerating how powerful they were.

Edison, being Edison, developed a couple of other key home theater technologies, the light bulb and, building on his phone work, the phonograph, which used a wax cylinder to record music. The first recording was Edison singing “Mary had a Little Lamb.” Unfortunately, the A&R guys who heard it (impressive, if you think about it, since without records, there really couldn’t be record companies, but I digress. Again.) didn’t think it had “single” potential. Without college radio (or any radio, for that matter), it failed to be much of a big hit. Within a few years, the first format war would begin, pitting Edison’s wax tubes against flat discs used on something called a “gramophone.” Inadvertently, the Grammy award was invented, which might well have been more fun as the “Tubie” had not Edison’s tubes gone, well, the way of the gramophone a few decades later.

Not to be discouraged, the genius inventor kept working, giving up his dream of becoming a recording star. He worked day and night, as Edison usually slept in his lab, instead of at home with his sickly first wife. Ultimately, he (okay, actually one of his paid assistants) then invented the motion picture, and then shortly after the death of his first wife, Edison invented the trophy wife, which ended his days of sleeping the lab.

Yet another man who sought to improve the telegraph, Guglielmo Marconi, took credit for accidentally inventing modern radio, trying to create wireless telegraphy, using Edward Tesla’s famous coil. Ironically, an employee of Marconi radio, David Sarnoff, became famous when he was the telegraph operator on duty during the sinking of the Titanic. While Sarnoff would later run Radio Corporation of America and the National Broadcasting Company, leading to “Hello, Larry” and Mr. T ending up on millions of televisions across the country, Tesla merely became the inspiration for a big-hair metal band in the 1980s. History will decide which is a worse legacy.

Lee DeForest, who was attempting to create the cellular phone before there were enough cars on the road to cause decent accidents, inadvertently invented the technology for large-scale radio broadcasts: the three-element “audion” tube that made today’s morning zoo programs, and worse, Rick Dees, possible. Despite that, DeForrest remains in the Radio Hall of Fame.

By the end of the first World War, commercial radio was ready to be born and the government forced the creation of a monopoly to prevent key radio patents from ending up in the hands of foreigners, gasp, the British. The U.S. Navy forced United Fruit, General Electric, Westinghouse and AT&T to pool their patents and form Radio Corporation of America from the shell of American Marconi. GE and Westinghouse actually built most of the radios sold under the RCA name, in part to build audience for both companies' radio stations. Westinghouse was the first to get a commercial station on the air, Pittsburgh’s KDKA, which remains on the air more than 80 years later.

Of course, without RCA’s WEAF, we wouldn’t have had a crucial development in broadcasting: the commercial. In fact two decades later, the same company invented the TV commercial as well, slipping one on before the U.S. government said it was legal.

Within years, millions of American families gathered around their giant wood-bodied, tube filled radios, and theater of the mind was born. Of course, we all know, theater of the mindless did not emerge until the Fox TV Network was born, many, many years later. The radio tubes also led to the first group of tech weenies, guys who would hang out at the radio store and test tubes and tweak their radios for better performance. It was an ugly omen of things to come, including, gasp, Radio Shack.

At about the same time, millions of people flocked to see “The Jazz Singer.” While the Warner Brothers’ film was the first full-length feature using a full soundtrack recorded on the film, the real attraction was Al Jolson in blackface, which could explain why the film didn’t win any NACCP Image Awards (of course, not as well as the fact that the NAACP didn’t start giving them out until 1969).

Within years, wealthy people like William Randolph Hearst, famed producer of the Spanish-American War, began building the first in-home theaters. Normal people could enjoy their radio or drop a nickel and catch the double feature down at the bijou. Only the rich and powerful could enjoy movies at home.

But even before the first “talkies” were thrilling audiences with stunning mono, a few hardy individuals were developing the technology that would someday make Josephine the Plumber a household name: television.

Continued in part II. Can't you feel the excitement?