New Jersey and TV, More than the Sopranos

May of 2010 marked the 75th anniversary of commercial television broadcasting by the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) from a transmitter on top of the Empire State Building in New York City.

The summer of 2010 will also mark 75th anniversary of basic technology behind cable television. The Coaxial Cable was originally invented in the early 1930s as a means of increasing the number of telephone calls that could be sent over a single wire. Radio engineers at RCA quickly realized that the technology would make it possible to transmit television broadcasts between a central programming facility and local broadcast towers.

Engineers were excited about the new cable because without shielding, transmissions along a cable were subject to interference. This limited the amount of information that could transmitted and prevented conventional telephone lines from being used to carry television signals. The invention of the coaxial cable, to use modern terminology, increased the broadband to the point where a network was practical.

Television was still in its infancy in 1935 when the first long distance coaxial cable connected the television Studios at Radio City and the transmitter on top of the Empire State Building in New York City with Philadelphia. The cable was developed by Bell Laboratories for the Radio Corporation of America who would use it on an experimental basis. There were no plans to use the cable for routine broadcasting.

(Radio City was located at Rockefeller Center and should not be confused with the Radio City Music Hall that is actually located about a block north. Rockefeller Center was the headquarters of the National Broadcasting Corporation and most TV viewers today know it as 30 Rock.)

Broadcasting became a big business during 1920s as radio moved from being used primarily for military purposes and international telegraphy to a medium for news and entertainment. The first transatlantic voice messages were sent by the Marconi Corporation in 1919 between Canada and Ireland. Regular radiotelephone service from New York to London would be available in a few months according to the company. Meanwhile, a Navy radio transmitter located in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and operated by the Marconi Corporation successfully made a one-way voice transmission to the military transport ship George Washington en route to Brest, France. In April of 1919 President Wilson traveled to France aboard the George Washington whose radio equipment was modified to allowed two-way voice communications between the ship and Washington.

Developments like these excited the civilian population with the same enthusiasm that the current generation shows for the internet. In fact, the question of pirated music arose as early as January of 1922 when the federal government ordered amateur operators to stop broadcasting music because doing so violated the exclusive transmission rights granted to stations within certain cities. It was also claimed that the amateur transmissions were causing interference with commercial stations. News content was also being pirated. The Associated Press called on broadcasters to stop reading wire service stories over the airways. Many radio stations resisted this call and eventually the wire services came to be a vital part of the broadcast news media.

Regular music broadcasts began in several US cities in the fall of 1921. Network radio was launched a few years later. NBC began their network service in November of 1926 and the Columbia Broadcast System (CBS) followed about a year later in September of 1927. By 1935 about two thirds of the nation’s homes had radios. By this time however, television had already been in development for several decades.

An analog television works on a simple principle, a beam of electrons is directed at a phopshorescent screen. Where the most electrons strike, the screen glows brightest. The challenge had always been to find a way to direct the electron beam so that the bright spots appear where they are supposed to appear. This is achieved by a process called scanning. The beam is first directed at the upper corner of the screen. If spot in that corner is supposed to be bright, a large number of electrons are sent to the spot. While the phosphorescent screen is still glowing, the beam moves to the adjacent spot on the screen and the process is repeated. The electron beam is swept, or scanned, horizontally over the screen. At the end of the horizontal row the beam is dropped down to the next row and process is repeated. In the time it took to read this paragraph the screen would be swept side to side, row by row, several hundred times.

The first method of scanning the screen was to use a rotating disk with a series of holes that would sweep past the electron beam. The holes were positioned so that as the flow of electrons increased or decreased, the spot on the screen they were supposed to be striking was exposed by one of the holes in the disk.

This was the system employed by a number of early television inventors. The first attempt to pioneered in 1884 by Paul Nipkow in Berlin, Germany. The idea was sound but the photodetectors at the time were too limited. An Englishman named John L. Baird later developed a spinning disk mechanical scanning system. By 1929, the British Broadcasting Company made some experimental broadcasts using 30 rows across the screen. The update rate was a mere twelve and a half times per second. The resulting images were neither sharp nor flicker-free because the update rate was too slow.

However it was the invention of a system of magnets to direct the electron beam by the American Philo Taylor Farnsworth that made an all-electronic television possible. Farnsworth's picture tube and timing circuit were patented by 1929. One of Farnsworth's rivals, Vladimir Kosma Zworykin, had invented a camera he called the "iconoscope." In this system an image was scanned to convert it into a series of analog signals. It was the first practical television camera and a version of it was also patented by Farnsworth.

RCA hired Zworykin to develop a television system. Much of the research and development work on the system would be carried out in RCA’s Camden, New Jersey facility. The company patented an improved version of Farnsworth's original picture tube in 1931. RCA now had all the pieces necessary for a commercial television system. Its first experimental transmitter was placed on top of the 1,300-foot-tall Empire State Building. The first studios were installed on the 88th floor. The tests were successful and by 1935 RCA president, David Sarnoff, announced that regular broadcasts would be available to the public.

During the early 1930s about several theaters nationwide were fitted with television projectors. A theater in the Lincoln Park section of Jersey City had equipment installed by Jenkins Radiovisor Company.

Under the leadership of Mayor Frank Hague and the Chamber of Commerce Jersey City was poised to take advantage of the new technology. About fifty television sets were set up in radio shops and other places throughout the city. The city's television project was launched in April of 1930 with a broadcast by Mayor Hague. The pictures were broadcast by stations W2XCR and W2XCD while the sound was transmitted on radio stations WRNY and WHOM. Jersey City’s Chamber of Commerce sponsored what was called “Television Week” with a series of broadcasts from the stage of the theater at Lincoln Park. The broadcasts would run from 7 to 10 pm during the week of April 7 to 12, 1930. The Jenkins Radiovisor Company provided the broadcasting equipment and the receiving sets.

The Jenkins Radiovisor Company was founded by Charles Francis Jenkins, a prolific inventor with more than 400 patents covering a wide range of fields including automotive and aviation components.

Patents on motion picture technologies lead Jenkins into television research. Jenkins demonstrated his own version of a scanning disk television shortly after Baird's initial demonstration and by July of 1928 was making regular broadcasts from a station near Washington DC. In October of 1929 De Forest Radio bought out the Jenkins Television

Corporation. Shortly afterwards, an engineer for the DeForest Radio Company named Allen B. Dumont, requested a construction permit for a television station in Passaic, New Jersey, using 20,000 watts power and operating on 2,0002,100 kilocycles. The Jenkins Radiovisors were among the first televisions designed for ease of use as opposed to being high tech kits for the home electronics hobbyist. (The parallels to the early personal computers are striking.) The Jenkins sets were also among the first intended for the home market.

Jenkins broadcasts were made from Washington DC and New Jersey. The picture quality was poor, the prices of the Radiovisors were high, programming choices were limited, and during the Great Depression sales of the sets declined. With all-electric television on the horizon, sales were unlikely to recover and by March of 1932 the assets of the company were sold to RCA.

Allen B. DuMonot was a graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnical Institute and afterwards went to work for Westinghouse. Rising to the position of supervisor in the vacuum tube production unit. He went to work for Dr. Lee DeForest of the DeForest Radio Company but struck out on his own to explore television. Working in his basement, DuMont founded his own company to manufacture cathode ray tubes in 1931. The company moved to a new plant at 2 Main Avenue, Passaic in 1938. The company also announced in 1938 that they would construct an experimental television transmitter. If successful the new transmitter would broadcast films made by Paramount Pictures. The movie company had acquired a stake in the DuMont Television about six months earlier.

As the DuMont company continued to grow another manufacturing facility was established in Clifton on Shafto Street at Scholes Avenue in 1948. The company also acquired at this time the former Wright Aeronautical plant in East Paterson. This move gave the company 500,000 square feet of manufacturing space on a 58-acre site. About 4,000 persons were expected to be employed by the company once the new plants were operational.

DuMont was a successful producer of televisions and television components. His sets were noted for their high quality but DuMont continued to devote resources to broadcasting. In 1941 the company licensed a New York television station. It was the third broadcast transmitter on Manhattan Island. But the broadcast operations expanded too fast and the company was forced to use profits from television set manufacturing to keep up their cash flow. The firm never really recovered from the stress. DuMont had trouble financing popular shows and whenever the company succeeded in creating one, it was usually bought up by NBC or CBS. Concerned stockholders forced DuMont to spin off its broadcasting operations in 1955. Oscilloscope and cathode-ray tube manufacturing were sold to Fairchild in 1960.

The early television manufacturers operated without industry-wide standards. In 1938, RCA pushed the Radio Manufacturers Association (RMA) to adopt its television system (441 lines) as the industry standard. The Federal Communications Commission conducted hearings on the proposal in 1940 but RCA and NBC had already been using the format for its broadcasts from New York City. Critics of the proposed standards insisted that 441 lines did not provide sufficient visual resolution. Both DuMont Laboratories and Philco Radio and Television joined their voices to the opposition. The RMA formed its own National Television System Committee. The committee eventually adopted a 525 line, 60 fields per second standard that was approved in 1941 by the FCC.

Less than two weeks after the adoption of the new standards, the RCA had a network of repair stations that would update sets for the new system. About 100 conversions a day were performed and the company announced that about three more weeks were needed to finish converting the remaining 1,500 sets. The DuMont company was producing 50 new sets a day that were compatible with the new standards.

At the time it was estimated that there were 4,500 home television sets in the greater New York area, another 600 sets were installed in various public places. The total audience was an estimated 90,000 viewers.

The stage was now set for the explosive growth of television as both a business and (sometimes) an art form. During the postwar years the medium would grow into the vast cultural wasteland we know and love today. Readers of the Indicator will know of course that the Public Broadcasting System can trace its origins back to 1953 when the FCC reserved 250 broadcast channels for educational programming. By the end of the 1960s there were 175 educational broadcasters forming the nucleus of the current PBS system.

Readers of the Indicator will naturally all be familiar with Nova, Masterpiece Theater, History Detectives, and the PBS Newshour. They may not admit however to familiarity with American Idol, The Simpsons, or (gasp!) The Jersey Shore. Go ahead and enjoy, we won’t tell anyone.

Kevin Olsen

Montclair State University

Olsenk@Mail.Montclair.Edu