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 nationÕs 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 RCAÕs 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
CityÕs Chamber of Commerce sponsored what was called ÒTelevision WeekÓ 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 wonÕt tell anyone.
Kevin
Olsen
Montclair
State University
Olsenk@Mail.Montclair.Edu