The first time I saw television, I didn’t know what I was looking at.
How come?
I was 9 years old, and my parents and I were visiting the 1939 World’s Fair on Long Island. That was the one with the trylon and perisphere.
We walked through one exhibit and there, on a small screen, was a black and white moving image of — if I remember correctly — wheat fields blowing in the wind.
What was your reaction?
Something like, What’s the big deal? I had already seen images moving on a really big screen in a movie theater. What’s with this?
As a 9-year-old, I didn’t know much about transmission of sounds by radio waves, much less of pictures.
Fast-forward to the late 1940s. My parents heard about families buying television sets. The picture tubes were round, as high as they were wide, so screen size added a lot to the size of the set.
How big were they?
Many of the sets had only 7-inch screens. A few families had 10-inch sets. Family nights around the TV was a growing thing. Families with sets would invite others over to watch the programs, such as they were.
In 1947 my parents bought a 10-inch set, and we became one of the few homes in our neighborhood to have a TV.
And they were enough of a status symbol that homes without a TV would want it to look as if they did have one.
How did they do that?
Fakery. In those days TV signals were weak and so were the sets. So we needed roof antennas.
And some TV-envying families would have dummy antennas installed on their roofs. “Look at us. We have a TV.”
Seems strange, but I guess the early TV sets were expensive?
Very. By today’s standards.
Programming in the early days was meager. The best programs didn’t start until evening, so often a station would televise merely a test pattern to help a technician install a set.
Install?
That’s right. TV sets back them were not simple plug-and-play devices. There were many behind-the-set adjustments: brightness, contrast, size, vertical hold, horizontal hold.
Other than a test pattern, some stations would run films of singers performing. One I remember was Art Lund singing “Mam’selle.”
One New York station even pointed a camera out its window and televised a street scene so that a TV viewer could spend time watching traffic go by.
How exciting.
Like watching paint dry. But, by late afternoon, it was the kids’ turn, so it was Howdy Doody Time, with Bob Smith talking to marionettes.
In the evening, live variety shows were beginning to replace old movies as entertainment for grown-ups. One was Milton Berle’s show, technically called Texaco Star Theater.
Another was Ed Sullivan’s show, billed initially as The Toast of the Town.
Of course, in those early days, all programs were in black and white. Although, before TV, I had been to Ebbetts Field to watch the Brooklyn Dodgers play, I got used to watching black and white images on the small screen.
So, when I went back to the ballpark, it was a shock to get that first glimpse of green grass.
So when did color TV start?
I guess it was around 1950 or so that the talk about color TV began. Two approaches were emerging. CBS and RCA.
CBS was promoting what was called a field-sequential system using a color wheel. A white light shining through a rotating color wheel would paint in sequence the primary colors on the entire TV screen.
RCA promoted what was called a dot-sequential system. In it a beam of electrons would target the appropriately colored phosphors on the screen to create the color image.
At first, the CBS approach was approved, but that was later withdrawn and RCA got the nod.
Why?
The main reason was that the RCA system was compatible with existing black and white sets already in the homes. The CBS system was not, and it required that viewers buy completely new TV sets.
Not good.
Here’s the kicker. Sometime in the early Fifties I heard that a certain department store was going to demonstrate the CBS colot system. I went to the demo, but it was a bust. They couldn’t even get the color wheel to spin.
Also not good.
So the final selection of a compatible color system was a good one.