How Many Us Cities Had Commercial Television Service Between 1930 And 1950

Since replacing radio as the well-nigh pop mass medium in the 1950s, television has played such an integral office in mod life that, for some, it is difficult to imagine existence without it. Both reflecting and shaping cultural values, television has at times been criticized for its declared negative influences on children and young people and at other times lauded for its power to create a common experience for all its viewers. Major world events such as the John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther Rex assassinations and the Vietnam War in the 1960s, the Challenger shuttle explosion in 1986, the 2001 terrorist attacks on the Earth Trade Center, and the impact and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 accept all played out on television, uniting millions of people in shared tragedy and hope. Today, as Internet technology and satellite dissemination alter the way people watch television, the medium continues to evolve, solidifying its position equally one of the most important inventions of the 20th century.

The Origins of Television set

Inventors conceived the thought of television long before the technology to create it appeared. Early pioneers speculated that if audio waves could be separated from the electromagnetic spectrum to create radio, so too could TV waves be separated to transmit visual images. As early on as 1876, Boston civil servant George Carey envisioned complete boob tube systems, putting forwards drawings for a "selenium camera" that would enable people to "see past electricity" a twelvemonth later (Federal Communications Commission, 2005).

During the late 1800s, several technological developments set the stage for television. The invention of the cathode ray tube (CRT) by German physicist Karl Ferdinand Braun in 1897 played a vital role equally the forerunner of the Idiot box moving-picture show tube. Initially created every bit a scanning device known as the cathode ray oscilloscope, the CRT effectively combined the principles of the photographic camera and electricity. Information technology had a fluorescent screen that emitted a visible light (in the form of images) when struck by a beam of electrons. The other fundamental invention during the 1880s was the mechanical scanner system. Created by High german inventor Paul Nipkow, the scanning disk was a large, flat metal disk with a series of small-scale perforations arranged in a spiral blueprint. As the disk rotated, calorie-free passed through the holes, separating pictures into pinpoints of light that could be transmitted as a series of electronic lines. The number of scanned lines equaled the number of perforations, and each rotation of the deejay produced a idiot box frame. Nipkow's mechanical disk served every bit the foundation for experiments on the transmission of visual images for several decades.

In 1907, Russian scientist Boris Rosing used both the CRT and the mechanical scanner system in an experimental telly system. With the CRT in the receiver, he used focused electron beams to brandish images, transmitting crude geometrical patterns onto the goggle box screen. The mechanical disk system was used equally a photographic camera, creating a archaic television organization.

Effigy ix.ane

Two primal inventions in the 1880s paved the way for television to emerge: the cathode ray tube and the mechanical disk arrangement.

Mechanical Television versus Electronic Tv

From the early experiments with visual transmissions, ii types of television systems came into being: mechanical idiot box and electronic tv set. Mechanical television developed out of Nipkow'due south disk system and was pioneered past British inventor John Logie Baird. In 1926, Baird gave the world's first public demonstration of a television organisation at Selfridge'south department store in London. He used mechanical rotating disks to browse moving images into electric impulses, which were transmitted past cablevision to a screen. Here they showed upwards as a low-resolution pattern of calorie-free and nighttime. Baird's first idiot box program showed the heads of two ventriloquist dummies, which he operated in front of the photographic camera apparatus out of the audition's sight. In 1928, Baird extended his organization by transmitting a signal between London and New York. The following yr, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) adopted his mechanical system, and by 1932, Baird had developed the first commercially viable television arrangement and sold 10,000 sets. Despite its initial success, mechanical boob tube had several technical limitations. Engineers could go no more than about 240 lines of resolution, meaning images would always be slightly fuzzy (about modern televisions produce images of more than 600 lines of resolution). The use of a spinning disk also limited the number of new pictures that could exist seen per 2d, resulting in excessive flickering. The mechanical aspect of television proved to be a disadvantage that required fixing in society for the engineering to move frontward.

At the aforementioned time Baird (and, separately, American inventor Charles Jenkins) was developing the mechanical model, other inventors were working on an electronic television set system based on the CRT. While working on his father'south subcontract, Idaho teenager Philo Farnsworth realized that an electronic beam could browse a pic in horizontal lines, reproducing the prototype almost instantaneously. In 1927, Farnsworth transmitted the get-go all-electronic Television motion picture by rotating a unmarried straight line scratched onto a square piece of painted drinking glass by 90 degrees.

Farnsworth barely profited from his invention; during Globe State of war 2, the government suspended sales of Television receiver sets, and by the time the war ended, Farnsworth'southward original patents were close to expiring. Yet, following the war, many of his cardinal patents were modified past RCA and were widely applied in broadcasting to improve telly picture quality.

Having coexisted for several years, electronic television sets somewhen began to replace mechanical systems. With better picture quality, no noise, a more compact size, and fewer visual limitations, the electronic system was far superior to its predecessor and rapidly improving. Past 1939, the concluding mechanical television receiver broadcasts in the Us had been replaced with electronic broadcasts.

Early Broadcasting

Idiot box dissemination began every bit early as 1928, when the Federal Radio Committee authorized inventor Charles Jenkins to broadcast from W3XK, an experimental station in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC. Silhouette images from motion motion picture films were broadcast to the general public on a regular basis, at a resolution of simply 48 lines. Similar experimental stations ran broadcasts throughout the early 1930s. In 1939, RCA subsidiary NBC (National Broadcasting Company) became the first network to introduce regular television broadcasts, transmitting its countdown telecast of the opening ceremonies at the New York Earth's Off-white. The station's initial broadcasts transmitted to just 400 goggle box sets in the New York area, with an audience of 5,000 to 8,000 people (Lohr, 1940).

Television was initially available just to the privileged few, with sets ranging from $200 to $600—a hefty sum in the 1930s, when the average annual salary was $ane,368 (KC Library). RCA offered four types of telly receivers, which were sold in high-end department stores such every bit Macy'due south and Bloomingdale's, and received channels i through v. Early receivers were a fraction of the size of mod TV sets, featuring 5-, 9-, or 12-inch screens. Idiot box sales prior to World War Two were disappointing—an uncertain economic climate, the threat of state of war, the high price of a television receiver, and the limited number of programs on offering deterred numerous prospective buyers. Many unsold television sets were put into storage and sold after the war.

NBC was not the just commercial network to emerge in the 1930s. RCA radio rival CBS (Columbia Broadcasting Organization) also began broadcasting regular programs. And then that viewers would non need a divide boob tube for each individual network, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) outlined a single technical standard. In 1941, the panel recommended a 525-line arrangement and an image rate of thirty frames per 2d. It as well recommended that all U.S. boob tube sets operate using analog signals (circulate signals made of varying radio waves). Analog signals were replaced past digital signals (signals transmitted every bit binary code) in 2009.

With the outbreak of World War II, many companies, including RCA and Full general Electric, turned their attention to war machine production. Instead of commercial television sets, they began to churn out war machine electronic equipment. In addition, the war halted well-nigh all television dissemination; many TV stations reduced their schedules to around iv hours per week or went off the air birthday.

Color Engineering science

Although it did not become available until the 1950s or pop until the 1960s, the technology for producing colour television was proposed as early as 1904, and was demonstrated by John Logie Baird in 1928. As with his blackness-and-white tv system, Baird adopted the mechanical method, using a Nipkow scanning disk with three spirals, i for each primary colour (ruby, green, and blue). In 1940, CBS researchers, led by Hungarian goggle box engineer Peter Goldmark, used Baird'due south 1928 designs to develop a concept of mechanical color television that could reproduce the colour seen by a camera lens.

Following World War 2, the National Tv set Arrangement Committee (NTSC) worked to develop an all-electronic color system that was compatible with blackness-and-white Television set sets, gaining FCC approval in 1953. A year subsequently, NBC fabricated the first national color broadcast when it telecast the Tournament of Roses Parade. Despite the television industry's support for the new engineering science, it would be another 10 years before colour television gained widespread popularity in the United States, and black-and-white Television receiver sets outnumbered color Television set sets until 1972 (Klooster, 2009).

The Gilt Age of Goggle box

Effigy 9.iii

During the so-chosen "golden historic period" of tv, the percentage of U.Southward. households that endemic a television rose from 9 per centum in 1950 to 95.3 percent in 1970.

The 1950s proved to be the golden age of television receiver, during which the medium experienced massive growth in popularity. Mass-production advances made during Globe War II substantially lowered the cost of purchasing a ready, making television accessible to the masses. In 1945, there were fewer than 10,000 TV sets in the United States. Past 1950, this figure had soared to effectually half dozen million, and by 1960 more than 60 one thousand thousand television sets had been sold (World Book Encyclopedia, 2003). Many of the early idiot box programme formats were based on network radio shows and did not take advantage of the potential offered by the new medium. For example, newscasters merely read the news every bit they would accept during a radio broadcast, and the network relied on newsreel companies to provide footage of news events. However, during the early 1950s, boob tube programming began to branch out from radio broadcasting, borrowing from theater to create acclaimed dramatic anthologies such equally Playhouse 90 (1956) and The U.S. Steel 60 minutes (1953) and producing quality news film to back-trail coverage of daily events.

Two new types of programs—the mag format and the TV spectacular—played an important function in helping the networks proceeds control over the content of their broadcasts. Early television programs were developed and produced by a unmarried sponsor, which gave the sponsor a big corporeality of control over the content of the bear witness. By increasing plan length from the standard 15-minute radio show to thirty minutes or longer, the networks substantially increased advertisement costs for program sponsors, making it prohibitive for a single sponsor. Magazine programs such as the Today prove and The This evening Show, which premiered in the early 1950s, featured multiple segments and ran for several hours. They were besides screened on a daily, rather than weekly, ground, drastically increasing advertizement costs. Every bit a result, the networks began to sell spot advertisements that ran for 30 or 60 seconds. Similarly, the television spectacular (now known as the tv special) featured lengthy music-variety shows that were sponsored by multiple advertisers.

Figure ix.4

ABC's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire brought the quiz show back to prime number-fourth dimension television after a 40-year absence.

sonicwwtbamfangamer2 – millionaire – CC By-SA 2.0.

In the mid-1950s, the networks brought dorsum the radio quiz-show genre. Inexpensive and easy to produce, the tendency defenseless on, and by the cease of the 1957–1958 flavor, 22 quiz shows were existence aired on network tv set, including CBS's $64,000 Question. Shorter than some of the new types of programs, quiz shows enabled unmarried corporate sponsors to accept their names displayed on the set throughout the testify. The popularity of the quiz-testify genre plunged at the finish of the decade, nonetheless, when it was discovered that almost of the shows were rigged. Producers provided some contestants with the answers to the questions in gild to pick and choose the most likable or controversial candidates. When a slew of contestants accused the testify Dotto of beingness stock-still in 1958, the networks rapidly dropped 20 quiz shows. A New York grand jury probe and a 1959 congressional investigation effectively ended prime-time quiz shows for forty years, until ABC revived the genre with its launch of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire in 1999 (Boddy, 1990).

The Ascension of Cable Television

Formerly known as Community Antenna Television, or CATV, cable television was originally developed in the 1940s in remote or mountainous areas, including in Arkansas, Oregon, and Pennsylvania, to enhance poor reception of regular television signals. Cable antennas were erected on mountains or other loftier points, and homes connected to the towers would receive circulate signals.

In the late 1950s, cable operators began to experiment with microwave to bring signals from distant cities. Taking advantage of their power to receive long-distance circulate signals, operators branched out from providing a local community service and began focusing on offering consumers more than all-encompassing programming choices. Rural parts of Pennsylvania, which had just three channels (one for each network), soon had more than double the original number of channels every bit operators began to import programs from independent stations in New York and Philadelphia. The wider variety of channels and clearer reception the service offered presently attracted viewers from urban areas. By 1962, nearly 800 cable systems were operational, serving 850,000 subscribers.

Effigy 9.v

The Evolution of Television

Cable'south exponential growth was viewed as competition past local TV stations, and broadcasters campaigned for the FCC to step in. The FCC responded past placing restrictions on the ability of cable systems to import signals from afar stations, which froze the evolution of cable television receiver in major markets until the early 1970s. When gradual deregulation began to loosen the restrictions, cable operator Service Electric launched the service that would change the confront of the cablevision television industry—pay Tv. The 1972 Home Box Office (HBO) venture, in which customers paid a subscription fee to access premium cablevision television set shows and video-on-demand products, was the nation's first successful pay cable service. HBO's employ of a satellite to distribute its programming made the network available throughout the United States. This gave it an advantage over the microwave-distributed services, and other cable providers quickly followed suit. Farther deregulation provided by the 1984 Cablevision Human activity enabled the industry to expand even further, and by the end of the 1980s, almost 53 1000000 households subscribed to cable telly (meet Section 6.3 "Current Popular Trends in the Music Industry"). In the 1990s, cable operators upgraded their systems by edifice higher-chapters hybrid networks of fiber-optic and coaxial cable. These broadband networks provide a multichannel television service, forth with telephone, high-speed Internet, and avant-garde digital video services, using a single wire.

The Emergence of Digital Television

Following the FCC standards set out during the early 1940s, television sets received programs via analog signals fabricated of radio waves. The analog point reached Television sets through three dissimilar methods: over the airwaves, through a cable wire, or by satellite transmission. Although the system remained in place for more than than 60 years, information technology had several disadvantages. Analog systems were prone to static and distortion, resulting in a far poorer picture quality than films shown in movie theaters. Every bit television sets grew increasingly larger, the limited resolution made browse lines painfully obvious, reducing the clarity of the epitome. Companies around the world, most notably in Nippon, began to develop technology that provided newer, better-quality television formats, and the broadcasting manufacture began to lobby the FCC to create a committee to study the desirability and touch on of switching to digital idiot box. A more efficient and flexible grade of broadcast technology, digital television uses signals that translate Goggle box images and sounds into binary lawmaking, working in much the same way as a computer. This means they require much less frequency space and besides provide a far higher quality moving picture. In 1987, the Informational Committee on Advanced Television Services began meeting to examination various TV systems, both analog and digital. The committee ultimately agreed to switch from analog to digital format in 2009, allowing a transition period in which broadcasters could send their indicate on both an analog and a digital channel. Once the switch took place, many older analog Idiot box sets were unusable without a cable or satellite service or a digital converter. To retain consumers' access to complimentary over-the-air television, the federal authorities offered $40 souvenir cards to people who needed to purchase a digital converter, expecting to compensate its costs by auctioning off the old analog broadcast spectrum to wireless companies (Steinberg, 2007). These companies were eager to gain access to the analog spectrum for mobile broadband projects because this frequency band allows signals to travel greater distances and penetrate buildings more easily.

The Era of High-Definition Television

Around the same fourth dimension the U.South. government was reviewing the options for analog and digital television systems, companies in Japan were developing applied science that worked in conjunction with digital signals to create crystal-clear pictures in a wide-screen format. High-definition tv, or HDTV, attempts to create a heightened sense of realism past providing the viewer with an near three-dimensional experience. It has a much higher resolution than standard telly systems, using effectually 5 times as many pixels per frame. Commencement available in 1998, HDTV products were initially extremely expensive, priced between $5,000 and $ten,000 per ready. All the same, as with nearly new technology, prices dropped considerably over the next few years, making HDTV affordable for mainstream shoppers.

Figure 9.vi

HDTV uses a broad-screen format with a different attribute ratio (the ratio of the width of the image to its height) than standard-definition Television receiver. The wide-screen format of HDTV is similar to that of movies, allowing for a more authentic picture-viewing experience at abode.

As of 2010, most half of American viewers are watching television in loftier definition, the fastest adoption of TV technology since the introduction of the VCR in the 1980s (Stelter, 2010). The new technology is attracting viewers to watch television for longer periods of fourth dimension. According to the Nielsen Company, a company that measures Goggle box viewership, households with HDTV watch 3 percent more prime-time goggle box—programming screened between 7 and eleven p.grand., when the largest audience is bachelor—than their standard-definition counterparts (Stelter, 2010). The same report claims that the cinematic experience of HDTV is bringing families back together in the living room in front end of the large wide-screen TV and out of the kitchen and sleeping room, where individuals tend to watch television lonely on smaller screens. However, these viewing patterns may change once again soon as the Internet plays an increasingly larger function in how people view TV programs. The impact of new technologies on television is discussed in much greater detail in Department nine.iv "Influence of New Technologies" of this chapter.

Figure 9.7

Since 1950, the amount of time the average household spends watching television has almost doubled.

Key Takeaways

• Two key technological developments in the late 1800s played a vital function in the development of idiot box: the cathode ray tube and the scanning disk. The cathode ray tube, invented by German physicist Karl Ferdinand Braun in 1897, was the forerunner of the TV picture tube. It had a fluorescent screen that emitted a visible lite (in the form of images) when struck by a beam of electrons. The scanning disk, invented by High german inventor Paul Nipkow, was a large, flat metal disk that could be used as a rotating camera. Information technology served as the foundation for experiments on the transmission of visual images for several decades.
• Out of the cathode ray tube and the scanning disk, two types of primitive television systems evolved: mechanical systems and electronic systems. Mechanical television set systems had several technical disadvantages: Low resolution caused fuzzy images, and the use of a spinning disk limited the number of new pictures that could exist seen per second, resulting in excessive flickering. By 1939, all mechanical goggle box broadcasts in the U.s.a. had been replaced by electronic broadcasts.
• Early televisions were expensive, and the technology was slow to catch on because development was delayed during Globe War Ii. Color technology was delayed even further because early on color systems were incompatible with black-and-white idiot box sets. Following the war, television chop-chop replaced radio as the new mass medium. During the "golden historic period" of television in the 1950s, television moved away from radio formats and developed new types of shows, including the magazine-manner variety bear witness and the tv set spectacular.
• Since 1960, several fundamental technological developments have taken identify in the television industry. Colour boob tube gained popularity in the tardily 1960s and began to supersede black-and-white television receiver in the 1970s. Cable boob tube, initially developed in the 1940s to cater to viewers in rural areas, switched its focus from local to national telly, offering an extensive number of channels. In 2009, the traditional analog organisation, which had been in place for 60 years, was replaced with digital television, giving viewers a higher-quality flick and freeing up frequency space. As of 2010, almost half of American viewers have high-definition telly, which offers a crystal-clear moving-picture show in wide-screen to provide a cinematic experience at abode.

Exercises

Please reply to the following writing prompts. Each response should be a minimum of one paragraph.

1. Prior to World War Two, boob tube was in the early stages of development. In the years following the war, the technical development and growth in popularity of the medium were exponential. Identify two ways television evolved after World War Ii. How did these changes brand postwar idiot box superior to its predecessor?
2. Compare the tv set y'all use now with the telly from your childhood. How have TV sets changed in your lifetime?
3. What do you consider the most important technological development in television since the 1960s? Why?

Boddy, William. "The Seven Dwarfs and the Money Grubbers," in Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism, ed. Patricia Mellencamp (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Printing, 1990), 98–116.

Klooster, John. Icons of Invention: The Makers of the Modern World from Gutenberg to Gates (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2009), 442.

Lohr, Lenox. Television Broadcasting (New York: McGraw Hill, 1940).

World Book Encyclopedia (2003), due south.v. "Television."

Source: https://opentext.wsu.edu/com101/chapter/9-1-the-evolution-of-television/

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