| |
|
Wall Street History
https://www.gofundme.com/s3h2w8
|
09/01/2006
The First Thoughts on Television
Back on April 7, 1927, Walter S. Gifford, president of the
American Telephone and Telegraph Company, in New York City
spoke with and saw Sec. of Commerce Herbert Hoover, who was
in his office in Washington, D.C. And that, sports fans, was the
first successful demonstration of television.
But television sets wouldn’t hit the market commercially until
1938-39, and, while David Sarnoff of RCA (together with
inventor Vladimir Kosma Zworykin) is perhaps best thought to
be the inventor of television, in actuality it was Philo T.
Farnsworth. But that’s a story for a different day. [It’s very
complicated, frankly.]
For now, The Atlantic Monthly, as part of its 150th anniversary,
has filed away some of its important essays and I came across
one from May 1937 titled “Television and Radio” by Gilbert
Seldes. Following are a few excerpts I found somewhat
interesting as we look at the power of the medium today.
---
“About seven and a half million dollars have already been
invested in experimental television and perhaps half a million
will be spent annually before any income will appear. In return
for this investment, the promoters have machinery which, they
seem to believe, may be improved, but will not have to be
fundamentally altered in order to give reasonable satisfaction .
“The first question on which all the promoters might agree would
be when and at what level of technical perfection television
should be commercially offered. Mr. David Sarnoff, the
President of Radio Corporation, has said, ‘In the broadcasting of
sight, transmitter and receiver must fit as lock and key.’ This
means that the moment receivers are sold transmitters cannot be
altered or improved in certain fundamental respects, because if
they were the receiver would be utterly worthless. There is a
danger that television may be made rigid at the beginning when it
should be most flexible, and this danger is all the greater if no
sudden surprises from a rival need be anticipated. Because early
receiving sets will cost about five hundred dollars, the producing
companies will not dare to let them become rapidly obsolete; the
method of yearly models will not apply until sets are actually in
mass production. In this way the consumer will be protected, but
it may be at the cost of continued improvement.”
---
“Radio programs will continue in undiminished splendor; they
will improve; they will be dominant; and television will be
offered as a supplementary entertainment .(The promoters)
know that the time will come when they will be trying to sell
electric light bulbs and kerosene lamps over the same counter.
The manufacturers now sell some two million radio sets a year,
on the assumption that they are the very best sets on the market.
Will the customer be as willing to buy if he knows that a
television set, which includes a perfect radio set, is also on the
market?
“The quick collapse of the silent moving picture haunts the
promoters of television; and the calm assurance of their own
technicians is ominous. An engineer was taking me through a
television studio and referred to his own post as the ‘monitor
room.’ When I asked him what the word meant, he replied: ‘Oh,
that’s just a hangover from the old radio days.’ Engineers in
television are notably cautious in expression, but one cannot talk
to them for five minutes without knowing that to them television
is the natural and inevitable fulfillment of radio, and radio is only
an outline to be filled in by television. Once it is launched, the
promoters will have a hard time keeping it supplementary.”
---
“(The) problem of promotion slips almost imperceptibly into the
problem of programs. If we assume that the program directors
will somehow free themselves from their obligations to radio, we
shall find three separate elements available for telecasting. The
first is any actual event at the moment it occurs; a parade, a
football game, a strike. The second is a dramatic sketch or a
song and dance number transmitted from the studio. The third is
any moving-picture film.
“Almost all the experts in the field are sure that the first of these,
the telecasting of events directly from their scene of action, will
eventually form the staple of the television programs.”
---
Gilbert Seldes on the difference between radio and television:
“(Here) we strike at the heart of the difference between the two
forms, because listening to music and looking at a moving
picture absorbs our energies in quite different ways. It is a
difference in the degree of attention. This is so obvious as to be
hardly worth mentioning, but because it is obvious we are only
aware of it in extreme cases. For instance, you may like or
dislike to have the radio going while you are driving your car,
but to keep looking at a television screen on your dashboard will
be in practice impossible.
“Yet within radio broadcasting itself there are degrees of
listening, and almost imperceptibly the demands upon our
attention have been varied. I do not know whether the sponsors
have ever worked out the psychological implications of the two
kinds of programs. The sponsor who offers a good popular
brand knows perfectly well that people will play bridge or read
the newspaper while the music is going on and expects them to
snap to attention when the commercial talk is uttered in a
commanding voice – that is, he is counting on contrast. The
sponsor of a gag comedian, on the other hand, demands sustained
and close attention. Comedians and their gag writers put down
four ‘sock’ gags a minute as a minimum for keeping a program
going well. And this means that you cannot divert your attention
for a moment if you want to get the point of the joke. However
commanding the advertising may be, it cannot compete with the
comedy itself; the advertiser must count on the fact that his
listeners are already attentive and will therefore continue to be.”
---
“In broadcasting circles, news commentary, advice to the
lovelorn, instruction in any subject, and even political oratory are
lumped together as ‘talk programs.’ Following that shrewd
classification, I postpone for a moment considering the rest of the
average radio program and note that statesmen may not find
television an unmixed blessing. There has been an advantage in
the sourceless voice. It has been nothuman (sic), even
superhuman. In the newsreels Father Coughlin, for instance, lost
much of the authority he exerted over the air; Huey Long, on the
whole, gained; Mr. Roosevelt, in my opinion, loses a little, but I
do not believe that this is a universal judgment. But in any case
the politicians will fall under the law of compression which I
suggested above. An actual audience in a stadium or convention
hall enjoys the contagion of the mob and will sit for an hour and
clap hands and throw hats in the air, but when only two or three
are gathered together the spectacle of an orating man will not be
nearly so absorbing. We shall be thrilled by the spectacle of a
nominating convention, but before a debate or an ordinary radio
speech is telecast the astute politician will want to be sure that
his audience will have something agreeable, but not distracting,
to look at which, in nine cases out of ten, eliminates the speaker
himself.”
---
“Clearly a program of information and ideas can gain even more
by television than a program of jokes and music. Here is a
blackboard for the mathematician, a laboratory for the chemist, a
picture gallery for the art critic, and possibly a stage upon which
the historian can reenact the events of the past, or the news
commentator the headlines of today.”
---
“(The) audience which television will create will be more
attentive and, if properly handled, more suggestible even than the
audience of radio. The question we are allowed to ask is whether
all of radio’s errors have to be repeated by television.
Considering the advances made both in radio and in the movies,
cannot television start off at its highest level instead of going
back to where they began? The tendency of most new forms of
entertainment is to take over the second-rate from an earlier type:
as the silent movies took over melodrama from the stage, as
radio took over the dialect comedian from vaudeville. The
practical reason is that these second rate elements are familiar
and commercially dependable; the entertainment which adapts
them to its own uses purges its older rivals but has to spend a
long time rising to their level. It would be a great thing if
television could from the start combine the best of the two forms
of entertainment which ultimately, I believe, it will supersede.
“And yet I have a feeling that the most important thing for
television is to make sure of its own popularity. Like the moving
picture and the radio, television would act against its own nature
if it did not try to be virtually a universal entertainment. I see no
reason for thinking that this universality is any bar to excellence.
Commenting on a rough division of the arts which I once made,
Professor Mortimer J. Adler has recently written: ‘Great and
lively art have this in common: they are able to please the
multitude.’ Professor Adler offers ‘the work of Walt Disney as
lively art that also reaches greatness, a degree of perfection in its
field which surpasses our best critical capacity to analyze and
which succeeds at the same time in pleasing children and simple
folk.’
“At least twenty years of popular work which was not great,
which was often offensive to reasonable taste and of doubtful
effect on the people, preceded those comparatively few works in
the movies which can stand beside Disney’s masterpieces. One
of the reasons for this long delay was the indifference of the
intelligent public. Perhaps a more alert and critical citizenry will
help television more rapidly over its difficulties.”
Gilbert Seldes should be rolling over in his grave after the latest
JonBenet Ramsey spectacle.
Anyway, I was perusing my copy of “The Encyclopedia of
American Facts and Dates” (edited by Gorton Carruth) and here
are a few more tidbits regarding television.
Dec. 24, 1951 ‘Amahl and the Night Visitors,’ an opera by
Gian-Carlo Menotti commissioned by the National Broadcasting
Company, was broadcast on TV on Christmas Eve. That must
have been a great event for the time.
[Also in 1951, Sen. Estes Kefauver, chairman of a Senate
committee on organized crime, opened hearings to television
cameras a big moment.]
1954 29,000,000 households had television sets, or about 60%
of American households. What I failed to mention above is that
the manufacturing of sets had ceased during World War II and
didn’t pick up again until 1947.
1958 45,592,000 households had TV sets.
Feb. 14, 1962 A televised tour of the White House by
Jacqueline Kennedy, accompanied by Charles Collingwood, was
broadcast simultaneously by CBS and NBC and was seen by an
estimated 46,500,000 persons.
By 1966 nearly all network shows were being broadcast in color
and nearly half the 11,000,000 TV sets sold that year were color
as well.
Nov. 21, 1980 The so-called ‘Who Shot J.R.?’ episode of the
TV evening soap “Dallas” was seen by more U.S. viewers than
any other television program in history. More than half the
nation’s audience watched to see who had tried to kill J.R.
Ewing, a question unanswered at the end of the spring season.
March 2, 1983 The final episode of M*A*S*H was seen by the
largest television audience to date for a nonsports program,
125,000,000 viewers. Your editor was depressed the show was
no longer on the air.
---
Wall Street History returns next week. Since Mr. Seldes
mentioned Walt Disney in his essay I’m going to attempt to
tackle his story.
Brian Trumbore
|
|
|
