Made In America - Bill Bryson [148]
By the middle of the decade, however, radio was taking on a more professional air and even producing its first celebrities, like Harold W. Arlin of KDKA. For reasons that seem deeply unfathomable now, Arlin and most other broadcasters developed the custom of donning a tuxedo for evening broadcasts, even though – patently – no one could see them.30
In 1926 RCA, General Electric and Westinghouse got together to form the National Broadcasting Company. (It actually comprised two networks, one known as the Red network, the other as the Blue.) A year later the Columbia Broadcasting System was born. At first some effort was made to bring higher values to radio. In the 1920s and early 1930s the government issued 202 licences for educational stations, but by 1936, 164 of those – some 80 per cent – had closed down or become commercial. ‘Accordingly,’ in the ponderous words of a radio historian, ‘in the critically formative first two decades of its utilization, the radio spectrum had only the most limited opportunity to demonstrate its capabilities for human resource enhancement.’31
If radio’s resource enhancement capabilities were underutilized, they were as nothing compared with television once it got going. Most of us think of television as a comparatively recent development, but in fact in terms of its practical applications it is nearly as old as radio. It just took longer to get established. As early as the 1880s it was known in theory what was required to make a working television, though the necessary valves and tubes had yet to be invented.32 The word television dates from 1907, but in the early days it went by a variety of names – electric eye, iconoscope, electric telescope, televisor or radio vision.
Unlike other technologies television was the result of work by numerous inventors in different places – Herbert Ives, Charles Jenkins and Philo T. Farnsworth in America, John Logie Baird in Britain, Boris Rosing in Russia. The first working television – that is, one that broadcast something more profound than silhouettes and shadows – was demonstrated by Charles Jenkins in Washington in 1925. Baird, a Scotsman, demonstrated a similar model, but with sound, four months later.
Television didn’t attract much public notice until Bell Telephone demonstrated its new system in New York in April 1927. Shown on a screen just two inches high by three inches wide – slightly smaller than a pack of cigarettes – the broadcast consisted of a brief speech of encouragement from Washington by Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, followed by some entertainment from the AT&T studio in Whippany, New Jersey – a vaudeville comic who first told some Irish jokes and then changed into blackface and told some ‘darky’ jokes. Sadly his jokes were not recorded. (It is curious that from its inception people instinctively grasped that this was a medium built for trivializing; when Baird demonstrated the first colour transmission in London in 1928 – yes, 1928 – his viewers were treated to the sight of a man repeatedly sticking out his tongue.)
The New York Times gave much of page 1 and almost the whole of page 20 to this big event under the headline:
FAR-OFF SPEAKERS SEEN
AS WELL AS HEARD HERE
IN A TEST OF TELEVISION
LIKE A PHOTO COME TO LIFE
HOOVER’S FACE PLAINLY
IMAGED AS HE SPEAKS
IN WASHINGTON
The reporter marvelled that ‘as each syllable