Made In America - Bill Bryson [150]
The first television networks were run by NBC, CBS, ABC (which had evolved from the NBC Blue radio network) and the now largely forgotten DuMont Labs, a leading electronics company of the 1930s and 1940s. As a television network it struggled for years – by 1955 it had just two shows on the air – and finally expired altogether in 1957, though the company itself, renamed Metromedia, lives on as a chain of television and radio stations.
Many early television programmes were simply lifted from radio. The Lone Ranger, Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, Sky King, Meet the Press, Queen for a Day, Stop the Music and Gunsmoke had all begun life as radio shows, though the transition to a visual medium often required alterations of cast. The squat and portly William Conrad, who played Marshal Matt Dillon on the radio, was replaced on TV by the more slender figure of James Arness. A more telling alteration was the adaptation of the popular The $64 Question from radio, but with the pay-offs raised a thousandfold, reflecting television’s sudden, staggering wealth. The show became not just a hit but a phenomenon. When a Marine Corps captain named Richard S. McCutchen won the $64,000 pay-off, the story made the front page of the New York Times. Inevitably it spawned a legion of imitative quiz shows – Dotto, Twenty-One, Tic Tac Dough, Name That Tune (one of whose early contestants, Marine Major John Glenn, won $15,000 by naming twenty-five tunes), and the brazenly derivative $64,000 Challenge. Almost all relied on the formula of ending the shows with the winning contestant having to defer until the following week the agonizing decision of whether to take his or her winnings or press on at the risk of losing all, thereby ensuring a supply of eagerly returning viewers.
The difficulty was that contestants had an exasperating tendency to blow an answer late in the programme, thus precluding the possibility of an even more exciting return performance the following week. To get around the problem the producers of several shows hit simultaneously on a simple expedient. They cheated. Each week they supplied selected contestants – among them a respected minister from New Jersey – with the correct answers, which made the results rather easier to forecast. Unfortunately they failed to consider that some contestants, having got a taste of success, would grow miffed when the producers decided that their reign should end. A contestant named Herbert Stempel blew the whistle on Twenty-One when its producers told him to ‘take a dive’, and soon contestants from several other quiz shows were sheepishly admitting that they too had been supplied with answers. And that was pretty much the end of such shows. None the less, the expression ‘the $64,000 question’ has shown a curious durability.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the boom years of the 1950s saw the development of another great electrical breakthrough: the home air-conditioner. Air-conditioning had been around for a long time. It was developed in 1902 by a twenty-year-old fresh out of Cornell University named Willis Carrier. As we have seen elsewhere, Carrier didn’t call it an air-conditioner but an apparatus for cooling air. Air-conditioner was coined four years later by a North Carolina textile engineer named Stuart Cramer, who invented a device designed not to cool textile mills but to humidify them.39
By the 1920s air-conditioning was being widely used for specific applications – in hospitals and cinemas, for instance – but the considerable cost and the need for outsize ducts acted as a disincentive for its use in most homes and office buildings. Even in the late 1940s, a home air-conditioning unit – which Carrier called an ‘Atmospheric Cabinet’ – was as big as an upright piano and as noisy and as expensive to run as you would expect a piano-sized appliance to be. The development of small