Cowan talks about radio, television, and computers in this chapter. If you think of both as media by which ordinary people get information (which the computer only became in the 1990s), do they take us in the same direction or different directions?
Possible themes for radio and television"
- you could easily tell Leinhard's imventor stories about radio and television
- many steps in the inventions
- where is the research and development done, government,
private inventors, big corporations
- impact on society from politics to music to decline of regional accents
- a good case for the impact of government regulation
Take radio as an example of the new science-based invention:
Radio was initially imaged as a wireless telegraph to send a message from one station to another; the idea of broadcasting (one broadcaster talking to many listeners) was a separate invention
- based on the work of physicists such as Faraday going back to the late 1820s--some people had seen the possibility of wireless telegraphy, but had not been able to transmit (via induction) for more than a mile or two. James Clerk Maxwell and Heinrich Hertz developed the theory of electromagnetic waves. Hertz even detected them with a spark, but it took Lodge's coherer (iron filings that organized themselves to conduct electricity when hit by electromagnetic waves) before this was something usable.
- Guglielmo Marconi used sparks to create radio waves. He grew up in Italy the son of an Italian father and a Scotch-Irish mother, got a mostly informal education (he got permission to sit in on university classes and work in a laboratory but did not actually enroll as a student), and decided to devote himself to make wireless telephony practical. This took a lot of trial and error, but by 1895 he had a system that would transmit many miles. His mother was convinced of the potential and took her son to England, where she thought the market would be better. The family decided to form their own company, which set out to get patents all over the world, and to publicize the new invention by publicity stunts. In 1899 Marconi sucessfully linked England and France across the English channel (where there was already a cable)--more significant was transmission from ships.
- there was a great deal of journalistic enthusiasm for the idea of a wireless telephone--both providing communication where there were no lines and breaking the monopoly of the telephone and telegraph companies. Marconi transmitted signals across the Atlantic in 1901. He then set out to build and protect a business, for example insisting that his stations not communicate with ships using rival apparatus--much to the displeasure of the newspapers who were customers.
Marconi (left) at time of first successful transatlantic test
- The PR was good but the market was limited, except for shipping and the military potential (and interference limited the number of signals that could be carried--you quickly got crowding between military, amateurs, and wireless telegraphy companies). Newspapers picking up military broadcasts and amateurs making up disasters for fun raised the need for regulation.
- Lee de Forest , trained at the scientific school at Yale and determined to be an inventor, set out to compete with Marconi in building a wireless system. He was good at publicity but the business claimed more than it could deliver. De Forest was successful sued for stealing a key idea from Reginald A. Fessenden . De Forest lost this company , but kept rights to an invention called the audion, the first vacuum tube amplifier. This made it practical to transmit the human voice instead of Morse Code. In 1907 he successfully transmitted the human voice. He did some experiments with broadcasting, but his company collapsed and he was accused of stock fraud.
- Edwin Howard Armstrong started as a teenager as a radio amateur, was a star student in electrical engineering at Columbia. In 1912 he figured out how to improve the audion dramatically (he understood it, which deForest never had). In 1914 Armstrong demonstrated his idea to the Marconi Company, where David Sarnoff realized its importance.
artist's rendition of the sinking of the Titanic
- When the Titanic his an iceberg on April 15,
1912, one of the ship's wireless operators immediately began sending
distress signals .
- These were picked up in New York and by two other ocean liners about 12 hours away, but nearby ships did not get the message because their wireless operators were asleep, and it took the Titanic less than 3 hours to sink.
- The California was less than 20 miles away, but the wireless operator was asleep and the wireless wasn't operational anyway because the captain had shut down the engines for the night rather than try to move in an icefield in the dark. If the California had heard the distress signal almost all the passengers could have been saved.
- Another ship, a freighter, was within 30 miles, but did not have a wireless at all.
- Only one nearby ship--the Carpathia, 58 miles away--got the message, only because its operator went back to the wireless room to check a time signal after he had finished his work for the evening.
- Once the tragedy was know, amateurs filled the airwaves with inquiries and cruel rumors (possibly because they had lumped together the message that the Titanic had hit an iceberg and another message about a different ship being towed to shore). One of the results of the disaster was radio regulation, licensing amatuers and limiting them to wavelengths of 200 meters or less.
- lifting of patent restrictions in WWI led to an explosion of innovation of devices using vacuum tubes
- GE had bought Marconi, Westinghouse had key circuit patents--you needed cross-licensing in order to make anything
- In 1911 AT&T turned their laboratory into an
Industrial Research Laboratory
- bought Lee de Forest's patent on the audion and used it for amplification of telephone lines, but also thought they might get into what they called wireless telephony as a feeder for the telephone system
- AT&T finally got out of the radio business by trading for new patents they needed to keep their monopoly on the telephone.
- the Navy was frustrated with dealing with British Marconi patents, which meant cooperating with the British government more than they wanted. So they encouraged GE, AT&T and Westinghouse to form the Radio Corporation of America in 1919. The goal was to compete with foreign domination of international transmission.
- RCA inherited from the Navy and the Marconi company a focus on the model of point to point communication.
- but David Sarnoff , who even before the war had been made head of advanced technology at Marconi, already believed in the potential of broadcasting. Sarnoff was the businessman who made radio commercially feasible, a poor immigrant who became president of RCA.
The invention of broadcasting:
- up to this point radio was a radio telegraph or radio
telephone--one user talked to one user
- Westinghouse had another idea, started commerical radio broadcasts in 1920--a real leap of imagination
- Some amateurs had already started broadcasting between 1913 and 1915--it was like having you own web page, and also a good activity for high school and college radio clubs. When de Forest sold his patent rights to AT&T he kept the rights to broadcast news and music, something that AT&T thought was a frivolous activity for amateurs (because how will you ever get people to pay for radio broadcasts). But deForest dreamed of bringing concert performances (and particularly opera) to the homes of people who couldn't attend. In Oct 1916 he broadcast the Yale-Harvard football game and the presidential election.
- When the U.S. declared war on Germany the government tried to close down all amateur radio stations (and get the operators into the military, which was very short on operators). When the war eneded the operators wanted to get back to their hobby, and were unhappy about the ban on transmitting that remained in effect for almost a year after the war.
- Once the ban was lifted amateurs like Frank Conrad in Pittsburgh began to move towards a commercial station--broadcasting music on a regular schedule and then getting records for free from a local merchant in return for mentioning the store's name on the air. A local department store began advertising and selling simple receivers to listen to Conrad's broadcasts. And it happened that Conrad's day job was working for Westinghouse.
- Westinghouse was making money selling to the amateur market, and began to realize that this was not just a few technology enthusiasts. The vice president of the company saw a newspaper story about Conrad's broadcasts, and the company decided they might sell more radio sets if they broadcast on a regular basis--Nov. 2, 1920 they broadcast election results. This got popular enthusiasm, and by 1922 a large number of stations were set up by amateurs and by department stores, newspapers, and the companies that made radios. A radio boom started getting attention from the press in 1922.
KDKA station, Pittsburgh
- But how do you get people to pay? First companies started sponsoring entertainment--the Ivory Soap singers--and that eventually evolved into advertising.
- There was talk of government patronage or a licensing fee to fund broadcasting, but that sounded too socialistic. In 1922 an AT&T run station in New York ran a 10 minutes advertisement for a Long Island real estate developer. As stations found ways of financing themselves the boom spread--at one point in the 1920s, 1/3 of the sales of furniture was actually radios.
- 1926 Sarnoff helped created the first broadcasting network, NBC.
- for more information A timeline of radio or radio history links. Video on early radio and tv.
1926 Silvertone Receiver
Television burst onto the scene after the Second
World War and soon became the most important mass medium. But it
had a long history before that there was Low
Definition Television:
- in 1925 C. Francis Jenkins in the U.S. and John L. Baird in Great Britain sucessfully demonstrated workable television techniques. See The Mechanical TV Era
- these were electromechanical and quite low-definition.
- early research on the transmission of pictures included both still pictures and the possibility of moving pictures, once it was understood that if you scanned fast enough the eye would see a continuous image (persistence of vision). Facimile was successfully demonstrated in 1921 by Francis Jenkins
- Francis Jenkins was a tinkerer--inventor of a motion picture projector and some automobile innovations. He used two rings of prisms to scan an image horizontally and vertically for radio transmission. He demonstrated this publicly in 1925 with great hoopla about the potential of what he called radio vision. But he could produce only 48-line silhouettes. John Baird in England achieved 8 line pictures in 1925, and by Jan. 1926 he was producing half-tones.
- by 1927 AT&T was demonstrating a system with decent half-tones, and while the company said this was to supplement telephone the demonstration emphasized bringing movie theater content home (newsreels, etc.). They even demonstrated a mechanism for color television in 1929
- consumers were excited by the prospect of television just around the corner
- regularly scheduled broadcasts were available after 1928--18 stations scattered around the country, broadcasting in the shortwave band, and consumers could buy kits or commercially produced sets.
- but the low-definition pictures--60 line--were far inferior to motion pictures, and this limited the audience. The FCC decided not to license commercial stations, feeling that the technology was not yet satisfactory and to license it would encourage public investment in technology that would quickly become obsolescent
- by 1933 the engineering limitations caused the
first boom to collapse.
- the entertainment value wasn't high enough--it was the needs of programming first and foremost that drove the development of new technology
- under financial pressures of the depression most stations stopped broadcasting.
Television as we know it:
- by the eve of the first World War several researchers had become convinced that cathode ray tubes were the key to television. Philo T. Farnsworth (independent inventor with only a high school education) and Vladimir K. Zworykin (Russian immigrant with a Ph.D. working for RCA) developed an all-electronic, higher definition form of television.
- In Dec. 1923 Zworykin filed a patent for an all-electronic television, but the results were disappointing because of the failings of the cathode ray tube technology of the time. RCA refused to invest in development until 1930, when Zworykin got more clout by becoming head of the RCA industrial research lab and the low-definition system was clearly on the way out.
- the significance was realized--the patent was not issued for 15 years because of disputes.
- In May 1935 RCA committed $1 million to research and development of the new technology. They followed a careful R&D step by step program with extensive field demonstrations in New York City. By Jan 1937 picture definition had been increased to 441 lines--for the first time you could see a baseball or football .
- the picture tube of the camera, however, was not efficient enough, and Philo Farnsworth didn't want to sell his patent on a better one. He wanted to license it, so his earnings would reflect its long-term success, and RCA had a policy to not license patents (they did offer to buy it). Finally they signed a non-exclusive cross-licensing agreement, as each had technology the other needed.
- despite earlier disappointments, the public was eager. But it was necessary to make sure it would pay--industry had invested something like $13 million by 1939 and earned nothing. The advertising industry took a wait-and-see attitude. 1941 promotional film.
early tv
- FM radio was coming in at the same time using the same part of the spectrum, adding to the complications. FCC wanted to see a mature technology, which was pretty good at this point, and also agreement over standards, which was not. RCA had major competitors, such as Philco, promoting rival systems.
- RCA went ahead anyway with public broadcasting in 1939, and a number of firms started to sell television sets (with disappointing results), but the quick FCC approval they expected did not come. People were reluctant to buy sets without standardization--in some markets they could receive only one of two rival stations.
- There was a political uproar over FCC refusal to license, but meanwhile the industry could not agree on standards. Finally a government National Television System Committee created in 1940 forced a compromise.
- commercial service was finally authorized in the spring of 1941: 525 lines, 30 frames per second.
- the interest was there--by the end of 1941 32 stations were licensed and experimenting with programming. The first thing they learned was that sports were popular, and increased sports broadcasting. Dramas and news were the other main components. Variety shows were not as popular as radio experience would have suggested. Political coverage was quite popular during the presidential election
- but sets could not be produced until the war was over--in fact all radio and TV production was banned in April 1942. By the time the war was over the technology was there for a significantly improved receiver.
WNBQ Chicago, 1948
in 1947 the television boom began in earnest
- in 1950 only 9 percent of American homes had TVs, four years later the figure was 55 percent. By 1967 95% of American homes had TVs and watched an average of 5 hours of television per day.
- programming was copied from radio--even sitcoms--but now with easier potential for prerecording. The first prerecorded serial was "I Love Lucy" in 1951.
I Love Lucy (1951)
- Became a part of the culture--the TV dinner was introduced in 1954.
- commentators quickly worried about people staying home instead of going out to movies. In 1961 the head of the FCC declared television a "vast wasteland"
- but that was what people liked about the medium--what Raymond Williams called mobile privatization.
- What difference did television make?
- Created a bias towards immediacy. Desensitized viewers towards suffering and violence?
Further techonology:
- Color television was first introduced in 1955 and became universal by 1965.
- satellite transmission 1963
- PBS 1967
- VCR (betamax) introduced 1975
- Ted Turner 's global news service 1979
- cable started in the late 1940s but didn't become predominant until the 1980s-- the promise was that many more stations would reduce the lowest common denominator effect.
- Digital TV and High Definition TV have been slow in coming
- broadband and interactive TV are expected to revolutionize the medium
- analog TV was scheduled to cease
broadcasting in Dec. 2006, though an extension until Feb. 17, 2009
has been passed
This page written and copyright Pamela E. Mack