Category Archives: Television History

1941 Boy Scout TV Broadcast

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Seventy-five years ago this month, the November 1941 issue of Boys’ Life carried this image of a New York television broadcast featuring scouts from Troop 1, Mendham, N.J. While not identified in the magazine, the gentleman in the center appears to be Troop 1’s Scoutmaster, William “Green Bar Bill” Hillcourt, the prolific writer whose works included three editions of the Scout Handbook.

From the CBS logos on the camera, the broadcast was from WCBW, which later became WCBS-TV. It is the nation’s second oldest commercial station, having gone on the air only an hour after rival WNBT, leter WNBC.

Both stations began commercial broadcasting on July 1, 1941, the first day that the stations then operating under experimental licenses were allowed to operate under commercial licenses.

Troop 1 was founded by the Danish-born Hillcourt in 1935, and chartered by the National Council of the BSA. He was asked to develop scouting in America, and he used Troop 1 to test his ideas. The twelve candles shown in the picture undoubtedly represent the twelve points of the Scout Law.



1946 NPOTA Activation

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During the 2016 centennial of the National Park Service, the American Radio Relay League (ARRL) is conducting its National Parks On The Air (NPOTA) event.  Amateur Radio operators are setting up their stations in various units of the National Park Service (NPS) and making contact with other Amateurs around the world. Since the beginning of the year, the event has been extremely popular, with over 11,000 activations from 450 different different units of the NPS (with only 39 not yet activated), with over 640,000 individual two-way contacts.  As I’ve reported in other posts, I’ve made contact with 251 different parks, operated multiple times from six parks in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and plan to activate additional parks in the Midwest before the end of the year.

Even though this event is recent, operating portable from the National Parks is nothing new, as shown from the photograph above, which appeared seventy years ago this month in the September 1946 issue of Radio News.

Shown here are members of the Washington Radio Club operating Field Day 1946 from Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. Shown here are Dick Houston, W4QPW (apparently at the mike), along with Major Eric Ilott, G2JK, of the British Army (later VE3XE), and club secretary Barbara Houston. They are operating a 25 watt phone rig on 10 meters, with a Hallicrafters Sky Champion serving as the receiver. Power was supplied by a 300 watt gasoline generator.

Ilott, apparently at the left in the photo, served in the British and Canadian military until his retirement as a Lieutenant Colonel in 1974. He immigrated to Canada in 1947. During the war, he served as a listener for the British War Office, sending reports to Bletchley Park. Among his accomplishments after the war was bringing the first ever television signal to Kingston, Ontario, from an antenna atop a water tower. He died in 2015 at the age of 95.  (For another look at the early days of bringing distant TV signals to town, please see my earlier post on the first TV in Marathon, Ontario.)

1946 was the tenth running of the ARRL Field Day, an event in which hams set up stations at portable locations to make as many contacts as possible.

I previously wrote about the 1941 Field Day, in which the high scoring station had made 1112 contacts. That would be the last Field Day before the war, and the one shown here was the first postwar Field Day. According to the results in the February 1947 issue of QST, the top 1946 scorer made 809 contacts.

But the results article noted that it would be pointless to compare the 1946 results with those of prewar Field Days, since operating conditions as of June 1946 were quite different. In particular, hams had not yet regained access to the 160, 40, and 20 meter bands, which had been the workhorses for the prewar events. The 1946 Field Day was limited to 80 and 10 meters on HF, along with the 50, 144, and 420 MHz bands.

Shenandoah was not the only national park being activated in 1946. In addition, according to the results article, there were operations from Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado and a battlefield national park in Virginia, as well as numerous other venues.

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Photo courtesy of N3KN.

While the Washington Radio Club took the honors of activating Shenandoah National Park in 1946, my own 2016 contact took place on February 8 on 20 meter phone.  Fortunately, the 20 meter band was returned to hams shortly after the war, as the contact on 10 or 80 meters in 1946 would have been considerably more challenging.  My contact was with Kay Craigie, N3KN, shown here.  In addition to being an avid NPOTA chaser, activator, and member of the NPOTA Facebook group, Kay is the immediate past president of the ARRL (a select group which included Herbert Hoover, Jr.).  She was at the helm of the ARRL when the NPOTA event was proposed and adopted.

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Du Mont Tubes, 1956

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Sixty years ago, the hapless TV repairman shown here was living the serviceman’s worst nightmare.  He had installed a cheap picture tube, and this consumer wasn’t happy about it.  The child shown here is now getting close to drawing Social Security, but probably still remembers the traumatic incident.

The moral of the story, according to this ad in the September 1956 issue of Radio Electronics, was that he should have used Du Mont tubes.

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1928: First Television Drama

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Today, we take a look at one of the more pleasant events that took place on September 11, namely, the first television drama, which was aired 88 years ago today, on September 11, 1928.

28. On that date, radio station WGY in Schenectady, New York, carried the audio, with the visual broadcast carried by W2XAD, of the play The Queen’s Messenger by J. Hartley Manners. The play was chosen since it had only two characters, but still pushed the limits of the medium. Despite only two characters in the play, four actors were used, along with three cameras. Two of the cameras were focused on the main actors, and to remain in focus, the actors had to maintain a very exact position. The other camera focused on the hands of two other actors, who served as doubles and handled the props. When one character sipped a glass of wine, the hand doubles first poured into a glass in view of one camera. Then, another camera cut to the main actor’s face as they sipped from an identical glass.  The hand doubles, along with the props, are in the foreground of the picture above.

The “cameras” actually consisted of stationary photocells, and the subjects were lit by a “flying spot” projected through a spinning disc.

1931SeptTVNewsMakeupIn the photo above, the director, in the white shirt, can view all of the actors, and switches from camera to camera, viewing the end result on the monitor. Considerable experimenting had to be done with makeup until the choices shown here were settled upon. In addition to using colors that provided suitable contrasts, another problem was maintaining focus as one part of the face moved.

The entire process is described in detail in an article in the September-October 1931 issue of Television News.  The article also recounts a second production done a couple of years later, after which time the technology had advanced to a point where a more traditional stage could be used.

Outside the studios for the 1928 broadcast, the station had a series of radios and televsion receivers to allow as many members of the press as possible to watch. The broadcast was repeated, first during the day, probably for the benefit of the press, and then again at night for more distant televsion entusiasts to be able to pick it up. The station reported reception reports from as far west as the Pacific coast.

References

 



1931 Television Image

1931SeptTVFor an idea of what kind of picture quality was available with early mechanical television, here is an example from 85 years ago, from the September-October 1931 issue of Television News.

The photo was sent to the magazine by H.E. Burket of 819 Center Street, Chicago, Illinois, who reported that he captured the image from the broadcasts made by the Chicago Daily News station.

Burket’s receiver consisted of an 18″ scanning disc, driven by a synchronous motor with gear transmission. He had been experimenting with various glow tubes. While neon tubes were most commonly employed, Burket noted that spot and crater type glow tubes with white or green light gave superior images.

He reported that the photographs were made with exposure times of between 2-1/2 and 10 seconds. He also noted that while lines were visible on this image, he had recently switched to a different scanning disc with which the lines were no longer visible.
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How Television Benefits Your Children

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Sixty-five years ago today, Motorola explained in this ad, appearing in the Pittsburgh Press, September 5, 1950, how parents could benefit their children. Of course, there’s only one possible answer, and that was television!

The ad shows the happy children watching Howdy Doody, and the caption proclaims, “home, sweet TV home! Peace! Quiet! No more ‘rainy day riots’ with television keeping small fry out of mischief, and out of mother’s hair.”

The ad even quoted one child psychology expert who noted that “taking away television from children who act up is a punishment that really works. The very thought of missing some pet program turns little lions into lambs. And incidentally, those favorite programs in the late afternoon are the world’s finest magnet for getting tardy youngsters home on time for dinner.”

And there were more benefits to television. Educators, religious and social workers all agreed that TV was a strong force for bringing parents and children together to enjoy clean, wholesome entertainment right in the home.

There was apparently a rumor going around that TV caused eyestrain, and Motorola nipped this in the bud by quoting the Journal of the American Medical Association in stating that television in itself does not produce eyestrain. It noted that if television seemed to tire a child’s eyes, the probable answer was that the child needs an eye examination.

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Dyna-Scan Flying Spot Video Generator, 1956

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This ad for an interesting piece of test equipment appeared 60 years ago in the September, 1956, issue of Radio Electronics magazine.

It shows an early pattern generator for the TV serviceman, the Model 1000 Dyna-Scan video generator from B&K Manufacturing Co., 3726 N. Southport Avenue, Chicago. The device was quite ingenious, and had a number of applications besides service.

The principle of operation was quite simple. The image which was to be converted to video was printed on a transparency. This could contain the test pattern or bar or dot patterns that were included with the unit. The transparency was placed in front of a CRT which served as a “flying spot” generator, in much the same way as a “flying spot” was employed by some early mechanical television systems.

Since the CRT did the scanning, a 931A photomultiplier tube placed on the other side of the transparency would pick up the video signal, synched with the scanning of the CRT. This model apparently used the ultraviolet images emitted by the CRT, so it appears to function even with the tube exposed to other light. Images of one of these in operation can be seen at this link.

The unit could also transmit an audio signal, and had a built-in RF modulator which could be tuned to any VHF channel.

Because the unit was a relatively low-cost method of generating a TV signal, it had other uses besides the serviceman’s shop. It could be used at the head end of a community antenna TV system to send an audio or video signal. Since any message could be put on the transparency, this allowed video announcements to be transmitted. It was also billed for use as a paging system for use in a hospital or similar application. Messages could be written on a transparency, and viewed by a standard television elsewhere in the building.

The device sold for $199.95, but the advertisement also showed a less expensive version. For $69.95, you could buy the Model 950, which included the pickup and RF generator only, but without the CRT. This could be used along with a “properly modified 10-inch TV set which acts as your external flying spot scanner.” This version also came with a set of three transparencies.

Some good pictures showing the device in operation can be found at this link, and some more pictures and a schematic can be found at the Radio Museum.

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1941 Car TV

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New York probably didn’t have a distracted driving law in 1941, and the August 1941 issue of Radio Craft proudly proclaimed that “Car Television is Here!”  The first commercial TV broadcasts took place on July 1, 1941, and according to the cover photo, the gentleman shown here was able to tune them in, even though he was driving around the city.

But upon closer examination, it appears that the motoring public wasn’t in any danger when TV hit the airwaves.  According to the magazine, the cover photo is a “composite illustration,” and car TV was a coming thing.  The magazine promised, however, that a future issue would show how to build one.

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TV in New York Taverns: 1941

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Seventy-five years ago, television was making its appearance in New York taverns, as reported in the August 1941 issue of Radio Retailing magazine.

In the photo above, the set is placed at a spot in the bar “where it keeps feet on rails longer,” while some other highbrow establishments had built the set into the wall.

1941AugRadioRetailing2The article noted that hundreds of Du Mont sets had been installed in public places around New York. The public intitially flocked to them out of curiosity, but when commercial broadcasting was authorized on July 1, 1941, having a set in a tavern or cafe became a practical trade benefit.

The biggest draw was sports, with boxing, wrestling, baseball, basketball and football being the most popular, in that order. However, other programs proved popular, such as news events. “Some taven and cafe owners even advise that fashion programs have brought in some ladies!”

Sets were typically placed in the bars on a trial rental basis for a month or two.  Almost invariably, after the initial term, owners discovered that the sets were paying for themselves in increased trade.  They then had the option of continuing the rental, or applying rental payments to purchase of the set.

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First Televised Wedding, 1931

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The first ever televised wedding took place 85 years ago, as shown here from the July-August 1931 issue of Television News.

The bride and groom, Grace Jones and Frank Du Vall were wed by Dr. A. Edwin Keigwin of the West End Presbyterian Church over the airwaves of W2XCR-WGBS. The video was transmitted over W2XCR, with the synchronized audio being transmitted over WGBS. The magazine reported that thousands of visualists were trilled by this marvel of modern science.  Du Vall was apparently a station engineer

The television studio and 500 watt transmitter were located at 655 Fifth Avenue, New York City. The station used a mechanical system employing a strong arc light with a rotating disc with a “flying spot” to do the scanning. The visual pickup consisted of fixed photocells. The more conventional system at the time placed the spinning disc in front of the photocell. The system used by W2XCR essentially consisted of a beam of light that scanned the subject, synchronized with the spinning disc on the receiver. The system used 60 lines and scanned 20 pictures per second.  The general idea is shown in the illustration here:

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The sound was sent by wire to WGBS at Astoria, Long Island.  According to the Spring-Summer 1931 issue of White’s Radio Log, WGBS operated on 600 kHz with 250 watts of power.  The station’s call sign represented its owner, Gimbel’s Department Store, and the station is the predecessor of WINS.

 W2XCR, licensed to Jenkins Television Corporation, operated on 2000-2100 kHz or 2750-2850 kHz.

According to the 1940 census, the couple was happily married and living in Essex, New Jersey, on their ninth anniversary.  The clergyman, Dr. Keigwin, appears to be the author of the 1899 hymn, The Someday By and By.

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