by Bill Bryson
In 1882, domestic electricity at last became a possibility when Thomas Edison began providing electricity on a commercial basis. By mid-decade 200 of New York City’s wealthiest households were enjoying the illumination of 5,000 light-bulbs – or electric lamps as the Edison company called them. Only the very wealthiest could afford such an indulgence. A single bulb cost a dollar – half a day’s earnings for the average working person – and cost up to twenty cents an hour to run.17 Nor was household electricity a hit with everyone. After spending thousands of dollars and suffering much disruption to walls, floorboards and ceilings having electricity installed, Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt ordered every inch of it torn out when it was implicated (very possibly wrongly) in a small fire.18
Outdoors, however, it was another matter. Almost overnight America became the most illuminated country in the world. By the 1890s Broadway was already being described as ‘the Great White Way’ because of its dazzling lights (almost all of them advertising products). People came from all over just to see the lights, which included the world’s first flashing sign, for Manhattan Beach and its hotels. Standing 50 feet high and 80 feet wide, the sign would light up line by line and then flash rhythmically before starting the cycle over again. It seemed a wonder of modern technology. In fact it was manually operated by a man in a rooftop shack.
In 1910 Broadway got a sign that was a wonder of electrical engineering. Rising the equivalent of seven storeys above the rooftop of the Hotel Normandie and incorporating 20,000 coloured light-bulbs, it offered in intricate detail the illusion of a 30-second chariot race, complete with cracking whips and flying dust. People were so agog over it that squads of police had to be assigned to the area to keep pedestrians and traffic moving lest the whole of Manhattan grind to a halt.19 Almost as arresting were the lights of Luna Park on Coney Island. Two hundred thousand bulbs picked out ornamental patterns and the outlines of the towers and minarets at the amusement park, turning it literally into a night-time wonderland.20 Even now it looks quite wonderful in pictures.
By 1896 electricity had become such an accepted part of life that people were familiarly referring to it as juice. But the expense held people back. In 1910 just one home in ten had electricity. By 1930, however, 70 per cent of American households, some 20 million homes, had electricity – more than the rest of the world combined. The proportion would have been higher still except that rural electrification took so long to complete. As late as 1946, barely half of American farm homes had electricity. (But then only a tenth had an indoor flush toilet.)
As electricity became more widely available, electrical products began to come on to the market. Singer introduced the first electric sewing-machine in 1889. The electric fan appeared in 1891, the electric iron in 1893, the electric vacuum cleaner in 1901, the electric stove – sometimes called a fireless cooker – in 1902, the electric washing machine in 1909, the electric toaster in 1910, and the electric dishwasher in 1918. By 1917 the American householder could choose between fifty types of electrical appliances and eagerly did so. In that year, Americans spent $175 million on them.21 Within a little over a decade, that figure would rise to no less than $2.4 billion a year.22
The new and fast-changing market for electrical appliances often gave small companies a chance to thrive. After General Electric turned down the idea of an automatic washing machine, a small outfit named Bendix, which had no experience of manufacturing household appliances, took up the idea and within a decade had become one of America’s biggest manufacturers of appliances. Much the same happened with a small subsidiary of General Motors called Frigidaire, which saw an opening for domestic refrigerators and so successfully seized it that the name almost became generic.23 The idea of the refrigerator might have been new but the word wasn’t. It had existed in English since 1611, and had been used as a synonym for icebox since 1824.24
Refrigerators, rather surprisingly, were among the last common electrical appliances to catch on. Frigidaire began production in 1918, but the first models were ungainly and expensive. The cheapest cost $900 – as much as a good car. As late as 1921, just 5,000 were made in America. Then things took off. By 1931 a million refrigerators were being produced every year and by 1937, at the height of the Great Depression, the number was nudging 3 million.25
But no product was more successful than the radio. Radio, in the form of radio-receiver, entered the language in 1903. Earlier still there had been such specialized forms as radiophone (1881) and radioconductor (1898). As late as 1921 the New York Times was referring to the exciting new medium as ‘wireless telephony’. Others called it a ‘loud-speaking telephone’ or simply a ‘wireless’. When a leading golf club, the Dixmoor, installed radio speakers around the course so that its members could listen to church services (honestly) while playing their Sunday morning round, it referred to the system simply as a ‘telephone’. Radio in the sense of a means of communication and entertainment for the general public didn’t enter the language until 1922 and it took a decade or so before people could decide whether to pronounce it rādio or rădio.
Until as late as 1920, all radio receivers in America were homemade. A crystal set involved little more than some wire, an oatmeal box, an earphone and a piece of crystal. The earliest commercial sets were bulky, expensive and maddeningly difficult to tune. The big breakthrough for radio was the Dempsey-Carpentier fight of 2 July 1921 – which is a little odd since it didn’t actually involve a radio transmission, though it was supposed to.
It is difficult to conceive now how big an event like a heavyweight boxing fight could be in the 1920s, but the Dempsey-Carpentier fight was huge – so huge that the New York Times devoted virtually the whole of its first thirteen pages to reporting it (though it did find a small space on the front page to note the formal ending of World War I). The day before the fight, under the lead front-page headline ‘Radio Phones to Tell Times Square of Fight’, it noted that an operator at ringside in New Jersey would speak into a ‘wireless telephone transmitter’ and that his words would be transmitted instantly to halls in several cities and to crowds outside the New York Times Building on Times Square. Although the headline used the word radio, the article never did. On the day of the fight, ten thousand people jammed Times Square, but because of technical difficulties the radio transmitter wasn’t used. A ticker-tape was pressed into service instead. Even so, most of the people in the crowd thought they were receiving their eyewitness account live by the miracle of radio from New Jersey.26 The very notion of instant, longdistance verbal communication was so electrifying that soon people everywhere were clamouring to have a radio. (Dempsey knocked Carpentier out in the fourth round, incidentally.)
In just three years, beginning in 1922, over four million radio sets were sold, at an average price of $55 In 1922. only 1 home in 500 had a radio. By 1926, the proportion was 1 in 20, and by the end of the decade saturation was nearly total. Radio sales went from $60 million in 1922 to almost $850 million by 1929.27 Radio buffs pored over specialized magazines and formed clubs where they could swap tips and bandy about terms like regenerative circuits, sodion tubes, Grimes reflex circuits, loop aerials, rotary sparks and neutrodynes. Companies that made radios became monolithic corporations seemingly overnight. In one heady year the stock of Radio Corporation of America went from 85¼ to 549. By 1928 people could even listen to broadcasts in their cars after a little company called Motorola invented the car radio.28
The first broadcasters were ham operators using Morse code, but by the 1910s experimental stations were springing up all over. KDKA of East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which was opened by Westinghouse in 1920, has the distinction of being the first true radio station in America, though the credit is sometimes given to a station without call letters operated by the San Jose College of Engineering and Wireless, which began regular transmissions of news reports and music to receivers set up in local hotel lobbies in 1909. The station eventually moved to San Francisco and became KCBS. Most of the early stations were distin
ctly amateurish. KDKA featured musical renditions by the chief engineer’s young (and not notably gifted) sons. Another early Westinghouse station, WJZ of Newark, broadcast from a curtained-off area of the ladies’ restroom at a Westinghouse factory, apparently because it was the quietest place in the building. To say that most of these early stations were low-powered would be to engage in riotous understatement. Many transmitters used less wattage than a single light-bulb.29
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 was heard, the motion of the speaker’s lips and his changes of expression were flashed on the screen ... with perfect fidelity’. None the less, he considered television’s prospects doubtful. Its future, ‘if it has one, is thought to be largely in public entertainment – super-news reels flashed before audiences at the moment of occurrence, together with dramatic and musical acts shot on the ether waves in sound and picture at the instant they are taking place at the studio’.33
In 1928 Baird made the first transatlantic broadcast from a studio near London to one in Hartsdale, New York, and the following year the cumbersomely named W2XCW in Schenectady, New York, became the country’s first ‘regularly operating television station’, though in fact its telecasts consisted of three thirty-minute programmes a week – usually just shots of an unidentified head talking, laughing or smoking – and of course there was almost no one to watch them. By the end of 1929 there were twenty-six stations in America, though only those that were supported by big corporations, such as W2XBS in New York (which evolved into WNBC), were destined to survive through the 1930s. There was no great impetus to promote the industry in America because of the lack of a market during the Great Depression and the government’s refusal to allow commercials until 1941.
Many people got their first glimpse of television at the New York World’s Fair in 1939. The New York Times, with its now standard lack of prescience, forecast that it would never be a serious competitor for radio because ‘people must sit and keep their eyes glued on a screen; the average American family hasn’t time for it’.34
The year 1939 also saw the first television sets go on sale to the public, but still there wasn’t much to watch (unlike Britain where the BBC was celebrating its tenth anniversary). During the war years, America had just nine television stations in five cities – New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Schenectady – and just 7,000 sets on which to watch the meagre programming available. In the autumn of 1944, for instance, on Wednesday and Saturday nights there was no television at all in America. On Thursdays only CBS was on the air, with fifteen minutes of news followed by an hour of local programming where available and a half-hour show called Missus Goes A Shopping. On Sundays the American viewer could watch DuMont Labs’ Thrills and Chills followed by Irwin Shane’s Television Workshop, or nothing.35
With the end of the war, American TV was unleashed at last. By 1947, the number of television sets in American homes had soared to 170,000. In that same year a programme called Puppet Television Theater made its début. A year later it was renamed Howdy Doody, and television had its first hit.
As late as 1949, radio was still generating profits of over $50 million, while TV was making losses of $25 million.36 But as the 1950s opened, television became a kind of national mania. As early as 1951, advertisers were cashing in on the craze. McGregor Sportswear took a full-page ad in Life to unveil its new sportswear range for go-ahead guys, ‘Videos’, which featured such televisually appropriate fare as the reversible ‘Visa-Versa Jacket’, ‘the Host Tri-Threat Jacket,’ the ‘Durosheen Host Casual Jacket’ and matching ‘Durosheen Host Lounge Slacks’, all expressly designed for wear in front of the TV. Soon people everywhere were buying folding tray-tables so they could eat their ‘TV Dinners’ while glued to the box. America was well on its way to becoming a nation of couch potatoes, though that expression would not of course be used for many years. (Its first appearance has been traced to the unlikely forum of American Banker magazine of 30 December 1980, but the context suggests that it was already current, at least in California.)37
By 1952, the number of sets had soared to 18 million, 105 times as many as there had been just five years earlier. The seminal date for television was Monday, 19 January 1953, the date on which Lucille Ball gave birth to ‘Little Ricky’ on national television (by happy coincidence she gave birth to the real Desi Arnaz, jun., on the same day). The nation was so enthralled it hardly noticed that Dwight D. Eisenhower had been installed as President that afternoon.38
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 expire
d 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.
