Television broadcasting began as early as 1928, when the Federal Radio Commission authorized inventor Charles Jenkins to broadcast from W3XK, an experimental station in suburban Maryland in Washington, D.C. Silhouette images from movies were regularly broadcast to the general public at a resolution of only 48 lines. Similar experimental stations were broadcasting in the early 1930s. In 1939, RCA’s subsidiary NBC (National Broadcasting Company) became the first network to introduce regular television broadcasts, broadcasting its first telecast of the World’s Fair opening ceremony in New York. The station’s initial broadcasts were broadcast on only 400 television sets in the New York City area with an audience of 5,000 to 8,000 people (Lohr, 1940).
Television was initially available to only a privileged few, with televisions costing between $200 and $600, a solid sum in the 1930s when the average annual salary was $1,368 (KC Library). RCA offered four types of television receivers, which were sold in expensive department stores such as Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s and received channels 1 through 5. Early receivers were several times smaller than modern televisions with 5-, 9-, or 12-inch screens. Television sales before World War II were disappointing-an uncertain economic climate, the threat of war, the high cost of a television receiver, and the limited number of programs offered discouraged many potential buyers. Many unsold televisions were put into storage and sold after the war.
NBC was not the only commercial network to emerge in the 1930s. RCA radio competitor CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System) also began broadcasting regular programs. To prevent viewers from needing a separate television for each individual network, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) developed a uniform technical standard. In 1941, the commission recommended a system with 525 lines and a frame rate of 30 frames per second. It also recommended that all television sets in the United States operate using analog signals (broadcast signals made up of different radio waves). Analog signals were replaced by digital signals (signals transmitted as binary code) in 2009.
With the outbreak of World War II, many companies, including RCA and General Electric, turned their attention to military production. Instead of commercial televisions, they began stamping out military electronics. In addition, the war halted almost all television broadcasting; many television stations reduced their schedules to about 4 hours a week or stopped broadcasting altogether.
Although it did not become available until the 1950s or popular until the 1960s, color television production technology was proposed as early as 1904 and demonstrated by John Logie Baird in 1928. As with his black and white television system, Baird adopted a mechanical method, using a Nipkow scanning disk with three spirals, one for each primary color (red, green and blue). In 1940, CBS researchers, led by Hungarian television engineer Peter Goldmark, used Baird’s 1928 designs to develop the concept of a mechanical color television that could reproduce the color seen through a camera lens.
After World War II, the National Television Systems Committee (NTSC) worked to develop a fully electronic color system compatible with black and white televisions and received FCC approval in 1953. A year later, NBC released the first national color system. broadcast when it aired the Tournament of Roses Parade. Despite the television industry’s support for the new technology, it took another 10 years before color television became widespread in the United States, and until 1972, black and white televisions outnumbered color televisions (Klooster, 2009).