The Technological History of Broadcasting

This web page supplements the book, Grass Valley; How a small town changed television and tells the story of television, broadcasting, and video (and audio), or media as it is generally known today, before Grass Valley came along.

The book itself tells the story of how a small company, named after a small town, greatly changed the trajectory of media.

The book answers two questions

• Why do most people who work in the television industry know the name of this small town in California, even though most do not know it is a place?
• Why did a fairly large international company, based in Montreal Canada take the name of a small town in northern California?

Vacuum tube development, which would also produce the cathode ray tube (CRT) started in the 1870s. Earlier than that, during the later days of the American Civil War, an English scientist, James Clerk Maxwell worked out a series of recursive equations that predicted the propagation of radio waves through space.

In 1884 Paul Gottlieb Nipkow, a 20-year old university student in Germany, patented the first electromechanical television system which employed a spinning disk with a series of holes spiraling toward the center, that scanned a scene for rasterisation. Very crude, but a line of television research which would continue for almost 50 years. Spinning disks made a final appearance as late as the early 1950s in an early approach for producing color television, as we will see.

Nipkow spinning ("flying") disk 

The U.S. early on was assigned several letters as the start of their radio call signs by the international organizations of the day. Two of those were K and W. Since ship radio communications took hold a little sooner it was soon settled on that the shore stations, which were west of ships in the Atlantic would start with W. When broadcast radio stations started signing on, they also received call letters starting with W, such as WABC, WEWS, WBZ, etc. So, it was decided that the KApos;s would be assigned to stations in the west. Thus, ships in the Pacific were also assigned W's. Today stations east of the Mississippi start with W's, and west starts with K's. Yes, there are exceptions as the K and W border was originally closer to the Rocky Mountains before being moved east to the river. Other exceptions are due to stations moving and simply mistakes when the call letters were handed out. Noticeable ones include one of the first radio stations, KDKA in Pittsburgh.

(Everything you could possibly want to know about call letter history)

Before broadcasters became dominant on the radio landscape, it was not only ships that looked to use this new technology. One early pioneer of radio was United Fruit Company, as they found radio to be a more reliable way of communicating with their plantations in South America.

Armstrong

One of the most prolific American inventors in broadcasting was Edwin Howard Armstrong. Born towards the end of 1890, at the age of eight, he got rheumatic fever, which lead to Sydenham's chorea, a serious neurological disorder. From then on he was afflicted with a physical tic exacerbated by excitement or stress. Due to this illness, he withdrew from public school and was home-tutored, which led him to become socially withdrawn. Early on Armstrong showed an interest in electrical and mechanical devices. He also developed a taste for heights, and even constructed a makeshift backyard antenna tower. He even had a boson's chair for hoisting himself up and down its height, often to the consternation of the neighbors. He had a workshop in the attic of his parents' house.

In 1909, Armstrong started attending Columbia University in New York City. Armstrong challenged conventional wisdom and was quick to question the opinions of both professors and peers. Here he concentrated on subjects that interested him and was sometimes indifferent to his other studies. He came to value the practical over the theoretical, reasoning that experimentation produced more results than pure mathematical and physics calculations.

Armstrong graduated from Columbia in 1913, with a degree in electrical engineering. The following year he was appointed for one year as a laboratory assistant at Columbia for $600. There after he worked as a research assistant for the college, for a salary of $1 a year. He used his position and the school's facilities to his advantage. He never worked for an outside company. He self-financed his research and development laboratory at Columbia. Many of his patents he owned outright.

Before he graduated he was instrumental in developing a " regenerative circuit ." This used feedback to greatly increase the amplification possible using vacuum tubes. Enough so that a radio could use speakers instead of only headphones. While de Forest had invented the three element vacuum tube (triode) known as a Audion at the time, he did not understand how it worked very well. Armstrong performed demonstrations and wrote papers on the circuit's operation the year he graduated. It was at this time that Armstrong met Sarnoff.

While de Forest initially dismissed Armstrong's findings, in 1915 he filed a series of competing patent applications that largely copied Armstrong's claims, claiming he had discovered regeneration first. This resulted in an interference hearing to discover the true inventor. After the war ended a long legal battle commenced and Armstrong began selling license to his patent to finance the effort. A series of court cases ensued, at times supporting Armstrong, and in the end siding with de Forest. The Institute of Radio Engineers continued to believe that Armstrong was the actual inventor.

Armstrong served in the Signal Corps during World War I, initially commissioned as a captain and left as a major. During both world wars, Armstrong gave the US military free use of his patents. In 1934, he received an appointment as a Professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia, a position he would hold the remainder of his life.

Between the end of the "great" war and his appointment at Columbia, he greatly influenced RCA. Armstrong took a keen interest in the " super-heterodyne " receiver circuit. This was based on frequency mixing to convert a received signal to a fixed intermediate frequency. This would greatly simplify radio design. But once again the patent he was awarded was challenged by Lucien Levy of France who had been awarded French patents in 1917 and 1918, covering some of the same basic ideas used in Armstrong's superheterodyne receiver. Again Armstrong eventually lost the battle.

But RCA did not find Armstrong's battle with Levy after he approached RCA about superheterodyne a hindrance. That was because of extensive cross-licensing agreements signed in 1920 and 1921 between RCA, Westinghouse and AT&T which meant Armstrong could freely use the Levy patent on behalf of RCA. The patent battle dragged on until 1928, when the courts determined all Armstrong's claims were invalid.

That aside, Armstrong's knowledge became very useful to RCA. While early Superheterodyne sets were considered complicated and hard to setup, Armstrong guided RCA engineers in getting receivers using this circuitry to market, which launched in 1924.

In fighting the Superheterodyne patent suits, Armstrong stumbled upon the super-regeneration phenomena, where, by rapidly "quenching" the vacuum-tube oscillations, he was able to achieve even greater levels of amplification. Like the initial regenerative circuit, it used positive feedback also, but in a way that the gain is controlled so that the circuit does not break out into oscillation.

This invention was not contested by others, and in 1922 he sold it to RCA for $200,000, plus 60,000 shares of RCA stock (another 20,000 were thrown in for consulting services). RCA originally thought that this circuit could be used to power receivers until the Superheterodyne approach could be developed enough to be put to use. But as it turned out the super-regeneration circuitry was not selective enough to be used in radio receivers, and as mentioned Armstrong and company ironed out the Superheterodyne issued first.

How about FM instead?

Toward the end of the roaring 20s, and as AM was becoming entrenched in many American households, a couple other new things were gaining momentum. One was the concept of all-electronic television. Up until then the efforts were a combination of mechanical, and electronic (actually more electrical) contraptions. We will take this up shortly.

Also becoming more than a laboratory curiosity was FM.

Up until that time it was thought that FM would not provide much more resistance to atmospheric noise than AM did, and it was at this time that Sarnoff called Armstrong in and said he wanted him to fix the "noise" problem with AM. It was also about this time, 1928, that Armstrong took an interest in FM.

While Armstrong did not conceive of FM, he had an insight that most others up until that point did not. An AM station occupied only 10KHz of bandwidth, as they still do today. It was initially thought that FM channels would be the same. Armstrong advocated for "wideband" FM. That is a channel much wider in bandwidth. Today FM stations have 20 times the bandwidth of a comparable AM station. This makes FM much less susceptible to atmospheric noise. Originally FM stations were 40KHz apart.

He worked on "wide-band" FM in secret in the basement laboratory of Columbia's Philosophy Hall.


Philosophy Hall is the center building. He ran antennas between it and the nearby buildings for many of his projects.



By the end of 1933 he had received five patents for his FM research. The next year he demonstrated to Sarnoff what he had come up with. It was not an improvement to AM, but all new technology. The world was in a economic depression, RCA already had a fortune sunk into AM, and TV development was about to start consuming amounts of money that by an order of magnitude dwarfed anything to date.

This was the start of a falling out between Sarnoff and Armstrong. When the two first started collaborating together in the early 20s, Sarnoff was moving up the corporate ladder, and he often championed Armstrong's ideas. At that time Armstrong would often stop by Sarnoff's house in the morning for coffee. Sarnoff's sons would refer to Armstrong as the "coffee" man. One of those sons, Robert would eventually take over the reins of RCA, much to its detriment many claimed.

RCA had the right of first refusal to Armstrong's patents, and reluctantly stopped TV testing from the Empire State Building and let Armstrong use the perch to do FM testing. That lasted from May 1934 to October 35, when Sarnoff decided that TV would take full precedence over FM development and ordered Armstrong out of the building.

AM and FM are very different beasts. To start with, AM is at frequencies centered around 1MHz. The low end of the FM band is located up at 88MHz today, right above the historical TV channel 6 slot. Above FM there is some aircraft and other bands before TV takes over again at channel 7 at 174MHz. Because of the frequency different AM towers are generally the antenna. Whereas FM and TV towers are simply platforms to get the antenna as high as possible. That' why TV & FM towers are found in high places; tall towers, high buildings, mountains. Whereas AM, again because of where it is located in the spectrum, is generally on flat ground, with good ground radiation characteristics. That is why you find them in swamps, marshes, near water.

Originally FM stations were located between 41 and 44 MHz. At the end of WWII the FCC, at the urging of RCA, moved the band to where it is today. Armstrong felt that RCA wanted to blunt and delay the impact of FM by obsoleting existing FM transmitters and receivers, to stretch out its AM investment. FM didn't really take hold until the 1960s.

Armstrong, now denied RCA's engineering and marketing heft, turned to other companies like Zenith and GE to license his technology. RCA came back in 1940 and offered Armstrong $1,000,000 for a non-exclusive, royalty-free license to use his FM patents. He refused as he felt it unfair to the other licensed companies, which had to pay 2% royalties on their sales. RCA went to work undermining Armstrong, like the frequency change just mentioned.

RCA developed what it claimed was a FM system that did not infringe on Armstrong's patents. In 1948 he filed suit against RCA. The suits drove on for the rest of his life. His primary patents expired in 1950, and with RCA offering a competitive system his finances took a dive.

1941 RCA Equipment Catalog

Rockefeller Center

Rockefeller Plaza was five blocks away, and RCA became its major tenant. In 1926, the Metropolitan Opera started looking for locations for a new opera house. The new design turned out to be too expensive for the Met to fund itself. John D. Rockefeller Jr. decided to support the project. Rockefeller convinced Columbia University, who owned the land, to lease him the land for the project for 87 years at a cost of $3 million per year. The initial cost for building out the project was $250 million.

An iconic photograph by Charles Clyde Ebbets of the Washington Post, depicts workers having lunch atop  30 Rockefeller Plaza  during its construction.

The complex was the largest private building project ever undertaken in contemporary times. Eleven buildings had been completed by 1937, and by fall 1939, the complex had 26,000 tenants and 125,000 daily visitors. It spanned 22 acres in total when completed. By 1944, the complex's existing rent-able area totaled 5,290,000 square feet. By the time that the project neared its existing state it had 17,000,000 square feet (1,600,000 m2) of office space.

NBC stuck in the center of the complex got their landlord to let them use the then little used Center Theater for extra broadcasting space in 1951. Eventually NBC would expand into space that Sinclair and Esso formerly occupied in the original complex, and they moved out of the Center Theater. This happen after the Sinclair Oil Company moved into its own tower in the complex.

The current complex is a combination of two building complexes and a standalone building. The original 14 Art Deco office buildings from the 1930s, one building across 51st Street built in 1947, and a set of four International-style towers built along the west side of Avenue of the Americas during the 1960s and 1970s.  The complex  spans both sides of the Avenue of the Americas and to 5th Avenue (east to west) and between 47th and 51st Streets (north and south).

The Radio Networks

WEAF signed on in 1922 in NYC. It was the first commercially licensed radio station in New York City. Western Electric Company, a subsidiary of AT&T, was interested in exploiting its collection of radio patents, which it believed would allow it to corner the market in the exploding field of radio broadcasting. The year it signed on, WEAF broadcast what it later claimed to be the first radio advertisement, which was a roughly 10 minute talk regarding apartments in Jackson Heights, Queens.

In 1946, WEAF changed its call sign to WNBC and became the flagship station of the NBC Red network (more on that in a bit). This station is now known as WFAN (AM) as GE, which bought RCA and NBC sold off its radio operations in 1988. WFAN which already existed took over WNBC's frequency (660 KHz) and vacated its old one.

WEAF Control Room 1927  

Early on it was AT&T that was in the best position to put together a radio network of AM stations. It owned the "long lines" on which to connect the networked stations and refused to lease the higher quality voice lines to any broadcasting competitors, only lower quality lines used for telegraph.

Early on RCA and the rest of the "radio group's" efforts at forming a radio network, centered on WJZ (now WABC), a Newark, New Jersey station which RCA acquired in 1923 from Westinghouse and moved it to New York City. RCA in 23 also put WRC (now WTEM) in Washington, D.C. on the air. Much of its early efforts involved linking these two stations, which were stymied by AT&T.

None-the-less the first RCA network broadcast occurred in December 1923, when a WJZ program was received off air and rebroadcast by WGY, Schenectady, New York, which was owned by General Electric. The "WJZ chain" saw little growth compared to AT&T. President Coolidge's March 1925 inaugural speech was sent over a growing AT&T transcontinental network of 23 stations, while the WJZ chain's broadcast of the speech was carried by only four stations, all located in the East. (Map)

Then in 1926 AT&T had a change of heart. AT&T centralized its radio operations in a subsidiary known as the Broadcasting Company of America. This was done in anticipation of selling the radio network, as the management of the company decided that the radio broadcasting was incompatible with the company's primary role as the leading U.S. supplier of telephone and telegraph services.

A few weeks after AT&T created the Broadcasting Company of America subsidiary, it sold its assets to RCA for approximately one million dollars. This sale transferred ownership of WEAF to RCA. AT&T also agreed to make its telephone lines readily available for RCA's network. RCA then announced the formation of the National Broadcasting Company, Inc. Up until then AT&T asserted that through the various cross licensing agreements among vendors earlier that only it was permitted to sell advertising. As part of the sale NBC was also permitted to accept advertising.

NBC's network operations were officially launched with a gala broadcast on November 15, 1926. Carl Schlegel of the Metropolitan Opera opened the inaugural broadcast, which also featured Will Rogers and Mary Garden. The broadcast, which even included a remote link from KYW in Chicago. Twenty-two stations, located as far west as WDAF in Kansas City, Missouri carried the broadcast originated through WEAF studios.

Soon NBC formally divided its programming into two networks, called the Red and the Blue. On January 1, 1927, they went into separate operations. WEAF originated the Red Networks programming, while WJZ originated Blue's. It is claimed that the two networks got their names from the color of the patches used by AT&T long lines to route the programming out to the network.

CBS

CBS started on January 27, 1927, as the United Independent Broadcasters network. It was started in Chicago by New York City talent agent Arthur Judson. Three months later the Columbia Phonograph Company, manufacturers of Columbia Records, invested in it. The network's name became the Columbia Phonographic Broadcasting System. The network's original flagship station was WOR in Newark. The network had 15 affiliates. The network lost money, especially because of the high rates AT&T charge to use its landlines. By the end of 1927, Columbia Phonograph wanted out.

Judson sold the network in early 1928 to the owners of the network's Philadelphia affiliate WCAU,Isaac and Leon Levy, who were brothers. They also had a third partner. None of the three were interested in running the network, so they hired the son of a Philadelphia cigar makers family, who was also an in-law of the Levy's, wealthy 26-year-old William S. Paley as president. One of Paley's initial acts was to simplify the corporate name. The company became the "Columbia Broadcasting System". After Paley had convinced his elders to advertise on radio and the sales of his family's La Palina cigars had doubled he truly believed in the power of radio advertising. By September 1928, Paley bought out the third partner's share, and had 51% ownership of the business.

William Paley 

Edward R Murrow, late 1940s 

Mutual Broadcasting System

Attempts at establishing a cooperatively owned radio network was tried a couple times. In 1934, a group of stations founded the Mutual Broadcasting System. Mutual's original participating stations were WOR Newark, owned by the Bamberger Broadcasting Service, which ended its relationship with CBS. Bamberger was a division of R.H. Macy and Company. The other stations were WGN Chicago, a subsidiary of the Chicago Tribune, WXYZ Detroit, and WLW Cincinnati. The network began operation in September with the members contracting for telephone interconnect facilities and agreeing to collectively enter into contracts with advertisers for their networked shows. WOR and WGN, the two stations in the largest markets provided the bulk of the programming.

The network produced many radio shows that became iconic. The Lone Ranger from WXYZ was an early one. The network managed to add affiliates. By the end of 1938, Mutual had 74 exclusive affiliates. Mutual shared another 25 affiliates with NBC and 5 with CBS, for a total not two far behind the two bigger ones. At its height the network had around 560 affiliates, almost three times as many as its more powerful competitors. The problem was that a lot of the better stations, the ones with more powerful transmitters and thus better coverage were already spoken for. As an example in the postwar era CBS and NBC covered all of North Carolina each with only four affiliates, while Mutual needed 14 affiliates to deliver comparable statewide coverage. Because of that kind of coverage NBC often took in more than 10 times as much revenue as Mutual.

Early performers such as Orson Welles, Kate Smith, Alan Ladd, Steve Allen, Perry Como, and shows like The Shadow, The Green Hornet, The Adventures of Superman, Queen for a Day, and Sergeant Preston of the Yukon aired on the network. Sporting events like the Indianapolis 500, and major league baseball were also aired. At one point the network won exclusive broadcast rights to the World Series. To limit Mutual's success the other two networks prohibited their affiliates from airing those games. This action eventually led to lawsuits by Mutual.

Mutual also managed to start a respected news operation with tiny budgets compared to the other two. But that would not be enough. Many of the shows that became hits on Mutual ended up moving up to the larger networks who could afford to buy them out from under Mutual. At times it appeared that the network was a farm club for others. The other bigger problem was that the network did not have the finances to move into television as the others were doing in the late 40s. A lot of the advertising money was starting to move to TV. There was a mass desertion of network radio talent, management and technicians for television taking their shows with them. After a couple of sales of the company to inattentive owners, and some questionable legal shenanigans by those owners by the 60s the network had retreated back to being a network only when it came to news and sports. Entertainment was all but abandoned.

In 1985 Westwood One bought the network for $39 million, partially for the news operations that Westwood lacked. Mutual also helped Westwood attain a broad demographic sweep, in that Mutuals audiences with adult and older listeners where larger, while Westwood's skewed younger.

Television

By the turn of the century, a couple decades before AM broadcasting got going, television, let alone color TV, was being thought about. In 1904 a color television patent is applied for. It used a rotating sectored filter (red, blue, yellow) wheel with two small mirrors for dissecting the image. At the receiver a vibrating wire and a platinum point which formed a spark gap became the light valve. This was a very early application of a form of sequential color television.

Early TV really got its start in 1884 when Paul Gottlieb Nipkow invented his scanning system. Television historian Albert Abramson calls Nipkow's patent "the master television patent." While the approach was eventually abandoned as all electronic systems evolved, it allowed a lot of early experimenting in capturing video and transmitting it. As we will see as video moved towards being all electronic, it was easier to perfect all-electronic at the receiving end before the transmitting end.

Mechanical Television
Visit to the Early Television Museum
How the Nipkow disk works

John Baird demonstrating his Nipkow disk type TV receiver in 1925 

A few important milestones for television happened in 1923. Maurice de Broglie, a French physicist, and brother of the theoretical physicist, Louis de Broglie, presented a paper indicating that a stream of electrons wavelength, being inversely proportional to the electron velocity. One of the earliest papers covering "electron optics."

Also, a young Scotsman, John Logie Baird, decided he would devote his life to the development of TV, after having failed in several other ventures. He decided that the use of the Nipkow disc combined with modern photocells and a thermionic amplifier could produce a workable TV system. After several attempts he finally advertised for help in June of that year in the London Times. He received a offer of some technical equipment and attracted the attention of Wilfred E.L. Day, a motion picture entrepreneur who saw in Baird an opportunity to invest in the new field of TV. With the financial backing of Day, Baird was able to set up a lab at 22 Frith St in London. Baird filed for his 1st TV patent a month later. It used a simple Nipkow disc arrangement at the transmitter. At the receiver, the image was to be displayed on a bank of lamps arranged to form a screen. There was to be an arm moving synchronously with the disc, moving over a series of contacts to complete the circuits of the successive lamps. Baird soon took out a number of patents.

Baird with his apparatus in 1925


His system used the Nipkow disc with 4 sets of 5 holes which revolved at nearly 2000 rpm. Behind it was a serrated disc that fed a selenium cell. The receiver consisted of a disc with lamps arranged in a staggered formation similar to that of the disc at the transmitter.

Additionally, John Hammond, Jr of Gloucester, Mass applied for the first patent describing the "flying spot" scanning of live objects. One variant called for the projection of a light beam, which would be caused to travel in a predetermined path by the use of vibrating mirrors. The light was reflected from the object to a photoelectric system. The subject was in a dark room surrounded by dull black, light-absorbent walls. At the receiver a similar light beam would pass through a pair of Nicol prisms, a polarization cell, and a lens system to a set of mirrors similar to those at the transmitter and in synchronization with them. The modulated light passed to a screen for viewing. It was planned to send 200 line pictures at 16 frames/sec.

At the end of 1923, another prolific inventor in the television realm, Vladimir Zworykin of Westinghouse in Pittsburgh, applied for a patent covering an all-electric television system. The camera tube portion was the subject of 11 patent interferences, and thus caused many delays in the patent process. Zworykin had left Russia and arrived in the U.S. in 1919. He joined Westinghouse in 1920 but left for C & C Development Co of Kansas City. He returned in 1923 with an agreement regarding his TV patents; he retained certain rights to his prior inventions while Westinghouse acquired an exclusive option to purchase his patents at a later date.

Zworykin's camera tube patent application was patterned much like Swinton's plan in 1911. It differed in that Swinton had disclosed a mosaic made of rubidium cubes, and Zworykin disclosed a plate covered with a layer of photoelectric material. The plate was made of aluminum foil so thin that it could be penetrated by a cathode beam. This plate supported a layer of aluminum oxide that insulated the photoelectric material. This was preferably potassium hydride deposited in a layer. The entire tube was to be filled with a low pressure gas such as argon. There was much controversy that the tube would actually work as Zworykin described it.

Vladimir Zworykin  

Eventually Baird went back to his original approach and gave up on the "flying spot" method. In 1926 he gave the first public demonstration of his television images for members of the Royal Institution and a reporter from The Times. In August of that year Baird obtained the first license to transmit television over station 2TV, from the BBC. The transmitter operated on 200 meters with 250 watts of power. It was soon reported that faces were perfectly distinguishable, with smooth gradations of shade, bright highlights, dark shadows and were perfectly recognizable.

The first known photograph of a moving image produced by Baird's "televisor"

The next year Baird transmitted a long-distance television signal over 438 miles of telephone line between London and Glasgow. Baird set up the Baird Television Development Company Ltd, which in 1928 made the first transatlantic television transmission, from London to Hartsdale, New York, and in 1929 the first television programs are officially transmitted by the BBC.

Farnsworth excelled in science in high school. In high school he started contemplating a television system of his design and asked his science teacher for advice. One of the drawings that he did on a blackboard for his chemistry teacher was recalled and reproduced for a patent interference case between Farnsworth and RCA later.

Farnsworth's 1924 High School yearbook photo 

August 1928 also saw Farnsworth give a private demonstration of his TV system to the Pacific Telephone Co. It was reported that the picture was rather low intensity on a screen 1.25 by 1.5 inches big. Images were hard to identify, but motion was easily followed. The phone company was impressed by the photoelectric transmitter tube (the dissector) and that all scanning was done electronically. He also did a demonstration for the San Francisco Chronicle at the beginning of September. It was 60-line 20 frame/sec video with about 8000 elements of resolution. It was reported that the image was 1.25 inch square with a "queer looking little image in bluish light now, that frequently smudges and blurs." The Chronicle's article claimed that the basic principle had been achieved and that perfection was a matter of engineering. It mentioned the lab was at 202 Green St and that the financial backers were W.W. Crocker and Roy N. Bishop. At this time Farnsworth still had the only operating camera tubes in the world.

Demonstration of Farnsworth all-electric camera system  

These were the same cameras that attempted the Albany "remote" pickup. The director had a monitor screen to watch the progress of the program and controls for fading from one camera to another. The program was witnessed by a group of newspapermen and scientist gathered in one of GE's buildings. It was reported that the pictures were small, sometimes blurred and confused, not always in the center of the screen and hard on the eyes because of the flicker. One of these cameras would be on display at the Radio World's Fair held in New York City later that month. It was part of the GE exhibit, which also included a demonstration of a large-screen TV projector. This "large" projected picture was 12 x 12 inches onto a silver screen by a 5 inch projecting lens.

Toward the end of 1928 there were about 12 stations actually broadcasting pictures in the US at some time during the day or were planning to. Six were using 48-hole scanning, 3 were using 24-hole scanning, and one each using 60, 45, and 36 holes. The number of pictures/sec varied from 7 one-half to 21. On top of these at the end of October Bell Labs reported work progressing on 72-hole disk to replace there then current 50-hole disk. It would require a bandwidth twice the 50-hole system. The system was demonstrated right before Thanksgiving. As a result of all these incompatible systems, the Radio Manufacturers Association (RMA) formed a "Television Standards Committee" on October 9th, to try and standardized to a single system.

In order to slow the spread of TV in the broadcast band, stations were only allowed to broadcast only one hour per day and forbidden to do so between the hours of six and 11 pm to minimize interference with AM stations. The Federal Radio Commission restricted the hours of all still-picture transmission and television until the end of 1928. After that date all TV would be in a special band above 1500 kc.

Continuing on in the year, Zworykin tried, but was unsuccessful, to get Westinghouse to build an improved version of his idea for the CRT. He decided on separation of the function of beam modulation, deflection of the beam while at low electron velocities, and finally, electron beam acceleration for high brightness by means of a high-voltage second anode in the form of a metallic coating on the inside of the glass bulb. This would provide a path for the electrons to return to the electron gun, thus preventing the screen from charging up. As true of many great inventions, while all these elements were in existence, it took Dr. Zworykin's genius to put them together.

Then at the end of 1928 Zworykin visits Sarnoff. Sarnoff was then the executive VP of RCA and was about to go to Europe to participate in the German Reparations Conference from 2-1-29 through 6-29. Sarnoff asked Zworykin how much it would cost to produce a workable TV system. Zworykin said that "it could be done in two years at a cost of one hundred thousand dollars." Zworykin told Sarnoff that the "basic instrument was already operative but required extensive and expensive development." There have been inferences that a crude camera tube was the instrument referred to by Zworykin, but it was known that Zworykin had no camera imaging tube either being built or working at this time. He did have a crude picture tube built from the Dewar flask operating in his laboratory. Sarnoff was convinced and had Westinghouse give Zworykin additional financing, staffing, and equipment. Soon an order was given for a shipment of glass picture tube blanks from the Corning Glass Co.

In January 1929 Farnsworth hires Harry L Lubcke, a young EE from University of California whose main project was to help Farnsworth develop a completely electric scanning generator. Farnsworth had been using 500-cycle motor generators to generate his sine-wave scanning currents. Sine-wave scanning produced double images as it was impossible to keep the two-half cycles in exact phase, and it produced "shaded" pictures as a result of the variable speed as it scanned the picture. Farnsworth had turned to tuning forks as a means of synchronization and finally to vacuum tubes to produce his scanning pulse.

By July of that year Farnsworth and Lubcke had developed an electric scanning generator that produced sawtooth currents and special pulses to eliminate return scan lines. This was the first all-electric TV system in the world. He had his dissector tube all-electric camera, a magnetically focused high vacuum CRT for viewing, and a vacuum tube scanning and pulse generator. There were absolutely no moving parts in the system.

Earlier that year actual work on another all-electric system got going. The Zworykin TV system began in earnest on February 1st, 1929, with the first shipment of glass bulbs from the Corning Glass Co. Zworykin did not have a working camera tube at the time so he decided to use a standard Simplex movie projector that had had its intermittent removed as a source of picture signals. An oscillating mirror was to scan the motion picture frame as it rolled by. A relay lens system focused the beam onto one part of the photocell. It was planned to use sine-wave scanning for the horizontal scan as it simplified the scanning process with both the oscillating mirror and the scanning coil being fed by the same simple sine-wave generator. Vertical scan was a linear process, however, with a toothed wheel driven by the film to indicate the start of each frame. A contact on the wheel would discharge a condenser circuit, indicating a new picture frame. The patent applied for regarding this was mainly concerned with the synchronization of film frames and had little to say about the receiving tube.

As promised by Sarnoff there were several engineers on the project assisting Zworykin. Among them were an optical engineer, picture tubes designers, along with engineers for video amplifiers, deflection circuits and high voltage supplies. By April of that year they had a satisfactory display picture tube. The image tube simulator, the film projector was completely assembled by the end of April.

1929 was shaping up to be a monumental year also. About the time that Zworykin's project was ramping up Dr. Frank Gray and John R. Hofele of Bell Labs applied for patents first revealing the spectral distribution of the video signal. They proved that information in the signal was bunched at certain intervals, leaving huge gaps with relatively little information.

While this is the spectrum of a modern analog color video signal, the concept is the same. The farther right you go, the higher the frequency. Higher frequencies relate to high resolution. The middle peak is where the color information is in a modern analog signal. The peak all the way to the right is the audio carrier.

Also at the beginning of February of that year, GE transmits both the pictures and the accompanying program sound from their studios in Schenectady to Los Angeles via their short wave station W2XAF, for video, operating on 31.48 meters, and the voice was carried on station 2XO at 22.5 meters. That appears to be the first nationwide telecast of both light and sound.

On February 11th of the same year Bell Labs reveals that they had produced "flying spot" equipment suitable for the "real time" recording of TV images on 35mm film. This was done using a special quartz, mercury lamp, and a special rotating disk with a series of slots, that formed a beam of light in successive parallel lines across a piece of continuously moving film. Gray claimed that they were actually recording 50-line TV images at 18 images/sec. Samples of these recordings have survived. Thus TV recording was essentially born. This apparatus was considered to be part of the Bell Labs scheme for the projection of TV images on a large screen almost simultaneously with their reception as mentioned earlier.

In March RCA completes installation of television equipment at 411 Fifth Ave. At that time RCA had decided to go with the Westinghouse standard of 60 lines at 20 frames/sec, instead of GE's 48 lines at 16 frames/sec. In April RCA presented a paper calling for some tentative standardization of the TV signal. All the while, while RCA appeared to move forward with the development of television, it was quite careful to follow General J.G. Harbord, president of RCA, and V.P. Sarnoff's policy not to interfere with the highly successful radio operation of NBC. That said it was still reported that not only was "conservative RCA" broadcasting TV on a regular schedule but there were rumors of impending RCA TV receivers. Some of this was coming due to the fact that in June RCA TV station W2XBS was then telecasting two hours a day, from 7 to 9 pm.

When Sarnoff finally got back from Europe in June he was not happy that a new plan involving the Victor Company that perpetuated the old system of having multiple sets of engineers and managers, from RCA, GE, and Victor, each going its own way in the Camden plant. Sarnoff objected strenuously and offered to resign if the plan was not changed to have a single, united management under his control. At the beginning of October his demand was satisfied, and on the day after Christmas a new entity, the RCA Victor Company, was incorporated. RCA owned 50% of the company, GE owned 30% and Westinghouse, 20%. The new arrangement had two obstacles, the deepening depression, and the filing of an antitrust suit by the DoJ, which we previously discussed.

The pace of working towards practicable television continued at a breakneck pace through the rest of 1929. Advances in interlace scanning, and synchronization continued. While, with the exception of Farnsworth's camera, the transmission end was still mostly a mechanical affair. In July of that year Zworykin, and his Westinghouse team, demonstrated his latest system to a group of RCA and GE engineers. The next month the system was shown to Dr. Alfred Goldsmith, who had set up RCA Labs, which was rapidly becoming one of the most important corporate research laboratories in corporate history. He and other RCA management were so pleased that they asked for nothing to be changed except to package the parts into six home receivers to be sold by Christmas, 1929.

Zworykin with an his kinescope or CRT 1929 

In August Westinghouse's KDKA began broadcasting motion pictures daily using the Conrad TV system. Zworykin used the Westinghouse transmitter between 2-6 am three times a week. KDKA was on 150 and 90 meter wavelength. Zworykin claims that film of 60-line at 12 frames/sec was quite well received at his home.

Zworykin with a Westinghouse television receiver in his home.

The actual display is circled

Farnsworth and his camera in 1930

Farnsworth with an early receiver of his 

Early Empire State Building television transmitter installation

TV Transmit Antenna on top 
of the Empire State Building 

The Philadelphia Storage Battery Company of Philadelphia (Philco) beat Sarnoff to the punch. Philco was the largest manufacturer of radio sets in the US at the time. As such it was very dependent on the RCA patent structure. It was very anxious to break away from its subservient position to RCA in the new field of TV. Farnsworth TV system was the only alternative to RCA/Zworykin system at the time. Philco proposed to pay his research expenditures which were to be credited as prepaid royalties, leaving Farnsworth in control of his inventions. On June 30th an agreement between Farnsworth and Philco was signed. He kept the Green St lab open with one or two employees and moved his equipment amidst great secrecy to the penthouse lab in Philly. In December of that year Philco applied for a TV station license. Farnsworth went to Philly where a research lab was set up atop the Philco plant.

One of the first things Farnsworth did at Philco was to apply for a patent in July which was a method of supplying high voltage to the anode of a display CRT. The HV was generated by rectifying sync pulses and using them to charge a condenser. This condenser was connected to the anode. He also used the pulses to generate the scanning signals. It is the process that is still used in CRT receivers.

In October 1931 Zworykin added a new claim to a still pending December 1923 patent application, that "a photo-electric layer over which said electron beam stream is deflected is adapted to pass and upon which the picture is adapted to be focused, and a circuit connecting the photo-electric layer and cathode." The design of the new single-sided camera tube was finalized and on October 23rd it was named the Iconoscope. Although many tubes were built and tested the first really successful tube was tested on November 9th. This was probably tube number 16, which was the first Iconoscope to give a reasonably good picture. A new patent applied for on November 13th, which showed a camera tube in which the target was single-sided and therefore both the light from the scene and the scanning electron beam impinged on the same surface. It had a thin sheet of mica deposited with a thin film of platinum on the back side. The front surface consisted of individual photo-sensitive elements made by placing a suitable mask against this side and in vacuum evaporating cadmium to cause individual elements to be deposited through the openings.

Zworykin holding his Iconoscope imaging tube 

1933: Very early Iconoscope camera prototype.

Down-sloped section under the lens was to fit the shape of the image tube.

The two cases to the left where the camera's power supply, and the other held the majority of the video processing circuitry.

Farnsworth (far right) with "Fusor" and engineers, 
Courtesy of the J. Willard Marriott Digital Library, University of Utah 

Early NBC experiments with televising on-the-spot news events provided invaluable technical and artistic experience which paved the way for the post-war television boom.

Engineers who had been developing television technology now directed their expertise toward designing radar and communications systems for the military. Also, the development of television guided bombs was undertaken. Around the world others used television. An early British TV developer, John Logie Baird, devised a system that was installed on planes that shot film of the ground passing below, which was rapidly developed on the plane and then using a special camera that looked at the lens of a film projector, the resulting video was transmitted to the ground. The British also used their transmitted TV signals to jam German aircraft navigation frequencies.

The Germans used television for propaganda purposes throughout the war, even transmitting from the Eiffel Tower. Perhaps the most interesting use of TV was by Russia. They mounted a camera above an early radar screen looking at Leningrad in 1941 and transmitted the signal to receivers at anti-aircraft sites in the area to help them locate enemy planes.




During the war some commercial TV development continued. Both these events were covered in 1944.

Notice the camera on the left (baseball game) does not have an electronic viewfinder, only a optical site.

The camera seen covering the football game is at Franklin Field at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. The camera is one offered by Philco. which was also located in Philadelphia. As you recall this was the company that sponsored Farnsworth for awhile.

Post War Take Off

Times Square Celebration Television Coverage at the end of the War

Post War Sets for Sale

Early Remote Production trucks for "Outside Broadcast" (OB) as the Europeans would say.

UHF

UHF reception issues are a reason why local community antennas sprung up, which eventually grew into the cable utility/communications industrial complex they are today. These community antennas co-ops would be formed by small towns or communities in hilly and mountainous areas. The first were in locations like Arkansas, Oregon, and Pennsylvania. The co-op would band together the finances to erect receive towers, generally 100 feet or less in height on top of mountains, or hills to receive signals in problematic receive areas, and distribute it to members over coax cable. How those modest beginnings became your 1000 channel entertainment and Internet provider is a story for another time.

Allen Dumont with one of his CRTs 

Dumont helped launch the career of Jackie Gleason on a show called Cavalcade of Stars in 1950. Gleason was wowed to CBS in 1952. Dumont also helped another well-known comic of the era, Ernie Kovacs, launch might have been the first late night show in 1954. Despite this, and a number of other popular and successful shows, including the first network-televised game show, the network today is often referred to as the forgotten network.

How video was recorded until the late 50s

The other big radio network of the day was Mutual, which we have already discussed as a radio network. While it discussed on several occasions about moving into television, as a network it never did, although many of its affiliates did on their own. A lot of this might have been the nature of the network's organization, being a cooperative instead of a centrally run network. This even though, like CBS and NBC, it had many popular radio shows that could have been converted to television shows, as the other two networks were doing, re-purposing much of their radio lineup to port over to television.

But the term network, way back when it was first applied to radio and television, was also referred to as chain broadcasting. A central facility or station would send out programming that would be linked from one city to the next, feeding the local affiliates. By 1928, using dedicated lines from the AT&T, NBC had linked, or chained, their radio stations from the east to the west coast. To handle more audio traffic, at the time a path could only handle 240 separate calls, and to be able to handle later additional television traffic, Bell Labs patented what resembles today's coax cable in 1929 and started to install it throughout their system. An early path was from New York to Philadelphia with experimental television transmission commencing in 1937.

KNTV became the first major affiliate to pay their network instead of the traditional opposite flow. The now cash strapped station was soon forced to sell out to NBC. This started the trend of affiliates paying networks instead of networks paying affiliates.

NBC had engineered a similar coup in 1955, when it coerced a swap of a Westinghouse station in Philadelphia, with an NBC owned station in Cleveland, under threat of Westinghouse's KYW losing its NBC affiliate status not only in Philadelphia, but also in Boston if it didn't go through with the demand. At the time Philadelphia was the largest market that NBC did not own a station in and being larger than the Cleveland market seemed like a good deal for NBC, if not Westinghouse. The Westinghouse station, KYW, moved to Cleveland and the NBC one, WNBK moved to Philadelphia.

After the swap and move, Westinghouse complained to the FCC and an investigation was started. Over the next nine years as NBC tried to secure a station in San Francisco, which failed, and the original operator of the Philadelphia station, Philco, which was now owned by Ford, jumped into the fray by also trying to pry the Philadelphia station away from NBC, the FCC slowly sorted the situation out and in 1965 the swap was reversed.

The moral from these two stories is that becoming an affiliate with a network can be a Faustian arrangement. But early on it was much simpler, the networks paid their affiliates, first by market size, and later by ratings. In the late 40s networks paid its affiliated stations only about 30% of the station's potential ad revenue if the station produced its own shows that got the same number of viewers and kept all the advertising revenue. But local stations, in almost all cases, could not possibly finance network level programs locally.

So the general deal was during network programming, which generally was prime time only at first, before branching out to morning and daytime programming, was that the local affiliate got about 90 seconds of commercial time each half hour that they could sell to supplement what they received from the network. This relied on the fact that the whole purpose of a show is to deliver the audience to the next commercial, as the network product is not programs, but the audience a show garners for the advertisers.

Early on television ad rates were 5% of what radio could command, so soon it was realized that TV didn't have much to lose by producing offbeat dramas. As mentioned in the 40s and first half of the 50s, except for Kinescope, TV's dependence on live, studio production, made the dramatic play the most feasible form to present. So, there was a lot of Anthology dramas, stories of human conflict and confrontation, which could be easily confined to a studio with few cameras and usually a small space.

Film production over live

Early RCA TK-30 black and white camera at CBS Studio City
RCA TK-30 black and white camera doing Lawrence Welk

In the 40s and into the 50s TV came mainly from network studios in New York, but it slowly started migrating towards Los Angeles. At first most Hollywood film companies viewed TV as a threat and competitor. But the television networks were realizing the benefits to film production over live video production, and with all the potential opportunities that would present, Hollywood became prepared to accept all the money and work these East Coast heathens could offer.

Going from live to film changed the texture of TV. The early harsh tones of early TV cameras could be replaced with a softer film look. Film allowed much more choice in show formats. Besides the "anthology" series, many other dramatic adaptations covering a wide range of topics, soon led to episodic shows or the continuing series, featuring characters whose vocations, surroundings, companions, and emotional responses were rigidly defined, and reoccurring. TV also became a new market for the B movie, or the made for TV movies, using smaller budgets and not yet marquee stars. Eventually a mix of the two evolved into the mini-series.

The major studios started producing shows shot on film for the major networks from the early 50s on. As we will see Disney was an early provider for ABC, as was Warner Brothers. ABC was an early adopter of shows shot by movie studios. ABC was lucky in its enlistment of the traditional studios to provide content, especially their timing in approaching Disney. But not all such arrangements worked out. In at least one instance a film studio saw an opportunity to become a television network itself.

Paramount was forced to spin off its movie theaters, and that branch eventually merged with ABC. The movie studio side started investing in the new medium itself by building TV stations in Los Angeles, and Chicago and investing into the Dumont Television Network. The two companies ended up in endless breach of contract lawsuits that became just another burden on the network. Coupled with the fact that for a number of years the FCC limited the number of new stations allowed on the air, so Dumont couldn't put new stations on the air to cover all the markets that NBC and CBS had. Most of the new stations they did get were UHF, and as already discussed, they were problematic.

Even with the new stations Dumont put on the air, the sole carrier of long-distance television programming, AT&T, did not have enough capacity to handle the distribution of all four networks. In the early 50s AT&T deferred to the predominance of NBC and CBS and allowed them to each distribute 100 hours of prime-time programming per month to their affiliates. ABC was allotted half that, and Dumont, once considered the third network, and now the 4th, less than 40 a month. On top of that until Dumont was able to persuade the FCC to prevent it, AT&T required the networks to lease both radio and television circuits. Dumont was the only network without a radio network and so it had to pay for a service it did not use.

Without a radio network Dumont did not have a stable of stars and the profits from radio to subsidize their television network as the others did. This was compounded by Paramount, who essentially controlled Dumont, not supplying programming to its own investment, but selling it to the other networks. A final straw was that Paramount owned two stations itself, along with the three Dumont had, the FCC deemed that because Dumont was essentially controlled by Paramount that the network really owned five stations, the limit for ownership at the time. The two Paramount stations did not carry Dumont programming. So, the other networks all owned five stations carrying their programming and Dumont only had three. We will see shortly why this was big.

At one-point ABC and Dumont considered a merger. The problem was Paramount's spun off theater side had merged with ABC, and the Dumont Network was effectively owned by Paramount's remaining studio side. Anti-trust considerations derailed that idea, and Dumont started a slow shutdown throughout 1955. For a couple more years, while not airing any regularly scheduled programs, what was left of the network was used to occasionally air sports and other special events.

As already alluded to, some have argued that eventually the network was resurrected. Two of Dumont's owned TV stations, one in New York, and the other in Washington, were spun off from the failed network into a standalone company, underwent a name change and then an ownership change. And finally, in 1986 were purchased together by News Corp to form the nucleus of the Fox Network.









Television's move from all network produced programming to a percentage done by the film studios came as the networks New York City TV studios, rebuilt largely from radio facilities were in need of a new generation of television equipment becoming available in the 50s. In 1954 CBS opened their Television City Broadcast Center in Los Angeles. It was the first facility built from the ground up with TV in mind. It opened with four large studios, with large stages, which could all accommodate studio audiences. One studio had 16,000 square feet with seating for 250. Over the years additional studios were added.

1st floor plan

Basement floor plan

Typical of the original four studios

What finally mitigated this were the game show scandals of the 50s. Game shows originally were not done because some claimed it was a form of gambling. It took a Supreme Court decision in 1954 that said they were not. But like many shows they were controlled by sponsors, many of whom wanted the maximum amount of excitement and drama. This lead a few shows to choreograph, or script who won, and who lost. The most notable probably being a show called Twenty-One, which ran on NBC. The first show was unscripted, and the contestants made a mockery of the show by not answering most questions correctly. The sponsor, Geritol, was not happy, and said they better not see a repeat performance. From there on the shows winners and losers were known in advance. One of the shows contestants, told to lose, eventually came forward to spill the beans.

While in the end no one went to jail as it was determined no laws were broken, Congress amended the Communications Act, and the FCC implemented rules that were intended to jeopardize broadcasting licenses if it happened again. While this would not directly affect a network, all the networks owned stations of their own, and those licenses could be put in jeopardy. The networks used this scandal to take back control and own most of what they aired.

CBS, after the quiz show scandals it was involved with, such as the $64,000 Question, and Ditto, promised Congress and the FCC that CBS would pay its public debt with a new commitment to public affairs. CBS from early on in radio could not compete with NBC in entertainment, and instead built a stable of legendary reporters, including Edward Murrow, Eric Sevaried, Walter Cronkite, Harry Reasoner, Harry Smith, and Dan Rather. Murrow literally built CBS News. Later the network produced several notable women reporters which included Lesley Stahl, and Diane Sawyer.

When TV started to eclipse radio, NBC got serious about competing in news. Their compliment of legends became larger than CBS's. From John Cameron, Dave Garroway, Frank Blair, David Brinkley, Chet Huntley, Chris Wallace, Barbara Walters, Hugh Downs, Frank McGee, Tom Brokaw, Jane Pauley, and Bryant Gumbel, just to name ones that came before the 90s.

Until the 60s network newscasts were only 15 minutes long. CBS still was not yet able to transfer the pre-eminence of its Murrow radio years to TV. At that time NBC had true TV news personalities but CBS did not until Walter Cronkite, who was hired by Murrow, took over as anchor of the CBS Evening News in 1962 from Douglas Edwards. Because, in part, of Cronkite's success as anchor, CBS was the first network to expand their evening newscast to 30 minutes. While at the start of the 60s NBC had more viewers, CBS poured more money into their news division than RCA allowed NBC to do, and with CBS's growing reputation for greater depth of coverage, by 1967 their news ratings were starting to beat NBC's.

During those years of competition between CBS and NBC, ABC was not much of a factor yet, the two had a tacit understanding that they would not compete against the other's news shows with entertainment programs during their evening news blocks as the entertainment program would take the bulk of the viewers. Then, as is much the case now, the networks would offer two or three showings of the evening newscast to allow affiliates to select the one that best fit the local station's "news block." Often the first two airings would be live as the second would often have fewer mistakes than the first airing. The third airing, usually a recording of the second newscast, could be done live also if breaking news required it.

Cronkite's popularity was a liberating force in CBS's news department. While the network often complained about the cost of their news division, it was often the first, and foremost thing highlighted in corporate earnings reports. It was known as the Crown Jewel of the "Tiffany Network." News did not make money, but it was a loss-leader for other shows and offerings. That was much like NFL football is today for the networks that air it. While the rights costs to air the games ensures that the networks will lose money, it is a vehicle for promoting the networks other offerings.

A crucial difficulty with TV news is unlike a newspaper the eye cannot jump to another story if the current story is not of interest, so every item had to interest everyone a little and not go on too long. So, it did not take long for the pure journalism aspect to start to become diluted. In 1959 the Eyewitness News format was started by KYW (yes, those folks again) a Westinghouse owned station in Cleveland. They launched the first 90-minute local newscast and called it Eyewitness. Other Westinghouse owned stations adopted the name. When KYW moved back to Philadelphia in 1965 its news director expanded the Eyewitness news format. The reporter would be the eyewitness to the anchor in the studio. The anchor would introduce the story, and the eyewitness reporter would fill in the details. Technology of the day limited the extent at which this could be done from location live. The eyewitness reporters account was usually recorded on film, or a combination of film with the reporter in the studio or newsroom.

Early on news relied on reading a lot of copy with some film stories intermixed. Back then video cameras were awkward and relatively immobile, especially color ones, which weighted hundreds of pounds, Stories were shot on 16 mm film. Film was expensive and often used sparingly. The live shot was relatively nonexistent unless television equipment happened to be setup where a news story occurred. Dan Rather described the liberal use of film as a lot of "fuzzy and wuzz," lots of police action and dead bodies. Cronkite noticed Rather's coverage of Hurricane Carla in Galveston. Cronkite said, "He was ass-deep in water moccasins." Film, being precious, meant it had to convey lots of action when it was used. And with the dawning of the "Eyewitness" news era, action was the name of the game.



First "portable" black and white camera; Used smaller newly introduced "vidicon" imaging tube at 56 political conventions
Much smaller by the 64 conventions
Color at the 68 conventions (two examples)

Back then News showed brightest every 4 years at political conventions where all the personalities and equipment could be brought to bear. At that time, it still was not the daily informing force it would become. TV News also shined with large, planned news events such as the Presidential debate televised in 1960, the first live televised presidential news conference, and the first western viewing of a live USSR parade for Yuri Gagarin on the BBC, both in 1961.

During the Nixon/Kennedy debate, held in the studios of the CBS owned station in Chicago, Nixon talked to the studio audience, as was the custom until then, while his opponent, Kennedy, went straight to the camera and mass audience. Nixon was recovering from the flu, yet most who listened on radio thought the debate was a draw or slightly favored Nixon, but the 70 million who watched via television thought it was Kennedy's night by a wide margin. Kennedy realized that TV was his ally, and started the televised press conference, and his successor, Johnson moved major addresses, including the State of the Union, to prime time because of TVs reach.

The networks made their money in unexpected ways. As mentioned, it was not from news. It was entertainment, and surprisingly from local stations. Early on as already mentioned, the FCC would only allow a single owner or company to own five stations max. This led to the KYW/NBC scuffle mentioned earlier. The five-station cap is a far cry from today, where a single owner can own as many as desired provided those stations reach no more than 39% of all U.S. TV households. There are a couple loopholes where that percentage can be higher, with the largest group station owner reaching 63% of the audience across the country. There are numerous companies that have bulked up. The largest now owns 141 stations. The major over the air networks now all have more than five stations, with NBC, CBS, and Fox all owning almost 30 stations each, with only ABC still having under 10.

Local stations have historically been money makers. The local station groups of the networks, even when the networks only had five local stations, made more money than their network usually did. While the network news lost money, the local news over time made money. Local news was often much cheaper to produce than if they purchased other programming.

Entertainment

The networks turned to entertainment early on to pay the bills. A staple for a long time was the Variety Show. It came in three distinct forms. The first was with a host as talent, who blended their skills into a broadly appealing show. Dean Martin was a good example. He made a virtue out of his apparent lack of preparation for his show, using it as one of his shticks as he headlined the show but at the same time hosted other celebrity guests. This form never lasted long as the host/talent would tend to burn out after a few years and the show would decline and be taken off, although Jackie Gleason, Red Skelton, and Carol Burnett were exceptions.

The second was a host as broker of talent offering a blend of comedy, song, dance, and spectacle. Ed Sullivan was a good example of that.

Finally, the host as friend, subordinating their talent, usually comedic, to the fact of their presence. Early on folks like Steve Allen, Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin, Mike Douglas, and Dinah Shore were notable examples. These hosts set out not to be glamorous or exciting, instead they intended to make the audience feel that the show was part of their neighborhood where interesting people come to talk about their activities and lives.

Dick Cavett, another comic who honed his skills as an interviewer, and became notable for his conversational style and in-depth discussions learned that the talk should not be too pretentious or serious. The audiences of these shows did not want to be bedazzled by the show, but just wanted a sense that they seemed included.

Most variety shows never did well in re-run syndication because many jokes and songs were topical to those shows, and as we see today what was funny and fair game then, is often shouted down today. Most variety shows worked off a stage with the camera occupying the best seat in the house and the audience was always aware it was watching a TV show as even in live to tape situations the needs of the home viewer experience was paramount to the audience in the studio. There was not much effort to hide the goings on "behind the curtain" to people in the studio. Today Saturday Night Live is a great example of that, as the show goes to break, and comes back out to a bumper shot in the middle of the break, showing sets being wheeled into place, talent finding their marks, and crew repositioning.



For many years the networks, NBC notably, could earn half of their profits from the morning news and the late-night shows, and surprisingly not from the prime time shows, that were often so expensive to produce. During the 70s the Tonight show was the most profitable show on television earning $60 million, $250 million today, a year. Carson carried significant sway over the network. From forcing the network to keep paying him ever more sums of money as he demanded to work less, in 1980 his show went from 90 minutes to an hour, to also having more instances of guest hosts. In his quest to minimize his workload early on he insisted that the show be treated as though it was live, even though it was not, it was live-to-tape as it was known. The show was recorded early evening. The tape did not stop rolling even during a break. If it was a three-minute break, there was three minutes of black recorded. There was no stopping down to reset. The show supposedly only stopped recording in the middle twice. Once because of a piece of the set falling over, and another when a guest tripped and fell. This practice insured that Carson spent 90 minutes doing his show and not three hours.

Another Carson edict was that every year his engineering representative would scour NBC facilities, New York, Los Angeles, and the locally owned NBC stations, looking for the best equipment the networked owned. As RCA had done with news, it was doing across the board with all operations, and curtailing the purchasing of new equipment. Even though RCA was by far the largest provider of professional television equipment at the time, and had much newer offerings, NBC often was still using equipment from a couple generations back, notably cameras. Into the 70s the network still had original color cameras from the mid-50s. Early on as we will see, NBC was flooded with color equipment to create color shows, which helped RCA sell color sets. That initial impetuous need receded into excessive belt tightening starting in the 60s.

Third generation RCA TK-44 color camera. For many years these were in short supply at the network

So, Carson could cull through the cameras, and other equipment the network owned and cherry-pick the best for his show. There were plenty of local engineers and technicians that looked after the equipment under their care, only to have that gear snatched from them.

The movie studios reacted to TVs growing dominance by doing something TV at the time could not, which was to gravitate towards more sex. The key for competing against TV was in specialization and looking for the subcultures that TV was too big to reach. This led television to move to more risqué niches which it did not only during primetime but during the daytime also. Even though audiences were much smaller, daytime TV also became more profitable for the networks than prime time. Whereas, even back then, it would cost $150K for a single prime time 1/2-hour program, soaps could be produced at half that and run five days a week instead of once a week. The Soaps were the first television programs to touch on subjects like adultery, impotence, alcoholism, drug addiction, venereal disease, women's liberation, anti-war sentiments, and other once taboo topics.

It was an NBC executive that advanced TVs so called "Drug pusher argument." The networks did not air what they would like to watch, but what the viewers wanted to watch.

ABC  

We have just talked quite a bit about NBC. NBC and RCA had a large impact on our story. As we mentioned back in the radio section, ABC emerged originally from NBC's Blue Network. As is shown in the Grass Valley book, ABC played a large part in the Grass Valley Group's evolution. To a lesser extent RCA's gravitational effect on the television industry also forced the direction that the television equipment vendors took.

The movie studios were forced to divest of their theater holdings by Supreme court in 1948. ABC merged with United Paramount Theaters, which consisted of the theaters that Paramount Studios had spun off in 1953. The new head of ABC was a movie guy, and by instinct and desperation he turned to movie studios for help. While Walt Disney was not interested in ABC's overtures at first, he agreed after ABC invested in the park he was building in Anaheim, Disneyland. Disney had approached NBC, and CBS about producing a show that would help him finance the building of the park, but neither were interested. ABC was his third choice.

Disney and ABC

ABC and Disney's first venture together was tentative and short-lived. ABC agreed to let Disney promote movies and the coming park in a show they produced for the network, which was originally called Walt Disney's Disneyland, and later Walt Disney Presents. The show often presented anthology episodes, opened, and closed by Walt Disney. Many of those shows were based on Disneyland's main sections, Adventureland, Tomorrowland, Fantasyland, and Frontierland. Shows based on Dave Crockett or 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea were examples. Episodes of the show often covered the "making of" a forth coming Disney movie. Disney's show quickly became one of the most popular shows at the time.

Disney was the first major studio to give television a try. This convinced the movie studios that TV could be a profitable partner. Warner Bros was the next to produce for ABC. Soon the other movie studios followed as it allowed them to find work for idle stages, crew, equipment.

Several technological firsts were introduced on the Disney show. The show was the first to broadcast in stereo, even before FM stereo commenced in earnest in the early 60s. In 1959 to promote Disney's Sleeping Beauty, which had six-channel sound the network cobbled together AM and FM stations to air a three-channel mix-down of the movie, a clip of which aired on the show. FM stations were enlisted to carry the left channel, AM stations the right, while ABC TV affiliates aired the center channel. Disney also promoted seeing the film in 70mm during the show, a format that was coming into wider use during the 50s.

Another technological first for the show involved ABC losing its coveted show. As we just mentioned RCA was using NBC to sell color television sets. In 1961, to great fanfare, NBC started producing, and airing all its prime-time programming in color. As we will see in a bit, CBS and ABC were not. To take advantage of the NBC colorcasting capability Disney took the show to NBC in 1961 and apply called it Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color.

ABC was the third-place network during the early 60s, with occasional hit shows that resonated especially in the larger markets, where it captured many younger urban viewers. To help keep costs low it started its own in-house film studio, ABC Films. The network pioneered the made-for-tv movie and introduced the mini-series with "Roots."















Sports

Color

The first officially announced network demonstration of a program using the NTSC "compatible color" system was an episode of NBC's Kukla, Fran and Ollie on August 30, 1953, although it was viewable in color only at the network's headquarters. The first network broadcast to go out over the air in NTSC color was a performance of the Opera Carmen on October 31, 1953. On January 1st, 1954, the first large network coast-to-coast broadcast of NTSC Color to 22 cities was telecast - the Tournament of Roses Parade from Pasadena.

On February 1, 1954 Four GE Chromacoder cameras were ordered by CBS and to be delivered before March 1, 1954. Strangely at the same time it was announced by Walter Watts, an RCA VP, that the first two of 12 color cameras CBS had ordered from RCA would be delivered in February with the balance of the million dollar order completed by June. It is believed that CBS had also managed to order a couple cameras earlier through third parties. So early on it appeared CBS was now on board with NTSC color.

One positive fallout from the CBS color effort was the development of "crispening" circuits by CBS which improved apparent picture resolution as the CBS system had a definite disadvantage in horizontal and vertical resolution. The crispening was done by enhancing all transitions between low lights and high lights in the picture, which gave the impression of more resolution. This development is still used in cameras to this day.

The hope that RCA might simply walk away from color was always short-sighted. By 1950 RCA had already sunk about $20 million into color research and field testing. RCA was the leading company in the television field, with a larger technical staff, more development funds, and more political access, which eventually succeeded in getting the NTSC compatible color television system to fruition.

A big breakthrough in color television receivers also happened in 1953, it was the invention by RCA of shadow mask color CRT. Its accuracy in electron beam landing and the mask layout over the front CRT phosphor, created a much sharper display.

RCA TK-41: First production color TV camera

The gory technical details of RCA Color Television


These were large and could be hard to manage in a studio. The camera head, the only part of the camera seen here, weighed over 400 pounds!


It usually took four people to lift the camera head! The author of this site got his first real work in television because he was young with a strong back!


One of the reasons that the camera head was so large was the fact that a color video camera is really three black and white cameras in one package. This is still generally true today, except for many low end cameras. Here is the optical path that splits the incoming light up into the three primary colors used.

As mentioned earlier the tubes used in this camera were all Image Orthicons, which tended to let stationary images burn into their targets if the image was static and not moving. In other words the image could be seen after the camera panned away to another view. To prevent that a "orbiting optical wedge" in front of the prism, a concaved piece of glass, would be rotated and the result would be that the image would keep moving in a very small concentric circle. When the camera was actually being used during a show that "feature" would be turned off.













Because the incoming light through the lenses of a color camera was split, early color cameras needed even more light than black and white ones.












Below, straight out of a RCA brochure, the page touts the ease of access to the various parts and sub-systems in the head.







The TK-41 had just under 200 vacuum tubes in it. All slowly aging by slowly consuming themselves because of the thermionic emission occurring within them. As they aged their operating parameters continually changed. The result was the necessity of near constant adjustments. Also, since microprocessors, and other complex ICs for automating these adjustments were far off in the future, almost every parameter to be adjusted had its own control knob.

Here is the camera control unit (CCU) where the video operator would setup the camera and maintain the cameras settings while it was in use. The camera head had adjustments for color registration, and geometry. A fancy way of saying to adjust the scanning of the three color tubes, so that they all lined up in the final video signal out: width, height, and centering wise. The controls on the CCU generally where to make sure the three color signals combined correctly so that red was red, and not slightly orange or brown, that blue was blue, and not magenta or slightly cyan, etc.

The first color cameras

TK-41s on location 

The first RCA color cameras that made it into use were known as the coffin cameras, because they were big enough to bury a person inside one. They were used for testing in Washington, D.C. for the FCC, and later in NBC's studio 3H in Rockefeller Center. There were only two ever built. They were replaced in 1952 by the first real production cameras, the TK-40. The B&W camera that RCA sold many of was known as the TK-30. The 40 number indicated a major advancement from the previous 30 series. All future RCA color cameras, save one, had numbers in the 40s. The exception was a model called the 76, that was introduced in 1976, and was RCA's first portable news camera.

Lots of studio lights

The TK prefix was probably in honor of Zworykin. The best explanation seems to be from Lou Bazin via Bobby Ellerbee. Bazin was a lead engineer on a couple of RCA cameras, and Ellerbee has a great site on the technical and production history of television in the U.S. Supposedly TK stands for Tele Kine. Tele originally meant "across a distance." Now the word itself is associated with television. Kinescope, or simply "kine," which was coined by Zworykin, was what RCA called their CRTs. The industry pronounced "kine" with a long e.

The original two prototype "coffin" cameras were painted grey (photo above). These cameras consumed a lot of power and thus generated a lot of heat. These cameras also required a lot of studio lighting to produce decent video. So, when the TK-40 was released they were painted silver to reflect some of the studio light so that it was not adding to the internally generated heat from the camera.

These color cameras, as explained before, used an image splitter, producing red, green, and blue component colors which directed the incoming light into three image orthicon tubes. As mentioned these early color cameras required tremendous amounts of light to operate correctly, making television studios of the day hot and uncomfortable. Splitting the incoming light through the lens into three streams, instead of just one for B&W cameras, made the situation worse. Individual studio lights could be as large as 5000 watts, with 1000 and 2000 watt lights common. Large studios could have 100 or more lights. Early on cameras required upwards of 1000-foot candles of light for optimal video. With newer pickup tube technology, and then the use of CCDs over the years the required light for some productions can now be below 20.

The RCA TK40 began broadcasting color images for the first time in late 1952, it was followed by the TK40A, which in 1954 became the first color camera to go into mass production. In 1955 RCA discontinued the TK40 in favor of the TK41. The TK41 was followed by the A, B and C models, and RCA manufactured them until 1964. RCA made 24 more on a special order in 1966; 12 of them were for ABC's remote trucks, and 12 more were sold to stations.

In 1954 the first two TK-41s were delivered to a local station WKY in Oklahoma City. In 1956 the NBC owned station in Chicago became the first "all-color" operation. Besides studio cameras, that also meant that "film chains" had to be color also. A film chain usually consisted of two film, and one slide projector pointed into a series of mirrors that would control which projector shined into the film chains camera. Before video tape, all television programming had to funnel through a camera.

Early color cameras were a precious commodity and could not be dedicated to a single show no matter how important that show was. Even the Today Show had to share its cameras. When the show talked of moving to larger space, they were told they had to stay a part of Rockefeller Center as part of a central facility.

Film Chains 

Up until this time if an image was not captured by a television camera of some sort, it did not make it to "air." While we are getting close, video tape recording at this time was still in the lab. But the photo on the left does show early Video Tape Recorders in the background.

The "RCA Gray" contraption in the foreground is a "film chain." A film chain was a system made up of one or two film projectors, a slide projector, and a repackaged television camera. In between the slide and film projectors, and the camera was a "diplexer," which was a series of mirrors which determined whether it was the slide projector or one of the film projectors that shown into the lens of the camera.

The photo on the right shows the mirrors. Powerful solenoids would drive these mirrors up or down depending on which projector was needed into the camera. The solenoids, moved into and out of position so fast that there was a very noticeable "clunk!" if you were within a hundred feet of it. The speed was so fast so that operations could switch between the projectors while the film chain camera was on the air with very little picture disruption.

Remember at this time cameras, studio, or film were precious commodities and so a film chain camera was naturally shared between projectors.

A 1970s complete Film Chain

These systems were found in television stations into the 90s. Often powered down, but still available for the occasional film that was need for air.

The right photo shows the camera portion of the system, where the R,G, and B imaging tubes are easily identifiable.

Drum style slide 
projector 

Final piece of the "film chain" 

Successive RCA Film Equipment









In 1954 and 1955, NBC and CBS each had only one color studio each on the East and West Coasts. ABC would not have a live color stage until ten years later in 1965. The unavailability of color studios led to early color programming practice of the occasional color special or colorizing a single episode of a regular series. In several instances, local affiliates had better color facilities than the networks. The first dedicated color studio that NBC had was Studio 3K, which was created by taking a wall down between 3H, NBC's first television studio and 3F, which was a radio studio. Although the first commercial color broadcast was "The Colgate Comedy Hour" on November 22, 1953, the "Hoody Doody Show" done in 3K on September 12, 1955, became the first daily color television show.

NBC's Burbank facility did not do its first color telecast until early 1955.

CBS Studio 72

CBS was forced to give in and buy a few RCA color cameras. The first ones they bought through contacts at Philco, as they did not want RCA to know, while their battle over color was still brewing. They were TK-40s, which they acquired mainly to study it and determine what to do about color. These four went to their Television City facility in Hollywood, where they were used occasionally. In 1954 they bought four directly from RCA and equipped a studio in New York City, Studio 72. The first big show was the telecast of "Cinderella," which stared Julie Andrews. The Studio also did Ed Sullivan's "Toast of the Town." The network did about 50 shows out of the studio in 1956. By 1960 the studio was barely used, and CBS east and west coast color productions dwindled to a few shows a year.

Red Skelton, who bought the old Charlie Chaplin Studios had his own remote production color television equipment that he used to produce his show on CBS, tried to get CBS to use his facilities to increase their color offerings. They were not interested, and eventually he sold the studio to CBS, and the mobile units to KTLA and continued his show from CBS's Television City. CBS was not an early fan of color, especially due to the fact that they had to buy equipment from RCA. They went so far as to take all RCA nameplates off their color cameras, and even the stylized "Color Television" plate off the side of the cameras. CBS executives claimed that they would commit to color when the sponsors wanted it.

Red Skelton's mobile production trucks

His company had three RCA TK-41s

Remote production vehicles around 1960

Eventually as the amount of equipment carried out to do remote production increased, eventually all large production units became one, or more trailers. Back when these trucks roamed the countryside, cameras, VTRs, etc. were so large that few were on board these units. A six camera truck with a couple VTRs was considered large. Today a production unit with a couple dozen cameras, and many dozen recording channels are found often.
Tour of mid-60s CBS Mobile Unit
Very quaint by today's standards.

At its beginning, the "Tonight Show" was done live, but in January 1959 they began taping the show, and in September of 1960, the show went all color. In 1960 and 61 RCA made a big marketing effort to sell color receivers. They forced NBC to up their production of color shows. This was partially due to the fact that in the late 50s the sales of B&W receivers had begun to saturate, and sales slowed. Now other manufactures started to realize that color sets might revive the industry. In 1959 RCA had its first year of profitable color-set sales. Soon companies like Zenith, who originally derided color CRTs as a "Rube Goldberg contraction" began to offer color sets. By 1963 RCA revenue from color set sales equaled the revenue from B&W sets.

RCA stopped making the TK41 in 1964, but NBC needed new cameras and they were not happy with RCA's replacement camera, so a final run of a dozen or so were built.

ABC's first color facility was The Hollywood Palace. In the summer of 1965, they bought an RCA color production truck that RCA had used at the 1961 World's Fair. The four camera TK41 truck was parked next door to the venue for a year, and the first live color show on ABC was The Lawrence Welk Show in the fall of 1965. During a production break during the summer of 1966, the theater was redone with a new control room and equipped with new, non-RCA cameras. The truck went to ABC Sports. ABC eventually had at least a dozen TK-41s doing sports.

The TK41s were in use by affiliates and networks well into the 1970s. Even with third generation camera offerings from RCA introduced in 1968, NBC kept its New York, Los Angeles, and O&O-station TK41s in service for years. Johnny Carson's Tonight Show used TK41s until about 1970. ABC had backup sports trucks with TK41s as late as 1978.

RCA's Second Generation

What David Sarnoff eventually did to "Nipper"
Back from exile  Article

RCA continued to offer B&W cameras until the mid-60s. In 1960 they came out with what the company called the new look. Gone were racks, cabinets, consoles, and chassis that were painted a dull to dark grey, instead it was heavy on blue and silver. The shade of blue used came to be known as "RCA blue" in the industry. A "new look" TK-12 black and white camera was introduced in 1960. An upgraded version that fixed mechanical and heat problems became the TK60 in 1963. this was RCA's first solid state camera (with the exception of one very small vacuum tube that RCA had invented in 1959). Like the earlier mentioned TK-76, and being a camera of the 60s, it was given that name. The camera continued to have pickup tubes that were essentially vacuum tubes. In fact, the TK-60 had a large one which had a 4 1/2 inch wide target, the same as the three in the TK-41. The TK-60 had a reputation for making very good video, albeit black and white.

With the new look marketing push RCA began to feel it was time to replace the TK41s with a new model; the TK42. They showed an experimental model at the NAB show in 1962. RCA wanted a black-and-white picture as beautiful as the TK60's and a color picture as good as what the TK41C produced. To get the same quality black and white TK60 picture, they used the same 4½ inch image orthicon tube for the monochrome or black and white image, but also used three smaller 1 inch vidicon tubes for each of the three colors. This led to a fairly complex light splitting system that required a lot of space and ended up having the pickup tube targets facing backwards in the camera. The three vidicon pickup tubes where less sensitive than the image orthicon tubes used up until then. Also, being smaller in size meant they did not have the resolution that the larger tube had. That was probably the first instance of purposefully sending less color information than luminance information. That concept continues to this day as we will see later in the book.

TK-42 

The photo on the right shows the two different image tube types used in the camera. There was one of the larger tubes, for the black and white signal, and three of the smaller tubes for each of the red, green, and blue color channels.

This camera had its base zoom lenses mounted inside the camera head portion. Let us talk a moment about what constituted a camera back then. The camera that one saw out in the studio or in the stands at a sporting event was called the camera head. The camera head had the necessary optics and electronics to send unprocessed video to what was called the Camera Control Unit, or CCU. The CCU processed the video and combined it into a single color signal. These cameras consumed much power, often almost 2000 watts. So, there was a separate power supply also.

Magazine cover showing the four tubes used in the TK-42
Proof that the TK-42 was not much lighter than the TK-41
TK-42s at 1967 golf match

Sample Camera System up through the 80s

In essence RCA wanted to put a TK41 and a TK60 in the same camera head. They wanted the TK60s 4 1/2 image orthicon, so the image broadcast to the millions of still mostly black and white receivers was sharp, but also wanted the kind of great color images that came from the TK41. With the plan to put the lens inside the TK42, that did not leave enough room for the three image orthicons and optics from the 41, so they opted for the smaller vidicon tubes for the red, green, and blue signals. This was RCA's first all solid state color project, no vacuum tubes were used, again with the exception being the pickup tubes. RCA soon had an upgraded TK-42, naturally named the TK-43. The main difference between the TK42 and the TK43 was the external lens on the 43. The internal TK42 zoom lens was affected by the camera's heat and at times would "chatter" while zooming as the lens elements tended to expand due to the heat in the camera head, making a smooth zoom a matter of luck.

The lens problem, the camera heads 280-pound weight, almost as heavy as the TK-41 it was to replace, plus the fact that RCA had color camera competition on the horizon kept this camera from being used by any of the networks, even NBC. Well not exactly. RCA shipped a few TK-43s to NBC to be used on an election night out of Rockefeller Center that showed up just a couple days before. NBC was instructed by RCA to use them in a conspicuous location where they could be seen in wide shots, complete with NBC logos. NBC technicians could not get setup of the cameras where they wanted it in time, so they put an NBC logo on them and camera operators behind them to look like working cameras on the set. RCA took all back but one back, and NBC relegated the remaining camera into a small "always ready" flash studio for breaking bulletins and late-night news summaries for locally owned WNBC. It is claimed that video from the TK-42/43 cameras never made air on NBC or any of the other networks.

RCAs real color camera competition showed up at the 1964 NAB convention, the Norelco PC-60. Potential customers of RCA started asking too many hard questions about why the four-tube TK42 pictures were not as good as the PC-60 three tube cameras. RCA pulled the plug on the TK42 at the show literally. They turned it off and left it off. While RCA had no luck selling them to the networks, not even their own, local stations bought about 60 of them. Overall RCA managed to sell about 500 of the TK-42/43s. Mainly because more of the local stations were starting to convert to color and to stay competitive once one station went color in a market, the others were forced to follow.

At this time NBC's nearly full lineup of prime time shows in color helped RCA. By 1964 70% of NBC programs were in color, a year later that percentage was a 95%. NBC was for all intents a full color network, when the other two major networks at the time had very little color TV offerings. Many NBC affiliates saw locally produced color shows advantageous. Many CBS, and ABC affiliate competitors were forced to make the jump. How this helped TK-42/43 sales is that the Norelco cameras were not quite ready to ship, and the stations took the only viable option at the time. Station managements trusted RCA's massive support organization, its unequaled sales force, known to rival IBM in temerity, its research facility in Princeton, a huge variety of products, and extensive color TV engineering expertise. But the TK-42/43 was not RCA's best effort at serving their customers, and with competition growing many turned to others.

The Norelco Revolution

We mentioned that a couple cameras were using new, better pickup tubes by the middle 60s. The tubes had a number of different names, mainly for marketing and refinements made by the vendors of those tubes to get around patent infringement. The most common name was the Plumbicon. In the early 1960s, an experimental color broadcast camera using three of these new Plumbicon tubes, was being developed by the Philips Company in Holland. The Plumbicon's target was lead based and was referred to as a lead oxide tube. The periodic symbol for lead is Pb, hence the name. Field testing on the new camera went on at the BBC in London. By 1963 the Philips Experimental color camera, was in comparison tests with the Marconi camera.

Three Tube Norelco PC-60

Here is the camera head opened up. The three much smaller, but more sensitive, imaging tubes can be seen on the left. The camera head is now well under one hundred pounds. Still, to keep the head as small and light as possible only the electronics to support the imaging tubes, along with intercom and return video for the viewfinder is in the head.

A drawback to the PC-60 is that it required two fairly thick camera cables to connect it to the rest of the camera chain. Notice the two large connectors in the lower right. The PC-70 was down to a single connector.

The first model out was the PC-60 in 1964. PC stood for Plumbicon Color. 60 stood for the year the Plumbicon was invented. In the U.S., the camera was sold under the Norelco brand. Yes, the same folks who sell electric razors. An early pioneer in television, Philco, in 1940 claimed that Philips name was too similar to theirs, and got the FTC to block any products from having the Philips name on it in the U.S. So they set up a subsidiary called North American Electronics, or Norelco for short. So everywhere else except the U.S., when the Norelco PC-60 launched, it was known as the LDK-1. LDK is the Dutch abbreviation of the lead oxide tube. Finally, in 1981 Philips acquired GTE, who had acquired Philco from Ford Motor. Ford had bought Philco in 1961. Philips could now brand itself Philips everywhere.

Philips will continue to play a major role in our story about Grass Valley . Philips has a storied history. They developed the first-ever dry shaver in the 1950s, the audio cassette tape in the 60s, the first video cassette recorder intended for the home in 1972, and even were instrumental, along with Sony, in bringing the compact disc to market. As we will see later in the book, Sony had a major impact on the Group also.

The Plumbicon tube developed by Philips was manufactured by Philips subsidiary Amperex Electronics in Slaterville, Rhode Island. The plumbicon tube earned Philips an Emmy in 1967 for "Outstanding Achievement in Engineering Development."

The smaller plumbicon tubes allowed for a smaller prism and optics overall. The camera tubes and solid state electronics made the pictures less noisy. Plus, the camera head ran much cooler.

While CBS acquired Marconi color cameras, they went all out when the PC-60, soon followed by the PC-70. On October 31, 1965, the Ed Sullivan started normal weekly colorcasts using Norelco PC60s.

The PC-60 and PC-70 series were very popular cameras, and all the major networks and countless local stations used them. However, perhaps the most well-known customer was CBS, which eagerly now bought Norelco's in its effort to become a color network. Even before the PC 60s were debuted at the 1964 NAB show, CBS had already placed an initial order for 36 units, and a secondary order for 36 more on an as needed basis.

Just as we said there was an NBC "Blue," well there was a CBS "Gray." It was based on a test card developed by Kodak that was used in photography. The card had a large gray patch, along with white and black patches. The gray patch was halfway between the values of the white and black patches. This was used as a reference when setting up a film camera. Television used charts that had nine vertical strips that went from white to black with seven shades of gray in between. A person setting up the camera would know normally to set the levels so that the middle strip was half-way between black and white levels. CBS painted their cameras with a gray that matched the middle strip.

Some had speculated that was done so that the production and technical crew could quickly shoot a camera with another and see if the camera showed up as the proper shade of gray. Actually, CBS liked to often run the shades of gray lower than normal to give some shows, like soaps, a darker look.

Dr. Frank Stanton, who was the long time VP of Engineering at CBS had ordered for all cameras as far back as the TK30s to be painted CBS Gray, even the chromed Norelco logo on the new cameras was painted gray. But at least the Norelco name plate was left on the cameras. RCA logos on equipment that CBS owned were always taken off.

Even NBC ended up buying Norelco cameras for their field trucks. NBC never liked their parents TK-42/43. RCA was working on competition for Norelco, the TK44, which would be quite similar to the PC-70, but development was behind schedule. So, with an aging fleet of TK41s in the field, NBC "jumped the shark" and ordered 35 Norelco's but requested a few modifications.

One of the first events NBC deployed the Norelco's on was the world series. While the main cameras were Norelco, there were still a few TK-41s in use. It is claimed that Philips executives in attendance were especially impressed with the shots from a couple of the cameras, which turned out to be TK-41s. While the TK-41s were old technology, at least compared to the Norelco's, with Orthicon pickup tubes, compared to the much improved Plumbicon tubes, the RCA tubes where larger in size and thus while they had the image burning issue, and were less sensitive, in the outdoors with lots of light their pictures in some instances looked better than the Norelco's.

RCA had one other advantage, the optics that split up the light into three colors tend to favor the reds more than the competitors' cameras. This made the video look warmer, and more pleasing on the eyes. Later competitors were soon designing, or at least offering as an option, cameras that mimicked the RCA color look. The optics that splits the incoming light into the separate colors, to this day, does not cleanly separate the colors. The red part of the spectrum overlaps the green, which overlaps the blue parts of the spectrum. For a long time, there were a few color tints that television cameras could never get quite right. The magenta uniforms of the Minnesota Vikings are a well-known example.

A process called painting developed among people who set up color cameras, where they would tweak each color's white, black, and gray levels, along with a myriad of other adjustments to get a banana brilliantly yellow, or an apple deeply red. More often it was used to make the talent and producers happy with the way they looked on air. The drawback was if the apple was made exceptionally red, or a person to look goldenly tanned, you would compromise by not quite getting some other color tints correct. Today the processing ability of cameras, video wise, but also memory, and computer processing wise allows an experienced camera setup operator to hit all the required spots on the color wheel. But it would not be until the mid-70s that a microprocessor found itself inside a television camera.

All in the Family

It is claimed that this is the first sitcom which was shot using the now standard three television camera approach, instead of using film cameras. Yes there are four cameras on the set - one most likely for ancillary duty, like shooting the whole set or to capture art cards as this was before there was computer animation. It was shot at CBS's Television City.

While the director would switch between cameras while they were recorded, each camera would also be iso recorded. Not a simple task in the early 70s, as we will see shortly as video tape recorders were also a precious commodity.

Originally shot before a live audience, it eventually was shot without a live audience. The laugh track would be obtained by letting an audience in to see another show watch a preview of the show in a studio where their reactions would be recorded and added to the audio track.

Norelco could not keep up with demand, so they also started building them in Mt. Vernon NY. There were a few specially modified PC-70s, called PC-71s that were built and were made with special mu-metal shielding for the insane electromagnetic problems caused by a huge DC subway transformer behind the back wall of the stage at The Ed Sullivan Theater.

Originally ABC was using RCA TK-41s for remote production. By 1968 when they covered the U.S. Open half of the two dozen cameras employed were now PC-70s.

Audio Magnetic Tape Recording

Early German Audio Recorder 

In 1928 Fritz Pfleumer developed, and in 1929 patented a magnetic recording tape using oxide bonded to a strip of paper or film. From then until the end of WWII the Germans led the way in audio tape recording development. The first reel-to-reel audio tape recorder was developed by the engineers of the German electronics company AEG in the 1930s. It was the world's first practical tape recorder, the K1, first demonstrated in Germany in 1935 at the Berlin Radio Show. It used a foil of cellulose acetate coated with a lacquer of iron oxide bound with additional cellulose acetate. About the same time the Blattnerphone steel band recorder was developed by the BBC. It never achieved the quality of the German tape recorder. In the late 30s Japan was also working on developing a wire recorder. The problem with wire recorders is that the machine needed to pass wire over the heads at high speed for decent quality, thus needing either enormous spools or very thin wire.

BBC's Blattnerphone steel band recorder

Towards the end of the war the Allies became aware of the German superiority in this technology, and a young technician from the Army Signal Corps, John T. "Jack" Mullin, was assigned to capture and analyze enemy radio equipment. He got his hands on a Magnetophone, and the U.S. went to work reverse engineering it.

At the same time Eisenhower ordered Major John Herbert Orr to use captured German scientists to set up an American tape manufacturing facility. When Orr was mustered out of the Army he eventually started a company that manufactured magnetic tape, in Opelika, Alabama. His company, ORRadio Industries, manufactured magnetic tape for the recording industry from 1950 to 1959, when he sold it to Ampex. Ampex, as we will see in a bit, began producing magnetic tape and magnetic recorders. The German patent rights on the recorders had been seized by the U.S. Alien Property Custodian and thus the technology did not need to be licensed.

John T. "Jack" Mullin (left), 
then John Herbert Orr, 
and Bing Crosby (right) 

The Crooner Bing Crosby, as we will see took a big interest in recording

Alexander Poniatoff (Right) with his chief engineer, Harold Linsay

Ampex's first audio recorder - 1948

As we will see in the book also at this time Dr. Hare, the Grass Valley Group's founder, had gotten his hands on a captured Magnetophone and so technically competed with Ampex for a while. While Ampex itself had no direct impact on "The Group" early on, it did influence the tech activity of the area, as we will also see in the book.

When Mullin got back to the states in 1946 he demonstrated the advanced Magnetophone to a meeting of the IRE in San Francisco, predecessor to the IEEE. There, according to Mullin's own account, it created quite a sensation. Word got back to Bing Crosby, who was a pioneer in the area of entertainer-as-entrepreneur, and a big star on radio at the time, he was receptive to the idea of pre-recording his radio programs. In the 40s with radio at its height, radio performers had to create their shows live, sometimes even doing the show a second time for the west coast, so Crosby had to do two live radio shows on the same day, three hours apart.

Crosby disliked the regimentation of live broadcasts and preferred the relaxed atmosphere of the recording studio. Also if he could do his show when he wanted, it would allow him more flexibility to work on his golf game. He was legendary for sneaking out of movie, and radio studios to get in a round. To accomplish that he ended up with the nickname "one take Crosby." Crosby liked golf so much that when he was entertaining at the infamous Cal-Neva Lodge on the north shore of Lake Tahoe, a little over an hour's drive from Grass Valley, in 1934 and 1935, he would invite his friends up to Tahoe to play golf at the nearby nine hole Brockway Golf course. They would play there every afternoon and then entertain at the Cal-Neva.

He hosted a little tournament during his summer stints at Tahoe that featured a clambake and a modest purse for the winner. The tournament soon became so popular they had to move it to the famed Pebble Beach, just south of Monterey, which morphed into the AT&T Open Pro-Am on the PGA Tour.

But it was not just Crosby that was drawn to the place. In 1960 Frank Sinatra bought the lodge and it played host to his "Rat Pack" buddies, celebrities, politicians, and other nefarious types. It is rumored that John Kennedy had numerous trysts there. Marylin Monroe's last weekend alive was spent there. Sinatra and his Rat Pack co-hearts, Sammy Davis Jr. and Dean Martin, played Brockway often during the 1950s while at the Cal-Neva. As did Joseph Kennedy, the father of President John F. Kennedy, and President Dwight Eisenhower once played the course also.
Map showing Brockway Golf course and the Nevada State line at Crystal Bay (where the Calneva was located)

Cal-Neva Lodge early 60s 

In 1937 Crosby moved the party down to Monterey, where he ended up buying a house on the 13th hole of Pebble Beach. It was now known as "Crosby's Clambake," the first Pebble Beach purse was $3,000 which came straight out of the singers' pocket. The idea was to pair pro golfers with some of the better amateurs on the West Coast as the golf tour made its rounds through the region.

For Crosby's 1944-45 radio season he asked NBC to let him pre-record on phonographic disks, which the network refused. The sponsors were adamantly opposed to the idea. Both the networks and sponsors argued that the public would not stand for 'canned' radio. Continuing the argument, they claimed that there was something magical for listeners because what they were hearing was being performed and heard everywhere, at that precise instant. Some of the best moments in comedy came when a line was blown, and the star had to rely on wit to rescue a bad situation. Fred Allen, Jack Benny, Phil Harris, and also Crosby were masters at this, and the networks were not about to give it up easily.

Crosby was not only fighting the network but the musicians' union and ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers), which wanted to ensure continued work for their members. So, Crosby withdrew from live radio for a year and returned for the 1946-47 season with the recently formed ABC Network, but only reluctantly. The new network gave him more latitude in how he produced his show.

In June 1947, Mullin, was pitching the technology to the major Hollywood movie studios, and he got the chance to demonstrate his modified tape recorders to Crosby. Crosby immediately saw the enormous advantage in prerecording his radio shows on audio tape. The scheduling could now be done at the star's convenience, such as doing four weekly shows in the same week, if he chose, and then taking a month off.

Crosby commissioned Mullin to prepare a test recording of his radio show. Ampex was finishing its prototype of the Model 200 tape recorder, and Mullin used the first two models as soon as they were built. After a successful test broadcast, ABC agreed to allow Crosby to pre-record his shows on tape. Crosby immediately appointed Mullin as his chief engineer and placed an order for $50,000 worth of the new recorders so that Ampex, then a small six-man concern, could develop a commercial production model from the prototypes. Later that year Crosby's taped radio show premiered on ABC, which being a hungrier network at the time was willing to take a chance on the new technology to land Crosby on their network.

Audio Recorder Crosby used to record his show

Being able to record the show in advance changed how the production was done. By using tape, it could go past its allotted length, say thirty-five or forty-minutes, then edit it down to the twenty-six or twenty-seven minutes that the program ran. In that way, they could edit out jokes, gags, or situations that did not play well and finish with only the "prime meat" of the show; the solid stuff that went well. Cosby, who was at his core a crooner, liked the fact that they could also take out the songs that did not work well. It also gave Crosby the opportunity to first try a recording of the songs in the afternoon without an audience, then another one in front of a studio audience. They would then use or dub the one that came off best into the final transcription. It gave Crosby a chance to ad lib as much as we wanted, knowing that excess "ad libbing" could be sliced from the final product. Crosby had said that "If I made a mistake in singing a song or in the script, I could have some fun with it, then retain any of the fun that sounded amusing."

In the evening, Crosby did the whole show before an audience. If he muffed a song then, and the audience loved it, that version would be kept. If not, they would take out the show version and put in one of the rehearsal takes. Sometimes, if Crosby was having fun with a song and not really working at it, they would edit a composite song out of multiple rehearsals and the final show takes. This process carried over to television.

Crosby claimed his show invented the laugh track. They recorded a show where they had bits that were not very funny, so they took the laughs out of another show that got enormous laughs. In that show there was a guest who told off color jokes that could not air, but Crosby told the crew to save the laughing. They salvaged the laughs and inserted them into the show. Thus, the laugh-track was born.

Video Recording

The BBC's answer to Ampex's two-inch quadruplex videotape recorder was VERA: Vision Electronic Recording Apparatus.  

Just like the RCA logo, anywhere you see this Ampex logo there is a link to the oldradio.com website

About the time Crosby started pushing Ampex to develop a video recorder, the BBC started the VERA project which stood for Vision Electronic Recording Apparatus. A recorder was demonstrated within the BBC in 1956 and then took another two years to develop before being shown to the world. By then it was too late, as we will see.

The project grew out of a recognition by senior BBC engineers that recording, currently on film with the kinescope, needed a better way. Kinescope film recordings were commonplace by American television networks at the end of the 1940s, but was rarely used by the BBC, and then only for special occasions when a permanent record was required.

VERA stored Britain's 405-line monochrome television as a linear recording. like audio tape, on half-inch magnetic tape traveling at 200 inches per second. This required 20 inch diameter spools to achieve 15 minutes' recording time. The range of frequencies required for video were an order of magnitude wider then audio required. So the speed of the tape passing by the record head had to be very high to capture the much higher frequencies that video needed. Turned out that Ampex came up with a better way.

In early 1951, Bing Crosby asked his now Chief Engineer, Jack Mullin, if television could be recorded on tape as was the case for audio. Mullin said that he thought that it could be done. Up until then as has been mentioned before, TV was either live with studio cameras, or recorded on film and played back through a special film projector into the lens of a camera, as we also saw earlier. At that time, the only way to record the video coming from a camera or other live source was with a Kinescope. A kinescope recording is simply another film recording, made by photographing the live images on a television video monitor. The monitor and film camera combination were usually packaged in a fair size machine (see above).

The quality the process produced was marginal. Especially the kinescope film recordings that were recorded for delay for the west coast. A show done live for the east coast was sent across the country where it was displayed on the video monitor in the Kinescope machine out in Los Angeles. The film was developed in time for the west coast feed, which was played back on a film projector into another camera and sent to the local west coast affiliates where it was finally transmitted over the air. The trip included two television cameras, a film camera, and three transmission hops from New York to Los Angeles, then Los Angeles to the local affiliates, and finally over the air to the home. Each step took a toll on the quality of the video, including the fact that the original cameras capturing the video in New York did not have the quality anywhere approaching what they had even 30 years ago. If it were possible to video tape the show for the west coast you would eliminate one of the TV cameras and the film camera in the process.

Jerry Lewis Show recorded on video tape (left), kinescope (right)

These recordings were made during one of his shows in 1960. The video tape recording was not even the highest quality available at that time. But even with that the kinescope recording pales in comparison.

Bing asked Ampex to build one and also set up a laboratory for Mullin as part of Bing Crosby Enterprises to also help develop it. The problem they all faced was that a video signal has a much wider bandwidth than an audio signal does (20 kHz vs 6 MHz), requiring extremely high tape speeds to record it; and there was another problem. The magnetic head design would not permit bandwidths wider than one megahertz to be recorded regardless of the tape speed. These two issues were eventually worked out by Ampex in a novel way.

First instead of recording video down the length of the tape, a two-inch wide tape was pulled past a spinning drum a couple inches in diameter which had four record/playback heads 90 degrees apart. One head was always traversing across the width of the tape. The head drum spun at 14,400 rpm. Each pass by one of the four heads laid down 17 horizontal lines of video on the tape. Because of the four heads these video tape recorders colloquially became known as "Quads." The spinning heads across the tape gave a head to tape speed of 1500 inch per second.

Record/playback head-wheel with 4 heads 

Video tracks laid perpendicularly across the tape

Operating a third generation two-inch "Quad" VTR
No you don't just hit play!

Audio/Control Tracks

As the video tracks are laid down, then an audio and control track are laid down along the edges of the tape. Control track is used to control the speed of the tape.

The 2nd solution - FM 

The carrier signal (top) is modulated, not by a sine wave as shown here, but by the video signal. The result is a resulting set of frequencies that stay within a megahertz in bandwidth, conforming with the limitation of the record/playback heads. Much like an FM station today, a carrier is used that oscillates across its channel, unlike AM where the carrier is fixed. These early Video Tape Recorders (VTR) had a carrier frequency of 4.5 MHz and were able to deviate from that by +/- 500 KHz to stay within the 1 MHz bandwidth of the heads.

The second solution was to use FM to lay information on the tape. So use of FM and the perpendicular or orthogonal scanning of the heads across the tape and not along the length of it made video tape recording possible.

Demo to CBS at NAB

The machine shown in the photo ended up here

The first Ampex Video Tape Recorder (VTR) was demonstrated on April 14, 1956, at the National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters in Chicago to a group of CBS management and engineers. Unbeknownst to the CBS crowd that assembled in a private room was that they were being recorded or "videotaped" as they entered. When all were seated, the lights where dimmed and the monitors in the room that where showing live video of them entering now started showing them what had just occurred a couple minutes ago. Pandemonium erupted as none of the guest had ever witnessed instant playback of a television recording. Upon playback of the material, they were astonished at the quality, marginal by today's standards but unparalleled at that time. CBS immediately placed orders for VTRs across the network. Ampex could not build the machines fast enough. The first magnetically recorded time-delayed television network program using the new Ampex Quadruplex recording system was CBS's Douglas Edwards and the News on November 30, 1956. Ampex sold 71 of these machines at or shortly after that NAB.

Ampex VR-1000

Here, the Ampex design team poses around the Emmy their efforts won, which is sitting on the tape transport section of the VR-1000. (Ray Dolby, founder of Dolby Labs, is fourth from the left.) The compressors and pumps seen in the exposed underbelly were needed to control and move the two-inch videotape used. A one-hour reel weighed close to 20 pounds. The photo on the right shows the tape transport with its "monitor bridge" sitting next to the two-rack electronics cabinet. Essentially, one of the racks housed the video and audio processing circuitry, while the other housed the servo circuits.

Early video tape editing
It involved the physical splicing of tape!

VR-1000; in use at CBS/tape transport

CBS installed 14 at their Grand Central Terminal facilities in 1957.

The VR-1000 had three sophisticated servo systems. One to move tape at the right speed, the caption servo. One to keep the head wheel spinning at the correct speed across the tape, and a third to keep the tensioning of the tape correct so as not to damage the tape.

The original recorders only recorded in black and white, but after we saw how CBS fought color TV early on, that fact did not matter to the network. VTRs where not only complicated electronic devices, but complicated mechanical devices also. Besides racks full of electronics to simply record black and white video, and a single audio track, along with a cue track, there were several motors, solenoids, pumps, and air vacuum systems. The first Ampex VTR weighed 1500 lbs. and took up 92 square feet.

When these machines were first introduced they could not be synched to other video sources and so could not be used in any kind of effect during playback, like a dissolve or split screen. Like color, which took a number of modifications and additions to the machine, locking a VTR to other sources, or to the "house" as they would say, took more stuff. Including money. It was not hard to get a VTR up into the $100,000 price range. That is in 1950s dollars.

The Ampex VR-1000 was the first of Ampex's line of 2 inch Quadruplex videotape recorders. Crosby Enterprises was Ampex's West Coast representative until 1957. Crosby became one of the richest men in the history of show business. He had investments in real estate, mines, oil wells, cattle ranches, racehorses, music publishing, baseball teams, and television. He made a fabulous fortune from the Minute Maid Orange Juice Corporation, in which he was a principal stockholder. He had come a long way in his life. While always a gifted singer, who could not read music, he squandered that talent early on with partying, drinking, and even an arrest. When William Paley, head of CBS first heard his voice he wanted the network to hire him. Network executives were reluctant, but at Paley's insistence they did. Crosby managed to cloister his shortcomings and demons for most of his life. He had more number one hits in his life than Elvis and the Beatles. For 15 years he was a top movie box office draw. In 1945 Life magazine declared that he had made more money than any entertainer in history. His passion for golf greatly swayed the trajectory of broadcasting for 20 years.




Seven generations of Ampex VTRs

History of Ampex

Mechanical Wonder
The pinnacle of electronic and mechanical engineering. A Ampex ACR-25. The system comprised of two Quad tape decks and a carousel that held short 2 inch video tape cartridges. It would automatically load and unload the tape in those cartridges into one of the two decks. The machine mainly used to play back commercial breaks.

RCA TRT-1 - Their first VTR 

 

Now it was RCA's turn to buy someone else's equipment. NBC ordered three Ampex machines. Two went to Burbank to tape delay west coast shows, which was better than their Kinescope recordings. One NBC forwarded to RCA Labs in Camden. Eventually RCA had eight Ampex VR-1000s in their lab. RCA proceeded to "colorize" the Ampex VR-1000. RCA's main interest was still selling color sets and that required colorized recordings along with live. RCA demonstrated their "colorized" VR-1000 to Ampex engineers and executives, which led to a patent cross-licensing deal, which enabled RCA to use Ampex's technology and make its own video recorders.

VTRs installed at NBC Burbank

NBC's Videotape Central started operation on Tuesday, April 28, 1958. The NBC Burbank facility had been dubbed "Color City." The $1.5 Million facility sported eight RCA modified Ampex VR-1000 recorders and one RCA TRT-1C color recorder.

First Color Recording? 

Screen shot of President Dwight Eisenhower during the 1958 dedication of WRC-TV/NBC Studios in Washington, DC. This is the oldest Color Quad recording known to exist. It was recorded at NBC, Burbank during the live broadcast on the NBC television network.

Early NBC color recordings (1958 and early 1959) were recorded on Ampex VR 1000 black and white VTR's modified with RCA Labs-designed color circuits. Early in 1959 the two companies compromised on a different color recording format and the early "RCA Labs" color tapes were obsolete and could only be played on a very few of the Ampex-RCA Labs VTR's. RCA sold color VTR's before Ampex did by offering a color upgrade kit for their TRT-1B VTR. Ampex had a registered trademark on the name "Video Tape," RCA called their system "TV Tape" and "Television Tape" in print advertising and on the machines themselves.


Successive RCA VTRs

Recording and playing back color

Recording color is not the hard part. Playing it back with the correct colors is the hard part. The color receiver or display depends on a reference burst of color subcarrier sent at the beginning of each color line. It then used that reference to determine the tint or color at any given place along the line. The slightest timing error, as little as 1.5 nanoseconds (that is 1.5 with 8 zeros in front), and the intended color would not be reproduced correctly, as seen above. As we just mentioned, VTRs, while complicated electronically, were also very much mechanical beasts as well.

The diagram shows that it took three mechanical servos (in red) to record, and then play back a tape. It also took at least two completely electronic servos in addition to faithfully reproduce the recorded material. The textbook definition of a servo is: an automatic device that uses error-sensing negative feedback to correct the action of a mechanism.

The head wheel that scanned the video tracks on the tape, was continually going a little fast or slow as the head wheel servo worked to keep the rotation speed near steady. But never completely steady. That meant that the video coming off the tape was a bit sooner or later than expected. Remember the color display took the color reference at the beginning of the line as gospel. Video jitter, as it was called, even incredibly small, caused color problems as the timing errors translated into wrong colors. The early fix was to use a dual heterodyne process.

This is what RCA originally did in modifying the Ampex machines to record color. We mentioned this process earlier to make it simpler to tune radios, and televisions for that matter, by mixing, or beating as they say, two different frequencies together to get two new frequencies, the sum and difference of the original two. If carrier off the tape with the video jitter is mixed with a steady carrier, one of the two new frequencies also has the same jitter. But a second frequency will be stable. What RCA did was separate the color signal or carrier from the rest of the video, leaving only the black and white info, and putting the color information on a second carrier, lower in frequency than the main RF carrier and record both on tape. This lower color carrier was often referred to as color under.

On playback both the luminance or black and white, and the color carriers will both have jitter, but the color carrier will be heterodyned again with a stable color reference and one of the two new carriers will be a stable color signal. This "time base" corrected color signal was mixed back with the B&W recovered signal. Yes, the B&W part of the signal will still have jitter, but it is small enough that it appears as slight fuzziness around the edges. But the color is stable and locked. This is the same process that the home VCR used, and why the video always looked a little fuzzy. Most think it was the color part that was fuzzy, while it was always the luminance or black and white part. Ampex and RCA came up with very expensive and complicated systems to get away from using heterodyned color, but it took a few years. It was not until the beginning of the digital revolution in the 70s that an elegant solution to time base jitter was achieved.

In record time for RCA, in only a year they had their own Quad VTR working, the TRT-1, and a little over a year later they had a colorized version working, the TRT1B. It was no smaller or lighter than the Ampex machine. The base unit was six racks and instead of a separate console that held the tape deck it had its tape deck vertically mounted in one of the racks. Two of the five racks housed nothing but the servo systems. If you wanted color you added a sixth rack. In a couple years they got the whole thing down to three racks.

Ampex and RCA competed with each other with two-inch VTRs well into the 70s. The machines got more capable, and a bit smaller, but not a whole lot. Ampex actually owned the VTR trademark and RCA never used it. While Ampex two-inch Quads had VR prefixes (Video Recorder) RCA ended up using TR (Television Recorder). The original TRT designation for RCA's first machine was never clear if it meant Tape Recorder Television.

The RCA bureaucracy showed up in the tape machines. The Ampex approach to integrating all the sub-systems into the machine was so that they were more readily separated when needed during troubleshooting and repair, which all these machines needed regularly. RCAs approach was much more convoluted with many sub-systems relying on other sub-systems to perform their function. This made it much harder to separate out which sub-system was in trouble when the machine was not working correctly. In fairness some of the byzantine approach was so RCA could get around some patent infringement contention.

A look at an ancient RCA TR-70 VTR

The original video server!
Much like a juke box being an audio server.
Sappy RCA TCR-100 promo

Bizarre promo for the RCA TCR-100
Before Ampex introduced their ACR-25 , RCA introduced this mechanical beast. Like the later Ampex version it had two quad tape decks, and a open carousal to hold 24 cartridges of tape. The tape length was limited to 5 minutes. Unlike the ACR-25 the tapes it had in the carousal could only be played in order, not randomly. Also whereas the Ampex version used pneumatic air columns to pull tape out of the cartridges, the RCA version used pins on sliders moved by bicycle chains to thread the tape.

Besides the pompous tone of the narrator the strangeness of this promo is centered on showing Sony BVU-200 VTRs and saying that RCA will essentially show the Japanese how it is done. The other hilarious thing is that it was claimed the machine was maintenance free. Anyone who worked on one knew that definitely was not true. To be charitable it did not need the setup to play back a quad tape as shown here , but it required almost constant maintenance and repair.

Tektronix

Company logo in 1973 

1973 marked the first ownership change of many to come for the company. This first marriage was to Tektronix. Under the merger plan ironed out, approximately one share of Techtronic stock was issued for every three shares of Grass Valley Group. This involved approximately 500,000 Tektronix shares. Culture, direction, and inertia were about to change.

Under things to come, the following switcher dam near killed the company!

1984 Promotion company video

 Still true to this day!