CHAPTER NOTES: Chapter 1 (Segment 4)

19. Discuss the emergence and impact of television.

The earliest U.S. patent for an all-electronic television system was granted in 1927 to a young Philo T. Farnsworth, who transmitted a picture of a U.S. dollar sign using his so-called image dissector tube in the laboratories of the Philadelphia Storage Battery Company (Philco). Meanwhile, the three radio technology powerhouses—General Electric, Westinghouse, and RCA—were cooperating closely with each other. General Electric and Westinghouse owned substantial shares of RCA stock, and the companies shared a collection of radio patents valuable to the development of television. In 1930 they consolidated their television research efforts at an RCA facility in New Jersey under the direction of Russian immigrant scientist Vladimir Zworykin. Historians usually credit Farnsworth, Zworykin, or both with the invention of television.

RCA unveiled television to the American public in grand style at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, with live coverage of the fair's opening ceremonies. This included a speech by President Roosevelt—the first televised appearance of an American president. Daily telecasts were made from the RCA pavilion at the fair. Visitors were invited to experience television viewing and were given the opportunity to walk in front of television cameras and see themselves on monitors.

Technically, network broadcasting takes place when local stations of different regions simultaneously transmit the same signal. Four companies stood ready to initiate network television broadcasting in the United States immediately following the end of World War II in 1945. Two of the companies, NBC and CBS, had made vast fortunes from radio broadcasting and were well prepared to dominate the television industry. The remaining two, the American Broadcasting Company (now ABC, Inc.) and the DuMont Television Network, were competing without the advantage of such previous commercial success.

ABC had been created in 1945 when the government won a lawsuit forcing RCA to sell off one of its two national radio networks. RCA’s Blue Network had been sold to Edward J. Noble, owner of the Lifesavers Candy Company, who renamed it the American Broadcasting Company. ABC managed to survive the early years of television through a corporate merger and imaginative programming innovations, many of them instituted by Leonard Goldenson, who joined Sarnoff and Paley as the third great founding mogul of American television. But ABC remained a poor third place in the programming ratings (estimates of the percentage of television viewers tuned to a particular program) for decades; it would finally catch up to its rivals in the late 1970s. The DuMont Network, owned by American television manufacturer Allen B. DuMont, was the only television network launched by a company without prior broadcasting experience. It went out of business in 1955.

By the mid-1950s the so-called Big Three radio broadcasting networks (NBC, CBS, and ABC) had successfully secured American network television as their exclusive domain. It was not until the mid-1980s that a fourth company, News Corporation, Limited, owned by Australian-born executive Rupert Murdoch, broke this oligopoly with the establishment of the FOX television network. In the 1990s Paramount Pictures (today a division of Viacom, Inc.) established UPN, and Warner Bros. (now a division of Time Warner Inc.) established WB, bringing the number of American commercial television networks to six.

20. Examples of television broadcasting companies.

The following are television broadcasting companies:

NBC
CBS
ABC
FOX
UPN (Out of business)
WB (Out of business)
CNN
CW
DuMont (Out of business)

21. Discuss television in the 21st Century.

Television is powerful medium. It has often been the eyes and ears of some of the most tragic and joyous events in the global village, or the phenomenon that refers to the total inclusion of the world. From the 1969 landing on the moon, to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, television has been an important through its merging of sights and sounds.