Television got its name in 1900, a quarter century before anyone could watch a recognizable picture, and within seventy years it carried a Moon walk into living rooms. These tiles follow the inventors, performers and producers who built the medium, from a student's spinning disk to a show tested against a slide projector. Each story is checked against museums, archives and broadcast histories, and a few popular TV legends get corrected along the way.
Every tile in a Classic Television game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Shows
nine stories
1Filming I Love Lucy turned it into a rerun gold mine
On the tile: I Love Lucy1951
In 1951 a live TV show could be saved only as a kinescope, a film shot off a TV screen. Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz's company, Desilu, wanted better pictures. It filmed each I Love Lucy episode on 35mm with three cameras rolling at once before a studio audience, while cinematographer Karl Freund lit the set from above so the lights never had to change. CBS let Desilu own the series if the couple paid the extra production costs and took a smaller fee. By the mid-1950s, reruns earned over $1 million a year.
2A puppet ran for president to count the kids watching
On the tile: Howdy Doody1948
In 1948 NBC had no reliable way to know how many children were watching The Howdy Doody Show, because Nielsen television ratings did not exist yet. So Howdy, the show's star puppet, ran for "President of all the kids," and producer Roger Muir suggested offering free campaign buttons to viewers who wrote in. The show received 60,000 requests, equal to about one-third of the American homes that had a television set. The flood of mail proved the audience was real, and some of the biggest brands in the country soon wanted to sponsor the show.
James L. Brooks and Allan Burns first imagined Mary Richards as a 30-year-old divorcee who moves to Minneapolis for a new job. CBS executives balked. Their worry was that viewers would think Mary Tyler Moore's new character had divorced her old TV husband, Dick Van Dyke, from The Dick Van Dyke Show. So the writers had Mary arrive in Minneapolis after breaking up with a boyfriend instead. The Mary Tyler Moore Show premiered on September 19, 1970, and went on to win 29 Emmy Awards over seven seasons.
Bus driver Ralph Kramden and his wife, Alice, began in comedy sketches on Jackie Gleason's variety shows in 1951. When The Honeymooners became a half-hour sitcom of its own on CBS on October 1, 1955, it lasted just one season of 39 episodes, and Gleason went back to the variety format. Yet those 39 episodes never went away. They entered syndication in 1957, aired on stations across the country, and later came out on home video. Fans still call them the Classic 39.
The March 21, 1980, season finale of Dallas ended with scheming J.R. Ewing, played by Larry Hagman, shot by an unseen attacker. Viewers waited eight months for the answer, and "Who shot J.R.?" became a T-shirt slogan and a national topic of conversation. When the answer aired on November 21, 1980, about 83 million Americans watched, a full 76 percent of the TV sets turned on that night. The culprit was Kristin Shepard, his sister-in-law. The stunt helped make the season-ending cliffhanger a television habit.
The Korean War lasted just over three years, from June 25, 1950, to the armistice of July 27, 1953. MASH, the comedy set at an Army surgical hospital in that war, ran for 11 seasons, from 1972 to 1983. Although it was set in Korea, it was first developed as commentary on the Vietnam War, which was still being fought when the show began. Its two-and-a-half-hour finale in 1983 averaged 105.9 million viewers, still the largest audience for a scripted program in American history.
When CBS executives first saw A Charlie Brown Christmas, they worried it would fail. It used real children for the voices, a jazz score by Vince Guaraldi and no laugh track, and Charles Schulz insisted that Linus recite a passage from the Bible. The executives admitted that the Bible part scared them. The special aired anyway on December 9, 1965, and more than 15 million households tuned in, about half of the television audience. It went on to win an Emmy and a Peabody Award.
Before Sesame Street premiered in 1969, its researchers wanted proof of what held a preschooler's attention. Their tool was the distractor. A child watched a test segment on a TV while, on a screen beside it, a slide projector clicked to a new random picture every 7.45 seconds. An observer pressed a button whenever the child's eyes left the TV. Producers then watched each segment alongside a graph of the attention it won, moment by moment. One lesson came up again and again: too much adult talk lost the children.
Roots, based on Alex Haley's best-selling book about his African ancestors, made ABC nervous. Programming chief Fred Silverman scheduled the miniseries on eight consecutive nights, January 23 to 30, 1977, hoping to cut the network's expected losses and get it off the air before the ratings sweeps. The plan backfired in the best way. About 100 million viewers, almost half the country, watched the final episode, and the series proved that a drama with Black heroes and white villains could draw an enormous audience.
1Five and a half hours of live TV, six days a week
On the tile: Betty White1949
Decades before The Golden Girls, Betty White learned television without a net. In 1949 Los Angeles disc jockey Al Jarvis asked her to be the "Girl Friday" on his new program, Hollywood on Television. It ran live for five and a half hours a day, six days a week, with no script and no rehearsal, and whoever came through the door got interviewed. A few years later she co-founded Bandy Productions, becoming one of the first women producers in Hollywood, and starred in her own sitcom, Life with Elizabeth.
Texaco Star Theater premiered on NBC on June 8, 1948, and after a summer of rotating hosts, Milton Berle took over for good that September. He became so identified with the new medium that he was known as Mr. Television, the first star TV could call its own. When he started, fewer than 500,000 TV sets had been sold nationwide; when he left The Milton Berle Show in 1956, nearly 30 million had. In 1951 NBC signed him to an unprecedented thirty-year contract that guaranteed him $200,000 a year, whether or not he worked.
3The starship officer who recruited real astronauts
On the tile: N. Nichols1977
Nichelle Nichols played Lieutenant Uhura, the communications officer of Star Trek. When NASA issued its July 1976 call for space shuttle astronauts, it specifically encouraged women and minorities to apply, and it asked Nichols to help spread the word. She recorded a recruiting film, touring Johnson Space Center in Houston in March 1977 with Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean, and spoke to audiences nationwide. In January 1978 NASA chose 35 new astronauts from more than 8,000 applicants. For the first time, the class included women and minorities, among them Sally Ride and Guion Bluford.
4An omelet on a book show launched The French Chef
On the tile: Julia Child1962
On February 20, 1962, Julia Child appeared on I've Been Reading, a book program on Boston's public TV station WGBH, to talk about her cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Rather than just talk, she cooked, flipping an omelet the French way on camera. Twenty-seven viewers wrote to the station asking to see more of her. WGBH, which had never made a cooking show, shot three pilots in a borrowed demonstration kitchen at the Boston Gas Company, and The French Chef debuted on February 11, 1963.
Bob Keeshan was working at NBC when he became the first performer to play Clarabell the Clown on The Howdy Doody Show. Clarabell never spoke, communicating by honking a horn. Keeshan left the show in 1952, and on October 3, 1955, CBS premiered Captain Kangaroo, with Keeshan as the easygoing captain with big pockets and a bushy mustache. He was just 28 years old. The program ran on CBS for nearly thirty years, one of the longest runs of any children's series on network television.
6A jazz star's TV show, canceled after a blacklist
On the tile: Hazel Scott1950
Pianist Hazel Scott was known for refusing to play for segregated audiences when the DuMont network gave her a 15-minute show in 1950. The Hazel Scott Show made her one of the first Black Americans to host a network TV program, and within weeks it aired nationally three times a week. In June 1950, a pamphlet called Red Channels listed her among entertainers it accused of Communist ties. Scott, who had never been a Communist Party member, voluntarily testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee on September 22. A week later, her show was canceled.
7The Supreme Court quoted Mister Rogers on taping TV
On the tile: Fred Rogers1984
Universal City Studios and Walt Disney Productions sued Sony, arguing that people who taped TV shows on its Betamax recorders were breaking copyright law. When the case reached the Supreme Court, the justices weighed the testimony of Fred Rogers, whose company owned Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. He had said he did not object to home taping for noncommercial use, calling it a real service to families. On January 17, 1984, the court ruled 5 to 4 for Sony, holding that taping a show to watch later was fair use.
Ernie Kovacs treated the TV camera as part of the joke. For Eugene, a silent character he played, the set was tilted 15 degrees and shot through a curved camera lens. When Eugene put food on the table, it rolled away, as if he had wandered into a cockeyed world that refused to obey the laws of physics. On January 19, 1957, NBC aired Kovacs's Silent Show, a half hour built around Eugene with no dialogue at all. Years earlier, in Philadelphia, he had used camera tricks to interview mirrored images of himself.
9How one 1972 poll crowned Cronkite the most trusted
On the tile: Cronkite1972
Walter Cronkite is remembered as "the most trusted man in America," a title that traces back to a single 1972 survey. Pollster Oliver Quayle asked voters to rate their trust in that year's candidates for major public office, and the CBS anchor's name was added to the list. Among 8,780 people in 18 states, Cronkite scored 73 percent, ahead of the "average senator" at 67. On Election Day, CBS ran newspaper ads urging readers to "Re-elect the Most Trusted Man in America," and the label stuck long after he retired.
The word television is older than any working TV. In August 1900, at the International Congress of Electricity held during the World's Fair in Paris, Russian scientist Constantin Perskyi presented a paper in French on devices that could make pictures using electricity, and he called the idea télévision. The word joins the Greek tele, far, with vision, from the Latin for to see. It appeared in English by 1907 and outlasted rivals such as telephote and televista. Recognizable moving pictures were still a quarter century away.
On Christmas Eve 1883, Paul Nipkow was a poor university student in Berlin who could not afford the trip home. Alone in his room, he worked out a way to send pictures by wire: a spinning disk with holes arranged in a spiral, scanning a scene line by line. He could not pay for a patent, so his girlfriend, Sophia Colonius, covered the fee, and his "electric telescope" was patented in 1885. Nipkow apparently never built one, but spinning disks on his principle became the key part of most early mechanical television systems.
In October 1925, in his attic laboratory at 22 Frith Street in London's Soho, John Logie Baird finally transmitted a picture with real gradations of light and shade. The face on the screen belonged to Stooky Bill, a ventriloquist's dummy. Baird then went downstairs and borrowed the office boy, 20-year-old William Taynton, who became the first person ever televised, reportedly for a fee of half a crown. On January 26, 1926, Baird gave a formal demonstration of his system to members of the Royal Institution.
At the 1939 New York World's Fair, many visitors had never seen an electronically received picture. To show there was no trick, RCA displayed the Phantom Teleceiver, a TRK-12 television set built into a clear Lucite cabinet so people could inspect its workings from every side. Its picture tube pointed straight up, and viewers watched the image in a 12-inch mirror on the underside of the lid. The deluxe TRK-12 sold for $600. The see-through set is now at the MZTV Museum of Television in Toronto.
5The first approved color TV that old sets could not show
On the tile: Color Wheel1950
In October 1950 the FCC approved a color television system from CBS. It spun a wheel of red, blue and green filters in front of the camera, with a matching wheel at the receiver. The catch was that ordinary black-and-white sets could not show a usable picture from its broadcasts. CBS began regular color programs in June 1951, but that October, at the government's request, it stopped making color sets to save materials for defense during the Korean War. CBS dropped the system in 1953, and a compatible color standard took its place.
Zenith's first TV remote, the 1950 Lazy Bones, was attached to the set by a cable. Its 1955 wireless Flash-Matic worked with a beam of light, but sunshine falling on the set could make the tuner start turning by itself. In 1956 engineer Robert Adler's Space Command used sound instead. It needed no batteries: pressing a button made a tiny hammer strike an aluminum rod, sending out an ultrasonic tone that the TV recognized. Each press also made an audible click, which is thought to be how remotes got the nickname clicker.
7The recorder that made broadcasters stand and cheer
On the tile: Videotape1956
Before 1956, TV networks recorded shows with kinescopes, movie film shot off a TV screen. At Ampex in Redwood City, California, a team led by Charles Ginsburg, and including Ray Dolby, built a videotape recorder with four heads on a spinning drum that wrote the picture across two-inch tape. When Ampex demonstrated it to a broadcasters' convention in April 1956, the audience stood up and cheered. On November 30, CBS used it to replay Douglas Edwards and the News for the West Coast, three hours after the New York broadcast.
Filmed comedies made without a studio audience had a problem: no laughter. By 1953 Charley Douglass, an engineer who had worked on Navy radar in World War II, had an answer. His Laff Box, officially the Audience Response Duplicator, was a cabinet about three feet tall with slots for 32 reels of recorded laughs, ten per reel, from chuckles to guffaws. One reel, worked by a foot pedal, held only titters. Douglass was notoriously secretive and rarely gave interviews. By the 1960s nearly every sitcom used his laughs, from Bewitched to The Beverly Hillbillies.
In 1948 Broadway actor Fred Barton Jr. was moving into television and worried about memorizing his lines. He teamed up with Irving Kahn, an executive at 20th Century Fox, and engineer Hubert Schlafly to build an alternative to cue cards. Their first model was a roll of butcher paper with the script typed in jumbo letters, housed in a suitcase with a speed control to match the speaker's pace. The TelePrompTer was first used live on December 4, 1950, on the CBS soap opera The First Hundred Years. Politicians were soon reading speeches from it too.
On September 11, 1928, General Electric's station in Schenectady, New York, broadcast The Queen's Messenger, a one-act play and the first dramatic program on American television. The tiny screens could show only one actor's face or hands at a time, so three cameras were used, two for the leading players and a third for gestures and props. Two assistant actors stood by to lend their hands whenever the story called for them. Director Mortimer Stewart watched a receiver during the broadcast to control which picture went out.
2TV's first legal ad was a test pattern with a clock
On the tile: Bulova Ad1941
Commercial television became legal in the United States on July 1, 1941, and New York's WNBT was the only station to air an ad that day. Just before a Brooklyn Dodgers game against the Philadelphia Phillies at Ebbets Field, Bulova turned its familiar radio time signal into pictures: a standard test pattern, fitted with clock hands and the sponsor's name, ticked off a full minute. Roughly 4,000 sets in the New York area could tune in, and the bill came to $9 at most. No recording survives, so the clips passed around online today are later re-creations.
3The first president on TV had about 1,000 viewers
On the tile: FDR on TV1939
On April 30, 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt opened the New York World's Fair, and NBC's experimental station W2XBS carried his speech, making him the first president to appear on television. The broadcast also began NBC's regular schedule of programs. The audience was tiny. According to The New York Times, there were only 100 to 200 television sets in New York City, for perhaps 1,000 viewers in all. No recording of the broadcast survives, because there was not yet a good way to record live television.
The first sitcom on American network television starred a real married couple. Mary Kay and Johnny, with Mary Kay and Johnny Stearns, debuted on the DuMont network on November 18, 1947, and later moved to NBC and CBS. When Mary Kay became pregnant in 1948, the pregnancy was written into the show, years before I Love Lucy did the same. Their son, Christopher, was born that December and made his acting debut with his parents weeks later. One episode, from June 1949, survives at the Paley Center for Media.
Captain Jack was the first Leave It to Beaver episode filmed and was meant to premiere the series in October 1957. In it, Wally and Beaver order a baby alligator by mail and hide it in the toilet tank. Network censors objected, since bathrooms were simply not shown on TV then. After negotiation, the producers were allowed to show just the tank, not the whole toilet, and the episode aired a week late, on October 11. It is remembered as the first American TV show to show a toilet, or at least part of one.
On July 23, 1962, the Telstar satellite relayed the first public live television across the Atlantic. The program was supposed to feature President John F. Kennedy's news conference, but the satellite link was ready before the president was. To fill the time, viewers in Europe were shown a baseball game between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field, where the Phillies' Tony Taylor hit a routine fly ball. It was the first time Europeans watched an American sporting event live.
On September 4, 1951, President Harry Truman's speech at a peace treaty conference in San Francisco was carried by 87 stations in 47 cities, the first time a television program was broadcast from coast to coast. On November 18, Edward R. Murrow opened his new CBS program, See It Now, by showing both coasts live at once: the Brooklyn Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge, side by side on a split screen. His opening line was modest: "This is an old team trying to learn a new trade."
A popular story about the first televised presidential debate, on September 26, 1960, says radio listeners thought Richard Nixon won while TV viewers favored John F. Kennedy. The evidence is thin. The one survey often cited, by the Sindlinger firm, questioned only 282 radio listeners, far too few for a sound national sample, and radio-only listeners in 1960 were not a random group. Scholars who reexamined it concluded that it probably overrepresented Nixon supporters. Kennedy did look more polished on camera, but the radio verdict remains unproven.
9The Moon walk pictures that did not come from The Dish
On the tile: Moon Landing1969Myth busted
The film The Dish left many people thinking Australia's Parkes radio telescope sent the world its first pictures of Neil Armstrong on the Moon. It did not. NASA first used pictures received at Goldstone in California, but they came in upside down at first and far too high in contrast, so just before Armstrong stepped down, NASA switched to Australia's Honeysuckle Creek station. Honeysuckle Creek supplied the first steps, and Parkes took over after about nine minutes. To broadcast the camera's slow-scan images, engineers filmed a monitor with a standard TV camera.