THE HISTORY OF
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It was the unsung hero, Philo T. Farnsworth who should be on a postage stamp honoring his involment in televisions creation, when this Amercan prodigy designed a full electronic television sytsem by the time he was fifteen years old. By the age of 24 Farnsworth
was confident enough to apply for a patent on his invention
that was to be hughly contested by RCA and Sarnoff, but
on August of 1930 the courts went in favor of the young
Fransworth.
Its after RCA’s chief television designer Vladimor Zworykin visited the Farnsworth studio, and was impressed by the clear picture quality that RCA’s lawyers began a long and costly process of trying to lock up Farnsworths patents. In the years that followed RCA’s technical standards continued to progress as Vladimir Zworykin was to be the inventor of the Iconscope camera for scanning , and later develope the Kinescope for receiving images. In 1935 RCA was to spend
over a million dollars demonstrating television at a studio
in Radio City, which was connected by a cable to a transmitter
on top of the Empire State Building.
By 1938 NBC/RCA mobile trucks were put into service, and regular interviews with passerbys at Rockerfeller Plaza became a way of life on television, and kept the normal studio costs down. Of course David Sarnoff had a flair for generating publicity, and chose to inaugurate NBC’s mobile service at the 1939 Worlds Fair in New York, which was to be addressed opening day by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on April 30th. At that time there were only about a hundred television sets in the New York area, and they were owned by most of the engineers and executives of NBC. The RCA Televisions sold at the New York Worlds Fair were priced between $200-$600 dollars. The screens were around five to nine inches wide, and the sets were housed in a cabinet about five feet high. When the second World War began, television took a back seat to the war effort, and you couldn’t give a television away if you could, there was a lot more important things to do. Its when the FCC approved RCA’s color system to be the basis for Television sets in this country that Sarnoff switched the National Broadcsating Company to full color, especially to help the sales of there RCA Color Televisions. SAVING TELEVISON HISTORY If your a babyboomer kid
like me who grew up in the 1950’s, everything we would eat,
wear and use in everyday life was now influenced by what
we watched coming from our Televisions, and in most cases
it was viewed on a RCA set, which my family owned.
Today there's not a musuem or library in the country that houses the complete histroy of RCA, NBC or even the birth of televison, it just doesn’t exisit. So trying to relive those TV memories is next to impossible when those who created the Industry, just threw most of those television shows & commercials away. (see In search of Television Histroy) Its because some of the original Directors, Producers and Talent of that era saved there television work that was shot on film ,or with live shows made into filmed Kinescopes, that some of these television shows & commercials still exisit. ALBERT HECK COMMERCIAL FILMMAKER As you get a rare chance to view some of the original Television commercials that aired in the 1950’s promoting RCA Television sets, its because one of televisions pioneering Commmercial film directors Albert Heck saved most of his work. RARE STREAMING VIDEO
You’ll also get a chance to not only to learn about the television & film work of Albert Heck, but download rare videos, as you visit an early RCA Television plant, view a Television sales film explaining how Television receivers and transmitors work, and those classic RCA television commercials that haven’t been seen publicly seen since they first aired over forty years ago. end of part one
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