Boston Airs America’s First Television Commercial (episode 315)

Transcript

Jake:
[0:04] Welcome to Hub History where we go far beyond the Freedom Trail to share our favorite stories for the history of Boston. The hub of the universe.

Introduction to Boston’s First TV Commercial

Jake:
[0:13] This is episode 315. Boston airs America’s first television commercial by accident. Hi, I’m Jake. This week, I’m talking about one of my least favorite aspects of American life. Television commercials.

Jake:
[1:13] I absolutely hate commercials. Whether they’re telling me which pickup truck I have to drive. So my neighbors won’t question my manhood or which light beer to drink. So large breasted women will throw themselves at me. There are times when I kind of forget about television commercials, this household went streaming only at least 15 years ago. Back when cord cutters were considered a new phenomenon. I didn’t do it to save money. In fact, until RCN finally rolled out a streaming only plan, I was paying for a cable bundle that I didn’t use for years. I just did it because I hate being talked to like, I’m stupid. In fact, I drive a truck and I love beer, but neither of those are brands that I got from television commercials.

Jake:
[2:04] Whenever I go someplace these days that plays live TV. The level of discourse is just depressing and it being an election year only makes things worse. I had to go to my dentist’s office a couple of weeks before the election and it turns out that Boston Cable is just wall to wall political ads for New Hampshire races who knew out of.

The Birth of Boston’s TV Stations

Jake:
[2:30] I don’t know I guess, spite, maybe I went looking for the first television commercial in Boston. And I was surprised by what I found, not only did Boston’s second television station air the first commercial in American history, 94 years ago, this week, they did it almost two decades before Boston’s first television station went on the air. Are you confused yet? This is gonna be the story of innovation, competing technologies and some of the earliest television broadcasts in the country.

Jake:
[3:05] But before we talk about how much I hate commercials. It’s time for a commercial break. Just kidding. Kind of, I haven’t had an actual ad to air in over a year now, but instead, I’m gonna use this time to say a big thank you to everyone who supports hub history financially and James K in particular, Jim’s the exception that proves the rule when I say that paypal is for one time contributions and Patreons for ongoing support. He sent me a nice chunk of cash on paypal this month. Like he’s done about a half dozen times over the past few years, I’ve been playing with the idea of switching the digital audio workstation. I used to edit the show over from audacity to one of the more modern A I powered options that allows you to edit the waveform or the transcript itself. But of course, those modern systems are more expensive, whether they support the show on paypal or Patreon sponsors like GEM allow me to even entertain the idea of an upgrade along with paying for the ongoing expenses of running the show, to everyone who’s already supporting the show. Thank you. And if you’re not yet supporting the show and you’d like to start, it’s easy. Just go to patreon.com/hub History or visit hubor.com and click on the support us link. And thanks again to all our new and returning sponsors.

The Race for Broadcast Innovation

Jake:
[4:33] If you ask anybody in Boston what the first local TV station was, you’ll hear the same answer. Well, actually most people will tell you that they have no idea, but TV, people will tell you that it was WBZ TV four, which started out as Boston’s NBC affiliate and still broadcasts local news today as a CBS affiliate. In 2018, CB, SS, Boston published an article looking back on their very first broadcast, which at that time, it just marked its 70th anniversary. It was post war Boston 1948 and radio was king. But plans for a new kind of broadcast center were in the works. A plan to bring the first TV station in New England.

Jake:
[5:18] We wanted to be the first in New England. We had made a commitment to ourselves that we would be and we wanted to see it through says Bill Swartley WBZS first general manager. In an interview that first aired years ago, it was a race to get on the air. Plans to go on in March were set back by the worst winner in years with slow going erecting the TV tower at 650 ft. It was the tallest structure in New England at the time. But on June 9th, 1948 at 10 a.m. WBZ TV went on the air with a test pattern at 10 a.m. WBZ TV went on the air with a test pattern which lasted much of the day at 6:30 p.m. The few TV screens in the area lit up with a film of prominent New Englanders wishing the TV station well like Cardinal Cushing and Boston Mayor Curly, that was followed by a live news report anchored by Arch mcdonald. The problem, the TV station was still under construction with no furniture in the studio. Like a good journalist. He improvised. We had this piece of plywood and I sat on a keg of nails and that’s how the station got on the air mcdonald remembers.

Jake:
[6:37] Now, some of you might be better at mental math than I am. And if you are, you realize that something isn’t adding up here at the top of the show. I said that the first TV commercial in the country it aired in Boston 94 years ago. But here’s WBZ saying that they were the first station on the air just 76 years ago. How can that be? Because almost two decades before electronic television debuted on WBZ in 1948 some of the very first mechanical television stations in the country were located here in Boston. The very first television broadcasts in the US were set in the spring of 1928 after inventor Charles Jenkins got special permission from the Federal Radio Commission. The predecessor of today’s Federal Communications Commission to broadcast from an experimental station in the Maryland suburbs outside Washington DC.

Early Television Experiments in Boston

Jake:
[7:35] Radio networks would continue to treat television as an experimental sideline throughout the 19 thirties and the FRC would continue granting experimental licenses throughout the decade.

Jake:
[7:47] One of those experiments was announced in the Boston Globe on Wednesday, October 31st, 1928 marking the beginning of the television era in New England.

Jake:
[7:59] Starting this afternoon at three o’clock station, W one XAY, the 500 watt experimental transmitter of the Lexington Air station will broadcast a television program. This announcement was made yesterday by Jerry Harrison, manager of station, Wlex Mr Harrison. States that the television broadcasts will be put on at the same time every day except Saturdays and Sundays and will be one hour at length in these experimental broadcasts. W One Xay will transmit on a wavelength of 62 m or 4850 kilocycles using a 48 ho disk rotating at a speed of 900 revolutions a minute, experimenters equipped with the necessary apparatus will thus be given an opportunity to receive a local television transmission on a regular schedule. Now, you probably have the same image of early TV sets in your mind’s eye that I do maybe from pictures of your grandparents’ house back in the fifties or something like that. A large wooden cabinet sits in the middle of the family room wall looking like a bar cabinet or a dining room sideboard, but with a large speaker grill on one side and a small rounded rectangular glass window on the other side, maybe showing leave it to beaver on a nine inch screen.

Jake:
[9:24] That middle image is showing you an early electronic television. The mechanical televisions that receive W One Xay signal starting on Halloween in 1928 were even smaller and even cruder relying on mechanical scanning systems to capture moving images and transmit them to your home. For early mechanical televisions. Both the transmitting station and the home receiver relied on a scanning device known as the Nipkow disk, a spinning disk with a spiral pattern of holes punched in it, as the disk rotated, the holes scanned the image line by line, breaking it down into a series of light intensities. Photoelectric cells converted these intensities into electronic signals. The electrical signals representing the image were then modulated onto a radio wave carrier. The modulated signal was transmitted over the airwaves using a standard radio transmitter.

Jake:
[10:23] On the other end, the viewer at home needed an antenna to pick up the radio waves that were broadcast from the station. A tuner that selected the desired channel and a signal amplifier.

Jake:
[10:36] The amplified signal was then used to control the intensity of a light source. Often a neon lamp, this light source was placed behind a second Nip Kov disk, a knob on the side of the device let the user control the exact speed of the electric motor that spun the Nipkow disk so they could tune it to spin at the exact same rate as the disk in the broadcast studio that was used to capture the images.

Jake:
[11:01] As the disk in the receiver rotated that neon light passed through the holes and created a series of illuminated dots on a screen. And the humanized persistence of vision blended the dots together to form a recognizable moving image.

Mechanical vs. Electronic Television

Jake:
[11:17] And Harvard’s collection of historical scientific instruments is an example of an early mechanical TV that was used with Boston’s second TV station W one XAV, which we’ll talk about in a minute. It makes the 19 fifties console TV with a nine inch screen that we all picture when we think of early televisions look like an eight K three DH DRL CD Cadillac. By comparison, the earliest mechanical television receivers look more like a jewel box or a music box than a piece of furniture. For the one in Harvard’s collection. The whole wooden case is about 2 ft wide, 18 inches deep and nine inches tall with a hinged lid, in the center of the front of the case is a magnified screen that measures about three inches across.

Jake:
[12:10] Opening. The lid reveals a metal drum with a black and white printed paper disk pasted on top for calibration purposes, instead of the clockwork ballerina that you would expect to find in the same place in a music box and in place of the Nipkow disk in a British mechanical television, the drum has perforations around the outer rim that are staggered up the surface at increasing heights. A bright lamp inside the drum shines at different intensities based on the radio signal the device receives and the drum spins so quickly that the perforations pass in front of the lens many times every second, creating the illusion of a moving image for the viewer lifting out. This drum reveals the metal spindle that turns it driven directly by an electric motor that looks like it belongs in a vacuum cleaner wires run around the inside of the cabinet to a simple circuit board with a single vacuum tube, knobs on the outside of the case control, the radio receivers, frequency and the speed of the disk with a single switch to turn the device on and off.

Jake:
[13:16] I’ll include a link to pictures of this device in the show notes because it’s definitely not how I envisioned an early television looking. Now. If that sounds like a crude device, that’s because it was, at the time, the best thing that the magazine, radio news could say about television broadcasts was that under favorable conditions, the features of a known person can be recognized. The movements of the lips, eyes and other features are easily discernible, which is very faint praise.

Jake:
[13:53] Frame rates. Meaning the number of times the image was scanned per second, affected the perceived image quality. A higher frame rate would result in smoother motion but it could also require more bandwidth than radio stations were allowed to use at the time. Meaning that most broadcasts had a granny and low quality picture synchronization between the transmitter and the receiver was critical. If there was even the slightest difference in the rotational speed between the two discs, the resulting images would flicker violently similar to the very earliest silent movies, screen resolution has become a key selling point for today’s gadgets from phones to watches to picture frames. A modern four K TV has a screen that’s almost 4000 pixels wide and regular 1080 HD TV. S are called that because the image is 1080 pixels high before the move to HD, a typical standard definition television would have a screen that showed images using up to 525 horizontal scan lines.

Jake:
[15:02] Early mechanical televisions couldn’t even compare to that Standard DEF TV with resolution limited by the number of holes were punched in the Nipkow disk. If my math is right the TV on display at Harvard and all of Boston’s early television broadcasters used a standard that was roughly 1/80 the size of a four K image today as described by the Berkshire Eagle on December 28th, 1928. Reporting. On the first two months of television broadcasts in metro Boston, regular daily television broadcasts have become a reality at station W one XAY at Lexington every afternoon, between three and four o’clock. This station operated in conjunction with station Wlex puts on a program of visual radio entertainment for such fans and experimenters as are equipped to pick up the broadcasts.

Jake:
[15:56] The studio is a study in somber colors dominated by a black background. The subject whose image is to be broadcast is placed several feet away from a machine resembling a motion picture projector and employing a high intensity arc light, just in front of the outermost lens of the projector is the edge of a steel disk about 2 ft in diameter, in a spiral arrangement within a narrow band next to the edge of the disk are cut 48 tiny square holes, when the disc is set in motion and the arc turned on sharp lines of white light pass in a continuous stream across the subject to be televised. The disc turns at 900 revolutions per minute photoelectric cells sensitive to every variation in light and shadow pick up the form of the subject and is every movement. The differences in light intensity are translated into electric impulses. Just as the radio microphone changes sound energy into electrical energy. These electrical impulses pass directly to amplifiers employing eight vacuum tubes which build up the signal before it’s put on the air. A 40 ft aerial of high efficiency is employed to send out the signals on the wavelength of 61.5 m with 500 watts of power.

Jake:
[17:19] Those 48 tiny square holes in a metal disk translate to 48 scan lines or a 48 pixel tall image while 900 revolutions per minute works out to a frame rate of 15 frames per second compared to today’s television standard of 30 frames per second. The station’s original 500 watts of broadcasting power didn’t reach very far. So within just a few months, the owners asked the Federal Radio Commission for another experimental license. And the Greenfield Daily Recorder reported on April 5th, 1929 that the FRC had granted it.

Jake:
[17:58] Construction of a new 5000 watt transmitter is being undertaken by television station W one Xay at Lexington as the result of the granting of a license for experimental television work by the federal radio commission. This station to be one of two television stations allotted to New England will employ its present 500 watt television transmitter until the more powerful apparatus is in readiness. It will operate on the band between 4100 kilocycles with the new 5000 watt transmitter. The station’s signal could be picked up around the entire New England region, by the handful of people who had either built or bought a television receiver, allowing them to enjoy 48 pixels of glory.

Jake:
[18:49] W one XAY mechanical television broadcasts may have been crude but they inaugurated a new era in American media culture. However, even before mechanical television became a reality, one of the earliest concepts for broadcasting images over long distances was conceived here in Boston.

Jake:
[19:10] George R. Casey was a surveyor employed by the city of Boston. And as early as 1876 the same year that Alexander Graham Bell received his first patent for the telephone, George Casey built on the recent discovery that the amount of electric current that the element selenium conducted depended on the amount of light striking it. And so he proposed a system for transmitting crude images that he called a te electroscope. His proposal was published in scientific American in June of 1880 a disk is drilled through perpendicularly to its face with numerous small holes each of which is filled partly or entirely with selenium. The selenium forming part of an electrical circuit, the operation of the apparatus is as follows. If a white letter A upon a black background be projected upon the disk, all parts of the disk will be dark excepting where the letter A is where it’ll be light

George Casey’s Early Concepts

Jake:
[20:10] and the selenium points in the light will allow the electric current to pass. And if the wires leading from the disk are arranged in the same relative position. When passing through a receiving disk, the electricity will print upon chemically prepared paper. A copy of the letter A as projected upon the transmitting disk by this means any object so projected and so transmitted will be reproduced in a manner similar to that by which the letter A was reproduced.

Jake:
[20:39] Casey’s main focus wasn’t allowing the receiving unit to print a copy of the image that was scanned by his perforated disk, making it more similar to a fax machine than a television. But the article includes a diagram of another receiving instrument with platinum or carbon points covered with a glass cap. There being a vacuum between the glass cap and the insulating plate or disk. These points are rendered incandescent by the passage of the electrical current, thereby giving a luminous image instead of printing the same. These platinum or carbon points are arranged relatively the same as the selenium points in the plate. Each platinum or carbon point is connected with one of the wires from the selenium point in the disk and forms part of an electrical circuit.

Jake:
[21:27] A modern commenter points out, although this approach should work in theory, each individual pixel requires its own photocell and wired circuit making the system cumbersome and expensive for producing even a modest size image. Just three years after Boston’s surveyor published his idea for a Selenium camera, a German physics student from a town in Prussia that’s now part of Poland named Paul Nipkow, conceptualized a spinning perforated disk while staring into an oil lamp on Christmas Eve. He patented the device in Berlin but never made anything of it and the patent expired after 15 years.

Jake:
[22:09] Meanwhile, as a mass communications textbook points out, another German physicist was developing a competing technology. The invention of the cathode ray tube by Carl Ferdinand Brown in 1897 played a vital role as the forerunner of the TV picture tube initially created as a scanning device known as the cathode ray oscilloscope. The C RT effectively combined the principles of the camera and electricity. It had a fluorescent screen that emitted a visible light in the form of images when struck by a beam of electrons. Neither German could develop a commercially viable product out of his invention. An image transmission technology languished until radio broadcasting caught up in the early 20th century.

Competing Technologies in Television

Jake:
[22:57] But their inventions would form the basis for two competing television technologies. A few decades later, as the textbook understanding, media and culture described.

Jake:
[23:08] Mechanical television developed out of Nipkow disk system. It was pioneered by British inventor John Logie Baird. In 1926 Baird gave the world’s first public demonstration of a television system at Selfridge’s department store in London. He used mechanical rotating disks to scan moving images into electrical impulses which are transmitted by cable to a screen. Here. They showed up as a low resolution pattern of light and dark. Baird’s first television program showed the heads of two ventriloquist dummies which he operated in front of the camera apparatus out of the audience’s sight. In 1928 Baird extended his system by transmitting a signal between London and New York. The following year, the BBC adopted his mechanical system. And by 1932 bed developed the first commercially viable television system and sold 10,000 sets.

Jake:
[24:07] At the same time, the Baird was developing the mechanical model. Other inventors were working on an electronic television system based on the C RT, while working on his father’s farm, Idaho teenager, Philo Farnsworth realized that an electronic beam could scan a picture in horizontal lines reproducing the image almost instantaneously. In 1927 Farnsworth transmitted the first all electronic TV picture by rotating a single straight line scratched into a square piece of painted glass by 90 degrees.

Jake:
[24:42] While John Logie Baird was demonstrating mechanical televisions in London, Hollis Baird was building and selling mechanical television receivers in Boston, starting in 1926 when he was just 21 years old. He sold televisions under the name the Beard receiver company. In an article for the Henry Ford, Suzanne Fisher writes Baird had the fortune or misfortune of sharing his last name with John Logie Baird, one of the inventors of mechanical television, on this side of the Atlantic Hollis Baird who has no relation, took pains in Baird Receiver company advertising to say that his products were not in fact made by the other Baird. The fact that he needed to put disclaimers in his advertisements indicates that this was a common problem. One that Hollis Baird probably didn’t mind if it led to better sales.

Jake:
[25:40] In late 1928 Hollis Baird co-founded a company called the Shortwave and Television Laboratory with Am Morgan and Butler Perry, which was originally located at 70 Brookline Ave in the Fenway. The mechanical television from the Harvard collection that I described earlier is a bare design carrying the shortwave and television corporation trademark.

Jake:
[26:04] Despite the bonus of name recognition, it was probably difficult to sell television receivers in a town that barely had TV broadcasts. So in April 1929 the shortwave and television company started broadcasting a low power signal under the call sign W one WX.

The Rise of Boston’s TV Broadcasting

Jake:
[26:24] A few months later, they applied for an FRC license to broadcast a full power signal as the first television station located in Boston and only the second in New England with the globe reporting on September 5th, 1929, Boston is soon to have television. This fact was made known yesterday by the Federal radio Commission which has issued a construction permit to the shortwave and television laboratories. A local concern located on Brookline ave the announcement issued by the commission gives the shortwave and television laboratories permission to try experimental television on the 2000 to 2100 kilocycle band with a power of 500 watts.

Jake:
[27:07] Coincident with the announcement made by the Federal Commission came a statement from AM Morgan who’s in charge of the shortwave and television laboratories. Mr Morgan stated that his company expects to have its station in operation within 30 days. He also stated that plans were under consideration for affecting a tie up of the television broadcast with a sound broadcast so that programs given for local radio fans might be visible as well as audible.

Jake:
[27:37] The signal was broadcast on a different frequency. W One WX started out using the same 48 line 15 frame per second format as W One Xay in Lexington. But after about a year, they switched to 60 lines and 20 frames per second and change the call sign to W One Xav. This station would go off the air in 1934 but bared in the short wave and television laboratory would operate another experimental station through 1941 tinkering with new mechanical TV formats that came pretty close to matching the resolution of the cathode ray TV. S of the 19 nineties with 120 lines. Then 100 8240 and eventually a whopping 343 horizontal scan lines with the goal of making moving images fill a 12 inch screen. Wow.

Jake:
[28:35] All these formats were experimental as was all television in the early years of the late 19 twenties and early 19 thirties, under the experimental FRC licenses that they operated under commercial messages and sponsored programming were technically prohibited. But Baird’s experiments with trying to synchronize W one Xavs television broadcasts with traditional audio broadcasts over radio led to a violation of this prohibition at the time. Ever’s own ranny weeks led the IJ Fox Furriers orchestra and twice weekly performances for the radio station, Wee I out of Gloucester. IJ Fox was one of the biggest fur specialists in the country with fur departments bearing his name and major department stores around New England as well as anchor stores in Manhattan, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and on Washington Street across from Filene’s in Downtown Crossing, they sold repaired and stored furs for Boston’s elites and they were the title sponsors of the orchestra’s performances.

Jake:
[29:42] The 1947 New York Times obituary for IJ Fox notes that he was an early advertising innovator saying he advertised extensively in newspapers. It was one of the first merchandisers to exploit radio and television. Airplanes wrote the firm’s name in the skies over many cities and regions going beyond radio jingles. He had special songs written for him by Ascap artists.

Jake:
[30:10] A 1937 article in the New Yorker notes that IJ Fox Furs had recently overtaken lucky strike as the largest advertiser by skywriting in the country. So it only makes sense that they would also get in early on the new medium of television. While most of the other early television broadcasters were still transmitting silent picture shows for their viewers. Hollis Baird was experimenting with simulcasting radio performances so his audiences could tune their radio sets to hear a show while they also watched it being made on the television receivers that he sold.

Accidental First Television Commercial

Jake:
[30:45] The sense of the television viewer sort of spying on a radio program is how viewers came to see the first television commercial basically by accident. On December 7th, 1930 radio programs were typically broadcast live at the time. So no recording of the first television ad exists. But bandleader Rannie Weeks announced something along the lines of this program brought to you by IJ Fox Furriers. And history was made because the Federal radio Commission considered it an accident. They took no punitive action against W One Xav. And television viewers wouldn’t have to contend with commercial messages again for over a decade. By the time the Fox Trappers accidentally aired a sponsor message for IJ Fox, the writing was on the wall for mechanical television.

The Decline of Mechanical Television

Jake:
[31:39] These early stations had to deal with tiny screen resolutions, flickering out of sync pictures, low frame rates and limited bandwidth that caused most broadcasts to look like a mere suggestion of a moving image rather than a perfect reproduction of life.

Jake:
[31:55] In addition, the mechanical nature of a home television receiver made it susceptible to wear and tear, leading to further degradation of image quality over time. As electric motors, vacuum tubes or metal spindles wore out by the early 19 thirties. It was clear that electronic television would be the wave of the future. Instead of mechanical scanning with spinning disks, electronic television employed Philo Farnsworth’s cathode ray tubes to generate and display images. A cathode ray tube is a vacuum tube that focuses a beam of electrons onto a phosphor coated screen, exciting phosphor dots to produce light. The intensity of this electron beam is modulated and so creates different shades of gray or colors by controlling the intensity and position of the electron beam. It became possible to create images with high resolutions and fast refresh rates. In time C RT S provided higher resolutions, faster frame rates and larger images than mechanical TV could ever hope for. In 1935 the BBC experimented with both technologies running mechanical and electronic broadcasts head to head and audiences overwhelmingly preferred electronic Television?

The Shift to Electronic Television

Jake:
[33:18] Here in the US RC A Victor was paying attention with company President David Sarnoff pouring resources into electronic television systems. During the depression years, RC A brought the first electronic television broadcasts to the United States at the 1939 world’s fair with regularly scheduled programming in the New York area. Announced around the same time within two years. RC A was operating the NBC network under the first commercial television license in the country. So New York audiences got to see the other first television commercial in the

The Legacy of Early Commercials

Jake:
[33:54] country before a game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Philadelphia Phillies. On July 1st 1941 a static image of a watch face superimposed on a map of the continental United States appeared on viewer screens and a voiceover announced.

Jake:
[34:15] And it’s all been downhill from there.

Jake:
[36:13] To learn more about America’s first television commercial in early Boston TV. Check out this week’s show notes at hubor.com/three 15. Of course, I’ll have links to all the news articles that I quoted from as well as the CBS article about that first broadcast by WBZ and the Henry Ford article that I quoted for good measure. I’ll link to the article in scientific American that describes the primitive television system dreamed up by a Boston surveyor that would have used selenium cameras to create an image along with the diagrams. In that article, I’ll also include a link to pictures of the surviving mechanical television by Hollis Baird and Harvard’s collection. So you can start to get a sense of what these things actually look like along those lines. I’m also gonna include an infographic that the Springfield Republican created in 1928 illustrating the amount of detail that a viewer could expect out of a 48 line mechanical television under even ideal conditions.

Conclusion and Further Exploration

Jake:
[37:19] When you see it, you’ll have no doubt as to why electronic television eventually won. If you’d like to get in touch with us, you can email podcast at hubor.com, you can find me as hub history on most popular social media apps, but Twitter has been a very depressing place lately, so I haven’t been posting much at all. I’d like to try something new. I have an existing Mastodon account as at Hubor at better dot Boston and I just set up an account on blue sky where you can find me as hub history or at Hubor dot bs ky dot social, for the next couple of weeks. I’m gonna try posting fun stuff like I used to do back in the golden days of social media, historic maps, funny gifts past episodes, historic anniversaries, that kind of stuff. But instead of doing it on Twitter insta, I’m gonna try posting the blue sky and Mastodon and we’ll see what happens if you’re not using those apps. Just go to hubor.com and click on the contact us link while you’re on the site, hit the subscribe link and be sure that you never miss an episode. If you subscribe on Apple podcasts, please consider writing us a brief review. If you do drop me a line and I’ll send you a hub history sticker as a token of appreciation.

Jake:
[38:43] That’s all for now. Stay safe out there listener.