From the beginning the groom, Prince Phillip, had advocated modernization. At the other end of the spectrum, the older establishment including the Queen Mother and the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, insisted on maintaining tradition and said no to television. While it would seem to indicate Phillip had been overruled, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) leaked the decision of the traditionalists to the general public. In the court of public opinion, 78% favored televising the Coronation. Bowing under pressure from the royal monarch’s subjects, the BBC received a go ahead to bring their live cameras to the ceremony.

Most of Europe could be serviced by a live signal. In the years after peace was declared in Europe, “Eurovision” was a concept being advanced by the continent’s television and radio services. Leaders of the group were the BBC and Rediodiffusion et Télévision Françaises (RTF) representing France. Tests had been done and some working agreements had been created.

On the day of the Coronation, BBC sent a live feed to the continent by way of a microwave link from Dover, across the English Channel to Calais, France, then to the Netherlands and Germany. Kinescopes of the proceedings would have to do for the rest of the world. Within days of the broadcast, the films would be made available to existing television stations around the world including the U.S.A.

Remember there were no overseas live capabilities we take for granted now. Satellites were at least ten years away. Likewise, the invention of videotape was still three years away. Other than “Live,” kinescope recordings were the only way to distribute television programming. The BBC was creating the first television event of international proportions.

The BBC was most gracious in accommodating the many requests for copies in places they could not reach with a live signal. Had they known what lengths the Americans would go, specifically CBS and NBC, they might have thought better of giving up the films without more stringent restrictions.

For example, in the remote hope of getting a live signal from the BBC, NBC made elaborate plans including pressing RCA’s Long Island shortwave listening post into service. According to a June 1^st, 1953, article in the New York Times, “Only occasionally in the past have British television signals, through some freak of nature, been received clearly in this country on frequencies used by the BBC.” Special aerials were erected and a British television receiver and kinescope film recorder were installed at Riverhead, Long Island, to intercept the signal should it appear. A helicopter will be standing by to rush the film back to Manhattan.

And then there were the airplane races.

Reuvan Frank who later became a president of NBC News, writing about the Coronation in 1993 for American Heritage, said, ”ABC was involved in none of this. The network ‘runt of the litter’ was still several years away from [challenging] the big boys on their own turf.” Instead they “arranged to carry, at no charge, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC) telecast of the kinescope of the entire BBC coverage.” ABC’s only expense would be for transmission lines and costs from the CBC.

But CBS and NBC both had reasons to beat the other to air the first pictures. They had promised their affiliates they would be first and worth the faith their stations (both current and potential) had placed in them. Aside from what it would do for the ego in one of the two executive suites, both networks were in a battle to win affiliation contracts.

NBC had lost the lead to CBS in radio, still the more widely reaching, and therefore, more profitable of the two media. And NBC’s affiliated station in Norfolk, Virginia, had just been lured away by CBS and others were on the “critical list.” Affiliates were concerned about leadership at RCA/NBC. On the other hand, before the VHF station freeze, CBS had advised its radio affiliates to wait to apply for television licenses so they could build their facilities around the CBS color system. Now it looked like color wasn’t going to happen anytime soon and when it did it would not be the system CBS had advised its affiliates to wait for.

The two networks sent separate teams to London to set up for the broadcast. It appears no expense was spared. Both networks chartered large aircraft. CBS’s British Overseas Air Corporation Stratocruiser, the largest airplane in transatlantic service at the time had a downstairs bar area that had been removed and converted to an office area, projection room and editing area. NBC’s Pan American DC-6 charter was similarly equipped for television. Both of these aircraft would fly directly to Boston for the late evening recap’s, about a ten hour flight. Boston was the closest U.S. city to London saving about an hour of flying time over New York.

Adding to the costs, CBS set up a facility in a Quonset hut at Heathrow Airport. Likewise, Charles Colledge, second in command in NBC News, picked out Blackbushe Airport, a small private airport forty miles outside of London and set up a live microwave feed from BBC’s downtown tower to their Quonset hut. In both locations, the buildings would become combination offices, film laboratories, recording studios and editing rooms.

Boston also was the closest transmission point with the ability to feed the entire country for both networks. Again, buildings were leased and a microwave relay to AT&T’s television circuits were installed at the city’s Logan International Airport.

To get the kinescoped footage to Boston, both networks reserved space on a Royal Air Force jet bomber.  The CBC wrote “It involved Royal Air Force Canberra light bombers and Canadian CF-100 fighter jets flying coronation films from London to Goose Bay, N.L., to Montreal in a relay” to deliver the kinescopes. The stop in Goose Bay, Labrador, would allow CBS and NBC to offload their film to their P-51’s for delivery to Boston.

Now the story becomes interesting if not a little silly. CBS knew that the actor, Jimmy Stewart, was both a part owner of one of its affiliate stations but also enjoyed being an owner of a World War II P51 Mustang that had been souped up for racing by its pilot, Joe De Bona. Through Stewart, CBS made arrangements for the De Bona P51 to pick up the film in Goose Bay and fly it to CBS at Logan Airport.

NBC arranged for another P51, also a racing plane flown by Stanley Reaver, to meet their film in Goose Bay. Reaver had just lost first place to De Bona in a major air race and was interested in a high profile rematch.

Unbeknownst to anyone outside of NBC’s team, the secretive location NBC had chosen was to hide its “secret weapon.” They had entered into a discussion with the manufacturer of the airplane, English Electric’s Canberra jet bomber. It so happens the company was about to deliver one of its jet aircraft to the Venezuelan Air Force in late May or early June.

In the agreement NBC struck with the ferrying company, the pilots would fly the early kinescopes to North America, drop off the film while making a refueling stop in Boston and continue on to Venezuela. According to Reuvan Frank’s article, “Getting the ferrying company to move the delivery date to June 2^nd was much easier than Colledge anticipated, although he later remembered one thousand pounds changing hands…”

On June 2^nd, over twenty million viewers watched live over the BBC as Queen Elizabeth II was crowned in a service conducted in Westminster Abbey. In the U.S., the “Today” show went on the air at 5:30am EDT to begin coverage in any way it could. It relayed the BBC’s radio coverage and still pictures using a device called “Mufax,” a wire transfer machine that would relay still images in only nine minutes.

By 7:30am EDT the ceremony film was processed and cut. Once the films had been packed, the Royal Air Force jet delivering the CBC (and those from CBS and NBC) could begin its 2,480 mile journey across the north Atlantic to the Americas.

But before that aircraft was able to take off, bad news was getting out about the NBC Venezuela jet that had gotten underway at 6:24am EDT. After about two hours into the flight the jet had to turn back to London due to fuel line problems. Luckily, NBC continued with the arrangements for the P51 to pick-up the footage from the morning ceremonies merely as a backup plan.

The race would start at Goose Bay. The Royal Air Force jet fighter took off at 8:46am EDT and landed in Labrador at 1:45pm EDT. The British jet was unloaded. The CBC films were loaded on the Royal Canadian Air Force jet fighter and took off for Montreal arriving at 3:45pm. The CBC technicians would start the BBC kinescope program after they had finished their coverage of the Canadian celebration emanating from Ottawa.

Walter Cronkite telegraphed the CBS group aboard the Stratocruiser to let them know the status. It was addressed to Sig Mikelson who was the first president of CBS News and wrote the book “The Decade that Shaped Television News.” Mikelson wrote he was among the group along with Ed Murrow, Don Hewitt, Bill Lodge (VP of CBS Engineering) returning aboard the evening plane trying to make a 10:30pm EDT air-time. They had just joined the British flight crew in toasting their new queen when they received the wire that NBC’s Venezuelan jet was returning to London with a fuel line problem. Now they only had to sweat out the airplane race to Boston. They probably refilled their glasses again to toast that De Bona in the CBS P-51 would succeed.

About this same time, the two P51’s took off for Logan Airport. The CBS flight got underway first at 2:02pm. NBC started out behind as its P51 didn’t get in the air until 2:15 and had problems with icing. As the minutes ticked by it became obvious the NBC flight was not going to catch up to the CBS aircraft.

In the CBS converted aircraft hanger, the personnel were hearing the NBC plane wasn’t making good time. And in the makeshift offices of NBC, as reported by Reuvan Frank, “the gloom was thick enough to touch.” Then there was an idea. The idea went up the chain of command until it reached Charles Barry, NBC’s Vice President for television programs. As Frank described it, he reached for a telephone and secluded himself under a desk in the back of the control room. He called Robert Kintner, the president of ABC. “If I pay for your line charges from Montreal, may I share the lines with you?”

They haggled while precious minutes crept by and then Kintner gave in.

Mikelson wrote that on board the Stratocruiser they were calculating when ABC would be getting to the actual crowning. They would be running the CBC feed which was uncut from the BBC feed. “It was a reasonable certainty that CBS would show the Archbishop of Canterbury placing the crown on the Queen’s head before the CBC version reached that point.”

At 3:56pm both ABC and NBC switched to the CBC’s Ottawa program. It was 4:16pm before the CBC switched to Montreal and the BBC London footage finally began to roll on North American television screens. It should be pointed out that neither the CBC nor the BBC had any pressure on them. Both of them can more aptly be compared to the USA’s Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) than to the U.S. commercial networks.

At Logan International, CBS’s P51 landed at 4:13pm and the network went on the air with its edited BBC kinescope footage at 4:23pm. Broadcasting magazine said, “…that its telecast gave the American audience its first view of the actual Coronation rite” even though it was last getting the program on the air.

So, who won?

Well, technically, nobody did. After all, when it came down to the broadcast of the coronation and crowning, all NBC had done was abandoned the P51 and take the feed from ABC who was rebroadcasting the Canadian Broadcasting feed who in turn was only running a kinescope of the uncut BBC live feed. CBS was the only network to run its own edited version.

If anybody could justify saying they won, it would be ABC who let the British and Canadians handle the whole show. And they were magnanimous about it.

Both NBC and CBS placed full-page ads in the New York Times the next day bragging about how they brought the coronation to the U.S. first. From NBC’s claims “First Pictures” (the wirephoto stills from the Today show’s Mufax machine) to CBS’s claim “…the best medium to stage a spectacle is the best showcase for a product. There’s crowning success for both on television’s most popular network.”

ABC kept their advertisement in the trade press. In Broadcasting of June 15^th, 1953, they lauded the British for their restrained and reverent coverage of the event and praised the Canadians for their efficient and speedy delivery. ABC said, “if we can take credit for anything, it’s the fact that we brought this nationally important event to America efficiently, effectively and economically.” The ad wraps up by saying they think “the crown for coronation coverage should stay in England and Canada. It doesn’t fit right on our American head.”

In December, 1953, the Sylvania Television Awards singled out ABC-TV, BBC and CBC by honoring them for Timely News Coverage for the Coronation.

In a post script, years later, Charles Colledge found himself in London at a dinner with a BBC staffer he had gotten to know. Frank writes, “Colledge asked him why the BBC had the plane ordered to return. [The BBC staffer] did not deny that it had. He said only: “To protect our Canadian coverage.”

Nobody knows where the edited program that NBC had sent with the Venezuelan jet ended up. According to Frank, “The two or three people who saw it said later it was a wonderful program…The film was never found, the program never shown.” To this day it is still missing.

Midge Costin’s directorial debut is wonderful in touching on how the human element has evolved. If you haven’t read Woody Woodhall’s interview with Midge Costin you should take the time to learn about what she and her team worked to create. For my part, I wanted find out how the technical parts were finally brought together.

Audience’s and critics alike are in love with the film. It pulls back the curtain to reveal to many audience members how film sound has “grown up” over the years to become an art form in its own right. Costin refers to the seventies as the quantum leap. “I love the fact that sound is getting attention… we’re so not used to it… it’s so unusual.”

Through interviews with people that were there and using films that will be familiar to the audience, it breaks down the process of how today’s film sound tracks are created. Costin said, “We intentionally made it for a general audience but also so it would be entertaining and educational for a fairly savvy film audience… I think people are pleasantly surprised… that it is quite entertaining but has educational value.”

She swiftly takes us through the invention process that leads up to the point where film sound moves from an unwanted stepchild and brings it to modern day when sound got “bigger.” But a lot of the early developments had to be covered quickly to keep it in a film that is limited in its acceptable length. Costin told me, “I knew I wanted to make a ninety minute film because I am of the belief ninety minutes is the human attention span particularly for a documentary.” With 90 interviews generating almost 200 hundred hours of material, needless to say, much had to be relegated to the cutting room floor.

There wasn’t very much in libraries or archives about sound. Costin said, “When we started to research we realized there was hardly anything about the first generation of sound people.” In the early days, there were many technical developments but again, the time available in the film was working against them. Costin added, “We spent the last half hour on what people do today, how we break things down – ambience, foley, sound effects and dialog. I thought that was more important than going through the history.”

A lot of designing and inventing happened during the early days. People involved were inventors trying to solve problems. The nuances of quality would have to wait while they figured out just how they were going to merge the media. Walter Murch describes in his first words about film sound – “they start as two different technologies.”

While not meant to be an in depth treatise of the subject, hopefully this article will augment the background information mentioned in the film.

In 1877, Thomas Edison began work on developing the phonograph. With his recording of “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” the sound revolution began. But the public became bored because the quality didn’t advance beyond its early stages.

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The initial phonograph easily recorded music or a human voice via a horn connected to a diaphragm. The diaphragm was connected to a needle that scratched on a piece of tinfoil wrapped around a spinning disc. Lifting the needle, moving it back to the beginning and restarting it allowed the listener to hear what had just been recorded. After his initial success Edison lost interest in the project and did not improve it. “The tinfoil tears easily and reproduction is distorted and squeaky.” Edison moved on to another project – developing the New York City electric light and power system.

In 1879, Alexander Graham Bell got involved. His father in law, Gardiner Hubbard, was president of the company that had purchased the Edison phonograph patent and was having problems with finances due to the inattention of Edison. Bell was looking for “new worlds to conquer” and Hubbard got him interested in making improvements to the phonograph. In 1885, when they were sure they had a number of practical inventions they filed applications for patents. The Graphophone patent was one of them. The Graphophone was now on a flat disc rather than tinfoil rolled on a tube.

Edison always wanted to team the sound and picture together. Costin said, “He [Edison] did the moving pictures to go along with the phonograph.” He had one of his laboratory assistants, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, go to work on building a motion picture film camera. In 1894, Dickson, building on the work of Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne Marey (two other early motion picture camera inventors), unveiled the Kinetograph. Several other European inventors applied for patents before Edison did for similar designs. Because Edison had the camera built to work as an adjunct to his phonograph, there was no projector. Instead it was a “peep-show” device. Try as they might, no one was ever able to find a way to sync up the phonograph to the kinetoscope until Walter Murch finally did it digitally in 2000.

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According to the Library of Congress, Edison continued marketing the Kinetoscope to run continuous film loops in amusement centers. When sales slowed in 1895 due to the popularity of the growing projection technology showing silent films, Edison introduced the Kinetophone. It did bring Edison’s dream of uniting the motion picture with the phonograph (with audio connected to the first “ear-buds”). Yes, sound pictures were a reality. However, only one person was able to use a machine at a time, the device only offered recorded music when the picture started to play. Synchronization didn’t get beyond starting the two machines together. Costin adds, “They didn’t think about things running at different speeds so they could never sync it.” Ultimately it failed to find a market.

In 1895, C. Francis Jenkins and his partner, Thomas Armat, agreed to work together on a way to project the “peep shows” and by September, 1895, they demonstrated film projection at the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia, using their Phantoscope.

There are conflicting accounts of who invented motion picture projectors. It ends up in the courts and you find different names attached to it including Edison’s. But it is Jenkins who gets the recognition as well as the patent rights. Eventually, Associate Justice Alexander Hagner of the District of Columbia Supreme Court wrote, “The evidence filed by both parties, proves, as far as it proves anything, that Jenkins is the sole inventor…and it is so ordered.”

Jenkins agreed to sell his patent on the projector for $2500 to Edison/Armat. He was quoted as saying “…a person more experienced in legal matters would have seen the inevitable result of so unequal financial resources. It’s the old story over again – the inventor gets the experience and the capitalist the invention. I’ll know better next time.”

Even citing that as a given it must be pointed out that John Rudge, a magic lantern and instrument maker from Bath, England, was working on his Phantascope in 1875.

In a side note, Jenkins is also responsible for the founding of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (SMPE). Later, they would add Television to their name the acronym became SMPTE.

Either Armat or Edison changed the name to the Vitascope and marketed it aggressively. Before long, however, investors lost money due to the lack of availability of films. At the time there were only about twenty films and the resources quickly went dry.

Others demonstrated competing systems in 1896. William Dickson had consulted on the Eidoloscope projector and he left Edison’s employment on April 2, 1895. He was a participant in American Mutoscope and Biograph Company that opened in December of 1895. They soon became a major competitor to Edison. Dickson’s company, Biograph, was active until 1916 and released over 3000 shorts and 12 feature films.

Meanwhile, the Lumière Brothers had debuted their combined camera/projection system in Europe on December 28^th, 1895, but it had not yet been demonstrated in the United States. Vaudeville managers reacted to the positive response coming out of London to the Lumière Cinématographe and were about to invest in it. “Edison films initially featured material such as circus or vaudeville acts that could be taken into a small studio to perform before an inert camera, while early Lumière films were mainly documentary views, or “actualities,” shot outdoors” by their cameramen all over the world.

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Thanks to projection movies were able to take off. With audiences now able to see the silent films in a room that would hold as many people as would fit, it became a theatrical experience. Audiences were enamored of it. They started watching for films with their favorite performers. Names like Chaplin, Lloyd or Gish were sure to fill up the house.

Just a note about silent movies. They weren’t really silent. From a piano player in a small town to full orchestras complete with a sound effects crew in the larger cities, movies have always had aural accompaniment. The bigger the venue, the more elaborate the sound experience up to and including full orchestras or huge pipe organs. Even smaller venues could have a show with appropriate sound effects. All played live.

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“Around the turn of the century, films began developing a structure by stringing scenes together” into a narrative. “By 1916 there were more than 21,000 movie theaters in the United States.” “By 1929, more than 100 million Americans were going to the movies each week.” Most of the audiences were content with the intertitles and the music. But entrepreneurial inventors continued to research how to get the movies to talk.

But, as Walter Murch reminded us earlier, for sound to be joined to film, the technology would have to change. As it turns out, radio would be a driving force in solving film’s audio beginnings.

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In 1904, John Fleming invented the world’s first vacuum tube. Known as the “Fleming Valve,” it was meant to help distinguish telegraph messages. Dr. Lee DeForest began looking new uses for the Fleming’s vacuum tube.

There is much discussion pro and con about DeForest. He was a graduate of Yale University and had become interested in the work of Heinrich Hertz and Guglielmo Marconi. To some he is the “father of radio” and the “the grandfather of television.” To others, he was a person who claimed those titles for him self. In any case he is the one who holds the patents even if said patents are disputed by people around him.

Working from Fleming’s design, DeForest developed the “Audion” tube 1906. In later years when DeForest and Edwin Armstrong were involved in legal disputes over a patent, Armstrong was able to demonstrate DeForest “had no idea how the Audion tube actually worked.” But the Audion would ultimately play a role into sound-on-film research. It should be pointed out here that the amplifier DeForest had developed left a lot to be desired. It was only after AT&T through their Western Electric Laboratories’ engineering department greatly improved the amplifiers until they were deemed acceptable. Western Electric was able to rework the tube so it allowed for extending telephone circuits to run longer distances as well as other inventions like radar and early computers.

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But its contribution to movies was it allowed an amplifier to be put in place between the miniscule current being generated by a phonograph needle and, via an electromagnet, an amplified speaker system. At last the output could be amplified and film showings were not restricted to four or five people huddled around a horn attached to a vibrating diaphragm!

Western Electric wisely built their amplification system so it would adapt to any kind of input. No matter that the signal emanated from a phonograph disc, rotating cylinder or some other method coming directly off the film. While it was a leap forward, amplifiers only raised the volume so that people could hear it. It did nothing to clean up a noisy signal or bring the sound into synchronization with the film.

Later Western Electric married turntables to the film projector and synchronized them through a direct mechanical coupling. The exact start point had to be identified on the disc recording and “sync’d” to the corresponding frame of the film in the projector’s gate.

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In 1925 Western Electric tried to interest Hollywood in their system. “The studios that owned their own theaters were doing a good business with silent films” and were not interested. Only Warner Brothers was struggling and decided to take a chance. They released several experiments, usually short films. But on August 5, 1926, with the premiere of their silent feature “Don Juan” they introduced Vitaphone (a name derived from the Latin word “living” and Greek word for “sound”). The movie had a synchronized music and sound effects track. “There was no spoken dialog. The feature was preceded by a program of short subjects with live-recorded sound…”

It worked! The public’s interest in sound was piqued. The next year, 1927, Warner’s released “The Jazz Singer” and it broke box office records! Even though there were only 291 words spoken, it would go down as the moment the actors could emote with their voices in addition to their actions. “It established Warner Bros. as a major player in Hollywood and is traditionally credited with single-handedly launching the talkie revolution.”

Meanwhile, Dr. DeForest continued exploring ways to eliminate the synchronization issue altogether by putting the sound on the film itself. In 1918, drawings of his sound on film invention began to take shape. But again and again, DeForest’s attempts at converting sound to light and back again proved to be unsuccessful. His system, named Phonofilm, suffered from poor quality audio. He needed help.

In 1921 he approached Theodore Case (an engineer who had a track record with the Navy in converting sound into light and back again) suggesting they collaborate on Case’s Thallofide cell for the sound experiments. Case had his own company Case Research Lab (CRL), and worked out of his own home in Auburn, New York. By late 1922, CRL had invented the AEO (Alkaline, Earth, Oxide) tube, a light that could react to variations in sound waves. Case used it to record the sound directly to the film and used the Thallofide cell for playback.

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But in 1925 Case severed his ties with De Forest over non-payment. He also complained De Forest withheld credit correctly identifying him as the inventor. Case went on to patent his own versions of the systems. He sold these patents to Fox Film Corporation. Fox established the Movietone system and used it to produce newsreels and eventually features.

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By the end of the decade, RCA would release its sound on film system called RCA Photophone. (The Case and Deforest systems were “variable density” and RCA’s was “variable area”) Both systems were in use for “almost 50 years until optical based sound film exhibition was superseded by other technologies.”

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Sound in motion pictures increased their popularity but they took awhile to get up and running. “Revamping a single theater could cost $15,000 with more than 20,000 movie theaters in the United States” the cost becomes staggering. A lot of infrastructure needed to be built both at the studios and in the theaters. Studios continued releasing silent pictures or pictures with synchronous music. A few would have dialog but not through the whole film.

The next step would be stereo. While preparing an elaborate edition of one of his “Silly Symphony” cartoon series, Walt Disney met with conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski, in late 1937. As the project came together it mushroomed into a full-length feature. Stokowski had participated in experimental stereophonic recording in 1931 and 1932. Disney directed that his studio engineering team lead by William E. Garity should research stereo sound. Garity looked to the RCA Manufacturing Co. to get involved and Watson Jones joined the team. The original orchestral recordings were mixed down to three main tracks along with one control track. These tracks were used in the final road show exhibitions. Time magazine reported, “The music comes not simply from the screen, but from everywhere.”

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Unfortunately, due to the setup time required, only legitimate live theaters in all but one location in the USA qualified to run the film. The installation and testing of the “Fantasound” equipment required too much time for film theaters. At the next Academy Awards ceremonies “Fantasia” was awarded a special Oscar in recognition of the film’s sound. But it never caught on because the system was so unwieldy and ended its run in 1941. RKO acquired the distribution rights to “Fantasia” and re-released the picture with a monaural soundtrack.

After World War II, television drove many of the format changes of theatrical films. The producers were under the gun to counter television with anything they could come up with to lure audiences away from their living room TV’s and back into the theater. Wide screen, 3-D, 70mm and big sound were the most popular.

In 1952, the release of Cinerama had similar sound disadvantages to “Fantasia.” Cinerama was shot with three cameras and gave audiences sweeping views and the feeling they were in the picture. In addition to the majesty of the huge images, Cinerama also used multitrack magnetic sound with seven tracks – five speakers behind the screen, one for both sides and one in the back of the auditorium. “Cinerama was a popular novelty, but its costs were prohibitive and the process was abandoned in the 1960’s. Later references to Cinerama were essentially a one-projector 70-mm variant on the anamorphic Cinemascope process.”

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Fox complemented its wide screen film “The Robe” (1953) with a stereo sound track. “The Robe” went with four channel sound. The print had three channels of magnetic for left, right and center behind the screen and one optical channel for the effects in the house. Fox’s first problem was there was no monaural or back-up channel. Because of this, it was limited to a small number of properly equipped “road-show” theaters. Also, the format required the sprocket holes on the prints be reduced in size making the “film more prone to wear and damage.” These two factors made it an expensive proposition for the studio.

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Likewise, Warner’s experimented with 3-D and multi-channel sound with its second 3-D feature “House of Wax” that premiered on April 10, 1953. It was married to a stereo magnetic track that provided the left, right and center channels originating from a separate machine running in sync with the projectors. The fourth channel was an optical monaural channel running from the right projector for off screen effects located on speakers around the house (the left projector carried a mono optical track for back up or venues with no multitrack capabilities).

“Michael Todd working with the American Optical Company [to] give the audience the same effect as Cinerama with far less complexity” offered Rogers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma” to debut his Todd-A-O format in 1955. The film was shot on 65mm camera negative but released in 70mm. The extra 5mm was reserved for the six track magnetic sound down each edge of the film. Like Cinerama, five channels were behind the screen to accomdate the larger picture. The sixth track was for the surround. In some cases, Perspecta (a system developed for Paramount’s VistaVision format), provided a left, center, right surround channel by encoding tones in the channel.

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With the release of “Kismet” in 1955 most film features settled into a stereo magnetic and a mono optical track configuration. “The cinema industry did not see any new innovation until the seventies.” And that brings us back to “Making Waves,” the documentary.

Costin takes us back to the seventies with the sound background of films like “Apocolypse Now” to “Ordinary People” and connects them with the engineering developments they represented and the people responsible for those developments. For example, people ask her about the “Star is Born” segment with Barbara Streisand. Stereo had already been used as far back as “Fantasia.” But the film’s tracks were noisy (a low hiss was in each one).

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Dolby had been working with the music industry for quite some time. An engineer for Ray Dolby, Ioen Allen, thought they should get involved with sound for movies. Dolby agreed but when Allen approached the studios, it was history repeating itself. The studios said, “We don’t need it. Things are fine they way they are.” Just like when Western Electric approached the studio heads with the offer to bring them the capability of sound! One by one films like “A Clockwork Orange” and “Tommy” made changes in the way soundtracks were created.

Then Barbara Streisand came in with a “Star is Born” and, thinking she was asking for an ‘option’, she wanted the audience to believe they were experiencing a concert. Costin adds “Barbara wanted not just the music to sound big but wanted the crowd to sound big in those big halls and have the audience feel what it would be like to really be there.” Dolby noise reduction was the solution. It was the first time a film had two optical strips that contained a five channel surround sound encoded in it. Costin said, “She didn’t know she was asking for a change that would change the way films sound forever.”

“Making Waves” has been praised by Variety as being “lovingly directed by Midge Costin.” It’s as entertaining as it is educational. It will be available in February on BluRay or Apple streaming.

Who knew that from these auspicious beginnings would come one of the longest running television shows ever to grace the airwaves? It was on the air twenty years (1951-1971) and produced over 600 episodes. Unabashedly, it was a public relations propaganda vehicle and unapologetic thirty-minute promotion for Army recruiting.

The medium of television was still new. In those early days local stations had to fill up time. Local station management was always on the look out for not just good programming but also a way to fill their open time slots on their schedule inexpensively. And an Army documentary show would provide them a credit the Federal Communications Commission would look upon as “public service.” A free once a week thirty minute show that could be planted in the middle of institutional advertising at the beginning and the close of the program would go a long way to cover time that might instead just be a test pattern.

“The Big Picture” (TBP) came along at an opportune time. The military’s advertising budget was under scrutiny by Congress. Pentagon public relations faced cutbacks by the Legislature. Several long running military shows on radio had already been cancelled. Here was basically a program put together from hours of film that already had fulfilled its intended use. It seemed to be a way to generate good public relations and give a boost to the Army’s recruitment effort.

Significant film contributions from a large group of photographers from all branches of the service were assigned to document both World War II and the Korean conflict. The combat cameramen all carried handheld 35mm cameras throughout World War II and Korea and virtually all the film they shot was black and white. It allowed the cameramen to develop their film in the field before sending it back to their posts.

https://youtu.be/U2WMP7cdT94

There had been millions of feet of 35mm film shot by the Army Signal Corps over the course of World War II. The Korean Conflict had just begun and was adding to that total. After the military was done analyzing it, the films were archived and released to the press and the public. As Broadcasting, in describing the pictures that made up the primary show elements said, “Footage has originally served military purposes for combat reports and is produced at minimum expense.” From the Army’s perspective, they were looking for a concept that would get more mileage out of this library of film and turn it into a recruiting platform.

The beginnings of the show are hazy. Like a lot of new programs transmitted on early television, life began as a local program. Chicago’s WNBQ (WMAQ) had the children’s show “Kukla, Fran and Ollie,” and Cleveland and Philadelphia had teen dance shows “Upbeat” (WEWS-TV) and “American Bandstand” (WFIL-TV) respectively that ran for a local audience for their first year then went nationwide.

Several sources are credited from those early days. But according to accounts from U.S. Army Press Releases (two sources – Broadcasting and Billboard trade publications) the show grew out of not one but several local programs, both live and filmed, and broadcast on WTOP-TV (now WUSA-TV) or WTTG, both in Washington.

The first of the local programs on the air was “Crisis in Korea.” The Korean Conflict began on June 25^th, 1950. The television program premiered the fall of the following year. On Sunday at 1:30pm, October 7^th, 1951, the thirteen week local series began on WTOP-TV. The broadcast was produced by the local Public Information Office of the Military District of Washington. (Although the Korean conflict continues to be unresolved to this day, an armistice was signed on July 27, 1953. TBP provided several updates to Korea after the completion of the first 13 shows but it still is sometimes referred to as “The Forgotten War”). The film was coupled with live in-studio interviews with soldiers who were there.

The name associated with most of these early shows is that of Lieutenant Carl Bruton. Up until the Army started taking advantage his talents, Bruton had been with WTVJ in Miami, Florida. As the Radio-TV officer for the Military District of Washington (DC), Lt. Bruton began directing the local “Crisis in Korea” shows. Later on he produced and directed succeeding shows, “Meet the Troops” (also for WTOP-TV, February, 1952), 13 programs designed to give the public a close-up view of Army life and “The Blue Badge” (for WTTG (TV), May, 1952), a series of documentaries showing combat divisions in action during World War II. These local shows were meant to service both the heavy military population residing in the Washington area but also the civilian population as well. “Crisis in Korea” was the basis of the first 13 shows for TBP however the other two shows also contributed to inspirations after the initial Korea series came to an end.

But could the programs be a national show? As it would provide an outlet for the huge film library that continued to grow the cost would not be a factor. The local program had also received high Pulse and Hooper ratings (ratings services before Neilson’s). Public interest in the Korea campaign had the public’s attention across the country. In view of the high ratings, the attention of Colonel Edward M. Kirby, chief of the Radio-TV Branch, Office of Public Information, Department of the Army got involved.

Videotape was still almost five years away so the local program was being done live with film being rolled in on cue. At this time, no kinescopes have been discovered which would counter this. Image degradation of the combat footage would happen if kinescopes were involved.

Given the state of the art, the only answer was to reshoot the interviews and opens and closes on a sound stage using 35mm film. This would tie the interviews together seamlessly with the original 35mm action footage shot by the combat photographers.

Enter the Signal Corps Photographic Center (AKA the Army Pictorial Center). In February, 1942, the Army purchased a film studio from Paramount Pictures. They opened the SCPC to train draftees to shoot documentation and make training films. When it opened three months later it became the home of Army training in everything photographic – from training combat cameramen to shooting training films on its many stages to editing and laboratory work. It became “home to filmmakers and still photographers who covered the war and who produced countless training films.”

The Paramount lot was a complete motion picture facility and a historic one at that. The Astoria Studios on Long Island opened in 1920 for the Famous Players Film Company later becoming Paramount Pictures Corporation. Adolph Zuckor, the legendary film mogul was the president, a title he held until his death in 1936. New York was the mecca for filmmaking in the silent era. It was home to actors Gloria Swanson, the Gish sisters (Dorothy and Lillian), W.C. Fields and Rudolph Valentino before they moved west.

When the “talkies” came in, the studio was able to draw from Broadway. The Marx Brothers made their first movies (“The Cocoanuts” and “Animal Crackers”) at Astoria while they continued performing on the Broadway stage. Astoria was also home to the Paramount short films division and Paramount Newsreels. By 1932, Paramount moved all studio operations to Hollywood and turned Astoria over to independent productions whose films were released through Paramount until the Army’s Signal Corps took over shortly after Pearl Harbor.

Under Kirby’s direction, TBP production moved from Washington to New York. To improve the technical quality of the program “the Army transferred the entire show – thirteen weeks of films and guests – to the soundstages of the Signal Corps Photo Center (SCPC) in New York, for distribution as a national film series” shot in 35mm and distributed in 16mm. Col. Kirby also became the liaison with the individual stations.

Supported by scripts written by the Radio-TV branch and using the production facilities the Army Pictorial Center offered from their motion picture studio, “The Big Picture” became a pilot season of 13 episodes about the onset of hostilities and resulting military activities in Korea.

https://youtu.be/CAT-Mw-xJNA

After assembling the TBP with appropriate footage from the archives and marrying it to the on camera portions, recording the narration and sound effects, laying in music stage, the completed 35mm film episode was reduced to 16mm and prints were made. Virtually every television station had at least one 16mm projector as part of their broadcast sources (called a film chain).

The release prints were not sent out on a one to one basis. Stations would have to “bicycle” the prints (Bicycle is a syndication term for shipping prints between television stations). Rather than have 60 prints made to send to all stations subscribing to TBP, lack of funds limited the number to 18 prints to be shared among the 60+ stations. Presumably that number increased as the station penetration grew larger.

In Broadcasting magazine Lt. Bruton is credited as creator of “The Big Picture” and stayed on as technical advisor as the production grew. But as the program evolved from a live/film local show to nationally syndicated weekly offering meant more hands needed to get involved.

Captain Carl Zimmerman was the writer and became the initial host for the first year of episodes of TBP. He introduces the film that in turn is narrated by an unidentified professional voice talent. Cpt. Zimmerman also does the interviews on the set with combat veterans who were on site in Korea at the activity being covered.

Later different hosts were added, most notably Master Sergeant Stuart Queen who began a long association with the program.

https://youtu.be/0Oy6XYyDPPA

TBP’s run began with its first station, WCBS-TV in New York City. The Federation Bank & Trust Co. sponsored the entire 13 week schedule. The first show was aired on a Sunday, December 30^th, 1951, from 2-2:30 pm. By January, 1952, fifty-one local stations had scooped the weekly offering up and were committed to carrying the show. Quickly the numbers continued to rise. By March 31^st, 1952, 83 stations (out of 108 licensees on the air nationwide) were airing the TBP show.

Week after week, TBP aired on as many as 366 television stations over the course of its run. Some markets, like Chicago and Baltimore, had multiple stations airing the program at different times a day and different days of the week. “Ratings as high as 13.5 have been achieved by the program.”

On the station side, the program offered the some ad revenue as well as some prestige, how could it not win? And add to that the good ratings it was getting considering the type of show it was and stations continued to sign up quickly.

When the truce was signed in Korea, coverage of the conflict would show up every once in a while. However, everything from the Boy Scouts to life in Europe to how the army designs and builds its munitions arsenal provided supplementary material that became worthy of a thirty-minute visit. Stories ran the gamut of possibilities. Every aspect of the Army involvement was fair game for the cameras.

As color television became more popular across America, the programs switched from black and white to a mix of color and black & white film. To save on the production costs of color, in house work used 16mm color stock for TBP assignments. In the sixties a new look for the open was designed and opened the program with a stylized world supplanting the original spinning globe and the “Big Picture” in bold letters.

https://youtu.be/xIIZeYsnaQU

After World War II and Korea, the Army Pictorial Center missions continued to be oriented toward training and generated approximately 300 to 350 projects in some phase of production per fiscal year with over 600 complete reels a year. Film was being processed at the rate of four to five million feet per month. In 1970 the Army phased out the Signal Corps Photographic Center and moved the facilities to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. The operation was converted to government owned and contractor operated.

The facility remains a television and film production center. Although when the Army declared it surplus in 1970, it took about twelve years to get reestablished. In the interim, some work was done and it was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1976. It took until 1982 to get title transferred to the City of New York and real estate developer George S. Kaufman in partnership with Alan King, Johnny Carson and others obtained the lease from the City. A list of many of the many film and television shows produced at the studio can be obtained here.

The Big Picture can still be seen via You Tube or through Amazon.com. Many of the episodes can be downloaded from the “FedFlix” archive. Some titles can be traced through this APC website.

Also, you can look up the segments that were hosted by names that either had earned or were about to earn a national reputation. That includes John Wayne, Lorne Greene, Vic Morrow, Audie Murphy and Henry Fonda. Dick Cavett had a bit part playing a cadet in an unidentified episode and Johnny Crawford who had played Chuck Connors’ son in the Rifleman but spent his Army time as an enlisted employee in the studio.

I should take a moment to observe that, even though many sites reference a network run either on ABC or CBS, “The Big Picture” was a syndicated program through out its lifespan. The network schedules I’ve researched back this up. If anyone has evidence to the contrary, please leave a comment on the article.

It was an extraordinary experience for the estimated 600 million people watching. Even Russia, the Cold War adversary still in competition with the United States, pirated the Eurovision feed and fed it throughout the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R).

That everyone was watching it happen live was also an awesome technical achievement yet to be topped to this day.

But the live visuals almost didn’t happen! From the mission planners at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to electrical contractors in Australia, many hurdles had to be confronted and worked out before the live images of the man’s landing on the moon could appear on television screens worldwide.

Incredibly, NASA had initially seen ‘no reason’ for any television pictures! It was argued in many meetings that a live television camera would take up too much space and weight to the spacecraft. It was also considered a distraction. Since it would provide doubtful scientific value to the mission it was therefore not initially considered as a high priority.

Taking pictures from space was nothing new for NASA. They had still cameras on every mission from the initial Mercury program, through Gemini and forward into Apollo. In those early days, film based motion picture cameras were stop motion and filled a diagnostic or research function. Their primary views were to assess the condition of the astronaut.

However, as early as John Glenn’s first orbital flight, a camera operated by one of the astronauts was brought on board as an afterthought. A camera “…was purchased in a local drug store and hastily modified so the astronaut could use it more easily while in his pressure suit… Photography was deemed nothing more than a recreational extra.”

NASA experimented with live television on one Mercury flight. Gordon Cooper’s Faith 7 had a camera aimed at him that was used for evaluation purposes. The Faith 7 camera transmitted one frame every two seconds, with a resolution of 320 lines. Also, the camera (with ancillary devices) weighed 17lbs. and consumed 56 watts during operation. NASA’s post flight report states “the quality and usefulness of its transmissions were not satisfactory.”

It wasn’t until Apollo 7 launched in October of 1968 that live video finally came on board successfully but only in the Command Module. In the initial phases of the mission, spacecraft commander of Apollo 7, Walter Schirra, nixed using the camera citing the workload they had been assigned and getting familiar with the redesigned spacecraft. But the next day the camera was brought out and it was obvious the crew had planned ahead even bringing out prepared cards for the entertainment of their “audience.” “Keep those cards and letters coming in, folks!” and “Hello from the lovely Apollo room high atop everything.”

Both Apollo 7 and Apollo 8 used a “Slow-scan” camera from RCA in the Command Module (CM). The engineers had to make the signal fit on the telemetry transmissions known as Apollo’s Unified S-Band system. Because they were not able to spare much space on it, they were forced down to 500 kiloHertz bandwidth resulting in a resolution of 320 lines at 10 frames per second, a third of what normal television operates at (Broadcast television at the time was using 6 megaHertz). NASA refers to this as Slow Scan Television (SSTV).

To convert the feeds to NTSC (the signals that television stations would be able to transmit), RCA built converters that utilized new experimental metal discs to record the scans and extend the output so it matched the NTSC rate of 30 frames a second. The units converted it to a usable broadcast signal by re-photographing it using an RCA TK-22 camera. The metal discs later gained wide acceptance in the sports production arena and became known as the first “instant replay” machines.

At the beginning of 1969, the presence of a lunar surface camera to be carried to the moon in the Lunar Module still had not yet been resolved.

According to BBC’s “Sky at Night” magazine, “…just months before launch, an emergency meeting – attended by every manager and a massive audience – saw ‘old timers’ fight for an additional TV camera.”

In January the meeting was held and according to Stanley Lebar’s interview with James O’Neal for TV Technology, “It was a big meeting – all the sub-system people were there, and all of the astronauts.”

The ‘old timers’ won. A second camera would be taken along with the astronauts. Television would be taken to the moon and the general public would be able to watch man take the first steps onto the lunar surface.

Lebar’s company, Westinghouse, had been awarded the job of designing  and building a small, lightweight camera to NASA specifications (Both the major commercial television companies, RCA and General Electric did not have a camera pick-up tube that would satisfy NASA’s deep space requirements). The Lunar camera manual can be found on this NASA website.

There was no Command Module camera on Apollo 9 launched March 3, 1969. Instead, NASA sent the new Westinghouse lunar surface camera up to do the tests of it in the Lunar Module (LM). Westinghouse provided a cable long enough to handle both spacecraft. Once the LM was jettisoned from the Command ship the camera went with it. The LM had to be jettisoned to make the command vehicle ready for the return to earth. It was the only test of the Lunar camera prior to Apollo 11.

On Apollo 10, NASA introduced a color camera for the CM. Like the smaller black and white Lunar unit, it was built by Westinghouse and was an update of the recalled CBS color standard (created by Dr. Peter Goldmark) approved by the FCC in 1950. As Stan Lebar explains it, the basically black and white camera had a small color wheel attached in front of the pickup tube. The tube was a development from the Vietnam war allowing very low light levels to make it easier to search for downed pilots.

When Lebar notified NASA he had successfully tested the camera, he was told to take it to the Goddard facility in Greenbelt, Maryland, and operate it. Houston set up a line with Goddard so they could evaluate it. Lebar says the best he could do on short notice was to use multicolored inflated toy balloons. The demo was a success. Tom Stafford, commander of Apollo 10, was a fan of the color camera. He “wanted people in the program and the American people to know how beautiful space was.”

With the Apollo 10 launch looming ever closer, Stafford wanted to get the color camera to the capsule and have it checked out before close out. On the “Live from the Moon” documentary, Lebar tells the story of how Stafford put the camera in his car, drove out to the pad, took it up the elevator and gave it to the team. When Stafford gave them the camera he said, “Here’s the television camera we’re going to carry. Test it for space and stow it.”

During the flight, Lebar watched the first use of the camera in the TV Pool control room wanting to know what the engineers, producers and directors thought of it. After a color close up of the astronauts they turned to him and gave him two thumbs up.

After Apollo 10 the Westinghouse color unit was made standard Command Module equipment on all future Apollo missions. But the Lunar lander camera did not fly on Apollo 10 since the LM was only going to be tested in flight over the moon and would not land. The LM had to be jettisoned to enable the CM to splashdown.

Regarding color, Richard Nafzger, Apollo Television Engineer, said, “We wished we could have [color] on the lunar landing but [black and white] was already set.” The lunar camera would need more time to work out the power and bandwidth issues. For the time being, the moon would have to remain in black and white for the first moon landing. Color for the LM would come later with Apollo 12.

Most of the moon’s downlink would be received in Australia. Nafzger related a story about the LM’s SSTV converter at the Overseas Telecommunications Commissions’ International Exchange in Sydney (referred to in the network as Sydney Video). Both Parkes and Honeysuckle Creek downlinks were microwaving their signals to Sydney. Honeysuckle had its own scan converter and was sending NTSC video directly. Parkes, however, was sending their SSTV footage to the scan converter in Sydney for conversion there.

A few weeks before the Apollo 11 launch, the Navy brought in an American standard power generator and wired it up. Australia power runs on 50 cycle/240 volts and the converter required American standard 60 cycle/110 volts. The team at Sydney Video had it running and was using it. When the weekend came, they shut down and on the morning they returned back from the weekend, they turned on the unit and got nothing but popping noises and smoke coming out of it!

It turns out someone over the weekend had noticed the wires weren’t run properly for an Australian installation and rewired to correct the “error.” Immediate calls to RCA in Camden, NJ, brought about $100,000 worth of equipment and several technicians to put the box right again.

https://youtu.be/UExTN3_UOIY

Finally, on July 16^th, 1969, Apollo 11 took off with two television cameras. One was the black and white one aboard the Lunar Module (tested on Apollo 9 – 6.5 watts and providing pictures in the slow scan rate). The LM, as discussed, was severely limited in its weight and bandwidth restrictions and had to be able to transmit the 500 kHz signal through the NASA S-band system. But the color camera on the Command Module (tested on Apollo 10 – 17.5 watts with a full 525 line signal) had adequate power to send back an NTSC signal in field sequential color (using 2 to 3 MHz bandwidth).

Only one color converter setup was installed for the network and that was at the Manned Space Craft Center. All Command Module video was sent back to Houston to this one color converter. It was modified to feed the combination of red, green and blue filters as a complete color image before outputting it as NTSC commercial video.

Once on the moon, Neil Armstrong descended the ladder. Before he started down, he pulled the cord to release the Modular Equipment Storage Area (MESA) that opened up a hole for the TV camera to shoot through. Once he got confirmation the TV was working, he continued down the steps.

https://youtu.be/CtwSgvstl8c

At this time, there were three tracking stations either in range or coming in range to receive Apollo 11’s weak signal from the moon. Had the astronauts followed the schedule, it probably would have been the 210 foot dish at Parkes from the beginning. However, the astronauts elected not to sleep but venture out onto the lunar surface. Houston gave them the go ahead. So Goldstone’s 210 foot dish was going to get the initial downlink.

The ground almost missed the first footsteps. Because the astronauts wanted to get to work right away, there were only two dishes in site of the landing position – Goldstone Tracking and Honeysuckle Creek’s 85 foot dish. Both had a good signal but in the case of Goldstone, the picture was upside down and got very high contrast. The site was having problems with their conversion scanner and was not ready. Parkes, the 210 foot dish, had to wait for the moon to rise into its footprint. It could not achieve a horizon line lower than 30 degrees above the true horizon. Only Honeysuckle was immediately waiting when Aldrin turned on the camera circuit breaker from inside the LM. Listening to the ground reroute the signal, one gets to hear them trying to get the best picture. As Armstrong steps off the LM’s footpad, it is Honeysuckle Creek providing the best picture.

As Goldstone moves off the path, the Parkes’ dish comes into view of the moon and they start receiving a signal. However, at the same time, the winds start to kick up and the Parkes personnel start monitoring the alarms. But the dish remains on target and at Sydney Video, Charlie Goodman asks Houston if he should switch the better signal from Parkes. “Please be advised I have a very good picture from Parkes, shall I give it to you?” Houston tells him to take Parkes and as soon as he does Houston says “Roger, beautiful picture, thank you! All stations we are switching to Parkes at this time.” After the moon walk is over, Houston radios “You might pass on to the Parkes people that their labor was not in vain, they’ve given us the best TV yet.”

Many of you, if you have seen the movie “The Dish,” may have noticed how closely this resembles what actually happened. Even to the winds kicking up as they moved the dish into position.

Sydney Video sent the selected feed to the Moree earth station and up to the Intelsat III Pacific satellite. That signal was received at the Jamesburg, California, earth station who in turn relayed it to Mission Control in Houston. With no reason to stop the information flow, Houston immediately relayed it to the world’s press and media.

Parkes and Goldstone are still on the network. But Honeysuckle Creek was dismantled in 1981. Economics and Honeysuckle’s isolated location necessitated changes and the dish was moved to the Deep Space Station at Tidbinbilla, Australia. Today, a park covers the grounds that used to be this Deep Space Station site. See the pictures that honor the point that brought the sight of man’s first steps on the moon to the rest of plant earth.

Looking back from 2019, everyone over a certain age can remember where they were and what they were doing when man made his first steps on the moon. As Dr. Eric Jones (observing at the time of Apollo 8) marveled, “Eight years earlier, flights to the moon were science fiction and here we were in our living rooms watching the lunar surface go by underneath us.”

This is a far cry from the glory days of the Drive-in. In the late 50’s, some estimates have the number of venues reaching over 4600. The drive-in is a uniquely American business and mostly mom and pop operations. While other countries have copied them, their numbers fall far short of America in its heyday.

From the introduction of home video equipment and cable channels in the late seventies to the most recent cost of conversion from analog (photochemical film) to digital (disc or server based) have been cited as reasons the drive-ins are going out of business. Obviously, these are contributing factors. But the sharp downturn over the years is due to multiple factors many having nothing to do with technology.

The migration of populations from city to suburbs, the cost of the land as those suburbs became more valuable, the building of malls with movie theaters making them convenient to suburbia, the limitation of drive-in hours to after dark and how daylight savings time made that worse, cars getting smaller because of the cost of gas, multiple gas crises as a reason to not even start the car at all, even down to neck rests blocking the back seat view all provided reasons to stay home and caused drive-ins to close permanently. In Beaver Falls, PA, even Mother Nature got involved when a tornado hit the Spotlight 88 Drive-In. Life in America was changing and drive-ins, by their very nature, could not keep up.

On June 6^th, it will be ‘National Drive In Movie day’. It celebrates the first opening of an installation that made it easy for families to go to the movies and dating couples a private place to either experience the movie or each other. According to DriveInMovie.com, “June 6^th, 1933, Richard Hollingshead opened the first, permanent drive-in theater in Camden, NJ.” He was granted a patent in May of 1933 and a month later he opened the first drive-in and called it the Automobile Movie Theatre. Hollingshead never made any money off his idea and sold it to a new owner who changed the venue location.

The next year, 1934, a second drive-in was to open in Orefield, Pennsylvania, and had more luck than Hollingshead’s project. This year celebrates the 85^th year of continuous service from Shankweiler’s Drive-in “making it the oldest continuous operating drive-in in the world.” Shankweiler’s has changed owners a number of times, but it has never been closed for a season.

DriveInMovies.com says, “…with any luck, the number of drive-in theaters in the U.S. will increase this year for the first time in decades.  While one year does not make a trend, it would certainly be refreshing to see this authentic American past time make a comeback.“

DriveInMovie.com maintains a database to all currently operating drive-in theaters in the world as well as a list of closed theaters.

From a technical standpoint, drive-ins have not changed that much over the years. Sound was the initial challenge. In the beginning years, theater owners tried keeping the speakers near the screen but not everyone liked keeping their windows open. The cars in the front complained about how loud the film was. The cars in the back could barely hear and, depending on how big a parking area it was, the sound would not be in sync with the picture. Also, there were complaints from the developing neighborhoods in the homes nearby.

RCA came to the rescue. In 1941, they invented the drive-in car speaker system that would deliver the sound to each individual car. Each speaker had a volume control and so each car could adjust the sound to the liking of the occupants. Complaints from growing suburbia went away but new problems came from customers forgetting to replace the speaker back on the holder. They would start to drive away with it still hanging in the car window.

As car manufacturers began to offer more sound options as standard equipment, the 1970’s brought the car radio into play as an important part in delivering the soundtrack to the customer. They kept some of the speakers on the poles so they didn’t have to turn away customers during the transition. Eventually, the problem of forgetting about the speaker in the windows became a thing of the past.

Initially, standard AM radio low power transmitters were used. As film progressed to higher quality soundtracks, drive-ins began to use FM and its stereo capabilities. Today, almost all theaters transmit their sound via FM Radio. The first drive-ins to use FM generally meant a transmitter that was intended for the home theater rather than a professional venue. But some companies are filling that void with professional gear to deliver a reliable, full fidelity signal to the customer.

In the beginning, going to the movies meant getting dressed up to go out on a night on the town (Yes, people did that in the 50’s and early 60’s). Drive-ins provided America with the option to just get in the car and go. Their kids could come in their pajamas and curl up with blankets in the back seat. In fact, the kids were welcome! Usually to go “in town” to a movie required the family hire a babysitter (adding another cost to the evening). At the drive-in the kids usually got in for free or at least at a reduced rate. “Come as you are and sit in your car” was the way the newspaper ads put it.

When television first started draining off the audience and keeping people home, the theaters had their first modification crisis as wide screen productions became immediately popular for films. All the more elaborate drive-in screens from the early fifties currently in existence have “wings” added to them to accommodate the conversion from Academy ratios (1.33:1) to most of the wide screen ratios.

In the seventies and eighties the advent of cable TV, satellites, and VCR’s were the first challenges faced by drive-ins regarding the state of the art of technology. Now families could just stay home to watch a current movie. The whole family could be in their pajamas and no one would care!

The cable into the home first provided HBO then Showtime with movies just out of the theatre circuit. These were the days when the movies opened in the bigger cities and got to the drive-ins three weeks or more later. About the same time the movie was getting to your local drive-in, HBO was starting to play it out to your TV set. (A serendipitous note here – HBO began its life on November 8, 1972 in Wilkes Barre, PA, just a little over an hour’s drive from Orefield, PA, where Shankweiler’s Drive-in was located).

Then the VCR’s came on the market. In 1975, Sony launched its Betamax recording system. Two years later, the VHS (for Video Home System) format came on the market. Initially, the cost for these units was considerable ($1000 or more was not unheard of) but the prices quickly dropped. It wasn’t long after that local shops began to pop up carrying movies for rent. These, like the drive-ins, grew out of mom and pop entrepreneurs. Pick-up a couple of movies on the way home on a Friday evening and you have programs for the kids and for mom and dad to watch after the kids had gone to bed.

Speaking of getting the kids to bed, one reason VHS won out over Betamax wasn’t necessarily just because it could record a two hour full-length movie (Betamax tape maxed out at just one hour). As Wired magazine reported in their June 4, 2010, issue, “Sony reportedly would not let pornographic content be put on Betamax tapes while JVC and the VHS consortium had no such qualms.” Drive-ins did get involved in showing X-Rated product, but they also faced an outraged public over it since their screens could sometimes be seen outside of the confines of their parking lot.

About this the same time, the drive-in on the outskirts of town discovered it now was in the middle of several new housing developments. Couple this with families facing gas shortages, multiplexes springing up in the new megamall and developers lusting after the huge lot of land just sitting empty most of the time and closures seemed inevitable.

It wasn’t until the conversion to digital brought the prospect of redoing all the technical equipment that the last holdouts started throwing in the towel. The projectors and sound systems had lasted so many years by just keeping up with the maintenance. Changing over to file based systems required more than just a state of the art projector (although that was a major financial consideration). Overall, each screen was going to require $60,000 or more! By and large, these owners didn’t have deep pockets. If they weren’t owned by a large multiscreen operation that could amortize that size of an investment, they were likely not to make it!

One that is surviving is the Rodeo Drive-In in Bremerton, Washington. Their location was built in 1949. Since 1986, the Rodeo has been owned by Jack and Cindy Ondracek and family. According to their website, “Today, with three screens and a car capacity of 1000, they are the largest outdoor theatre complex in Washington State.” In 2012, they converted all three of their screens to digital. They tell their story of the conversion here.

As other operators who had been around since the 50’s or 60’s were getting older, they were looking to find a way to retire. If a property management group came calling and offered up to $500,000 to buy the drive-in (for its land value), most of the operators saw it was a way to retire comfortably. As digital moved forward they could no longer get product from the distributors. It was time they put up the “Closed Permanently” sign. Before long a real estate developer called on them with a substantial check in his hand for their property.

It was easy for the developers to erase all vestiges of the theater. The only substantial demolition required was tearing down the concession stand and, depending on the venue, the screen. Many screens were just attached to wood poles or a few girders for support. If they were more elaborate, it might take longer. The rest of the property was at most asphalt parking spaces.

Of the venues who did manage to ante up the conversion costs most are still with us. While the days of over a thousand venues are permanently in our rear view mirrors, the industry believes there is hope for a resurgence. We need to have something to show what life was like when the boomer generation left their homes in pajamas, cuddled up in the backseat and watch the latest Disney film under the stars.

For a nostalgic trip back in time as well as an analysis of the drive-in phenomenon, a documentary was produced in 2014 about drive-ins. “The Definitive Story of the American Drive-in Movie” was directed by April Wright and is available on DVD in stores and via several streaming services.

The 1936 Olympics games in Berlin, Germany, would be the first international television sports event. Despite all the hoopla being spewed out by the German propaganda machine during the games, the television pictures being transmitted and recorded were not entirely of German design. Up until the early 30’s, Germany was attempting to improve mechanical television to a watchable state. The 180 lines at 25 frames was to have been the bridge between the mechanical system and fully electronic television. Germany claims the “world’s first electronically scanned television service” beginning in 1935. The two German manufacturers represented – Fernseh AG and Telefunken – did indeed design the equipment to a large degree. However, the internal cores of the cameras (that were now electronic) were designed by U.S. Companies – Farnsworth’s Image Dissector tube was at the heart of the Fernseh AG’s units and Vladimir Zworikin’s Iconocope tube converted the pictures from photons to electrons in the Telefunken cameras.

Following a trip to Europe in 1934, Farnsworth, the “wunderkind from Utah,” secured an agreement with Fernseh A.G. to exchange television patents and technology to speed development of stations in their respective countries. In wouldn’t be until 1939, after the lawsuits generated by RCA finally conceded that Farnsworth invented the camera that was the basis of electronic television, that licensing agreements would be generated and for the first time David Sarnoff would be paying royalties.

RCA was active with Telefunken who licensed and demonstrated a camera influenced by the Iconoscope tube. In licensing the Iconoscope technology from RCA Telefunken made improvements in the camera technology, but did not use the smaller super iconoscope as others have reported.

There is some conjecture regarding the replacement of the iconoscope tube in Telefunken Olympic camera cannons. In a document written by Christine Heimprecht “Fernsehkamera – Dr. Walter Bruch und die Olympiakanone” the claim is made the use of a “superikonoskop” was developed and used in the Telefunken cameras at the Olympics. However, there is documentation that the improved iconoscope wasn’t available until the later days of World War II and was developed for use in television controlled guided weapons. [Please see Peter Scott’s entry on the Early Television Foundation’s website.]

According to the documentary “Television Under The Swastika – Unseen footage from the Third Reich” (Spiegel TV 1999), there were only three electronic cameras (2 Telefunken and 1 Fernseh A.G.) available for the games assigned to the Olympic Stadium. A control room had been designed and built at the stadium site so there was no “OB” (Outside Broadcast) unit. Any camera that could generate an electronic signal was probably connected to the lines that criss-crossed the Olympic venues and sent back to the control room.

The two Telefunken units had limited mobility and spent the “full 16 days in largely fixed positions on the south side of the Olympic Stadium at track level.” Other than changing lenses and panning and tilting, there couldn’t be a lot of movement. There was nothing like the miniature cameras, zoom lenses, mobile camera cranes or flying cameras we are familiar with now. Bobby Ellerbee from the “Eyes of a Generation” website states, “…the Telefunkens appear to have zoom lenses, but they’re not. There were several fixed focal length lens options that could be changed out (a 2 man job), and we can see an example of that in the telephoto lens shot. They have placed the focus mechanism on the outside of the camera instead of inside, and are already using cradle heads instead of friction heads.”

The third camera, the Fernseh, A.G. unit, located at the Olympic Stadium is shown here from a “Wireless World” picture as part of their August 21^st, 1936, coverage of television at the games. There is no reference to it directly but the assumption is made that it was fed through the control room operating in the Olympic Stadium. It spent 13 days at the Olympic Stadium and 3 days in Dietrich Eckart Open Air Theatre. Ellerbee describes the Fernseh AG unit as a “roving camera.” Given the available pictures that would seem to be the case.

Fernseh AG did have an OB van – of sorts. It was referred to as the “intermediate-film process.” This was a unique machine. The unit had a 35mm film camera installed on its roof. On the top of the camera was a feed reel of 1300 meters (about 4200 feet). The camera would have to be restricted in its pan and tilt movement due to the process involved. The exposed footage passed out of the camera through a light-tight conveyer, down through the pedestal and the roof of the van into a processing tank.

The film “was immediately developed, fixed, washed and given a preliminary dry. The film negative whilst barely dry, was scanned by a flying spot scanner and turned into a positive for transmission over the air.” The “flying spot scanner” was equipped with a Farnsworth image dissector camera. Now as an electronic signal it could also be connected to the lines available at the Olympic venues and sent to the stadium control room. “Fernseh overcame the Image Dissector’s need for very high light levels to perform adequately” by providing a consistent and adequate light via the scanner.

In reviews, it is apparent the sound track on the intermediate-film process suffered due the haste to get in on the air in minimum time. Since the telecine point took place when the film was still damp from the drying stage of the processor, the sound track appeared to be impaired by “the rapid developing, fixing and drying processes.”

Wireless World alludes to a “long film transmission” to recap the day. It does not stipulate if the film originated with the Fernseh intermediate film truck. It just states the films “were not specially selected for television purposes.”

In addition to the “Intermediate Film Camera,” there is also a reference to an Iconoscope based camera that is not part of the Telefunken complement. It was built by German Post Office engineers and was stationed at the Swim Stadium for the duration of the games.

Since all the television facilities were operating at 180 lines at 25 frames a seconds, there is no reason why the Fernseh units couldn’t be tied into the control room and cross-cut with the Telefunken units. Although, according to David Large, author of the “Nazi Games: The Olympics of 1936,” “They used three different types of TV cameras, so blackouts would occur when changing from one type to another.” We don’t know that the Germans had figured out how to lock to one sync source to lock each camera. It wasn’t until 1951 that RCA started marketing their Genlock unit and caught up with the process of locking two disparate sources.

Two cables were energized for the telecasts to feed the Witzleben television transmitter from the opening ceremony to the closing ceremony with a main and a backup cable.

The name of the station broadcasting the Olympics was named the Paul Nipkow Television Station in honor of the designer of the scanning disc, the heart of mechanical television. Nipkow had studied at Humboldt University of Berlin and years later the Third Reich saw the propaganda value in claiming television was a German invention.

At the receiving end were various installations. Up to the beginning of the Olympics, television technology was being pushed by politics in the interest of showing how the country was making strides in improving daily life for the German people. Though the only people who had television receiving sets were engineers and some of the political elite had their own sets. However, “there were no television receivers on sale to the general public.”

Prior to the Olympic Games the public could view television at “seven public viewing rooms in Berlin and one in Potsdam.” The viewing rooms could accommodate 30-40 people. When the games commenced the “plan was to have 25 rooms and two theaters, one seating 100 and the other seating 300 people, to be available during the games and extending as far as Leipzig.” Also, the Olympic Village had one in its recreation center.

“It was sometimes harder to get a ticket to get into one of the television rooms in Berlin than it was to go to the stadium itself,” according to author David Large.

The technology had progressed to the point that an upgrade to 375 lines interlaced could have taken place ahead of the games. But 180 lines non-interlaced 25 Hz frame rate was a well engineered legacy left over from the mechanical television system age. The manufacturers of television receivers were reluctant to suddenly make major upgrades to 375 lines with so little time to prepare for it. In addition, the Wizleben/Funkturm transmitter was fire damaged less than a year from the beginning of the Olympics. It was replaced by another 180 line unit to insure its readiness for the games.

Eventually, the Germans upgraded to the 441 line rate in February, 1937. “Curiously, only a few weeks after RCA had also increased to 441 lines.”

https://youtu.be/3exBWIwrvsE

The prewar Olympic telecasts that have survived over the decades since television’s introduction to Germany represent a sampling of the barely discernable to better than passable of the era. However, it did provide substantiation to the government promise going forward – it had succeeded and claimed credit in bringing television to the country – and to the world. But what else was true was that it was based on work going in other countries, notably Great Britain and in America, and how much they contributed regarding invention and innovation. Television was already a blossoming international industry. But with all its claims of being first, Germany’s national radio and television organizations ceased operation in the fall of 1944.

In an article written in 2008, Chris Bowlby of the BBC explained how the Olympic torch relay was created as an innovation of the Berlin games “to project the image of the Third Reich as a modern, economically dynamic state with growing international influence.”

In less than five years, all worldwide work on television would be halted as the world was plunged into dark times. Borrowing from Bowlby’s article, “No matter how great the emphasis on the torch as a bright sporting symbol… amid the political wrangling and media hype, less welcome historical ghosts are running alongside.

It can be said the quote is apropos for television as well.

Urban sprawl (the growth of the suburbs) and expanding families only added to the studio’s problems being dealt with at the time. There was also the Blacklist, Supreme Court decisions regarding ownership of TV stations and theaters and the abolishment of the studio system. Families were electing to stay home and watch a tiny flickering image coming into their homes for free. As televisions continued to go from furniture store showrooms to home living rooms by the thousands, Hollywood realized they had to find something to make movies stand out from their nineteen inch screen competition.

So what could they control? How could they beat this new technology? What would lure people out of their homes into a theater?

Interestingly, reading through the materials preparing this article, it seems all the technologies had already been designed and built in some way shape or form. Beginning in the early fifties, the film studios tried to find ways to gain back some of its audience using “new” technologies. Some of the methods had been around since the teens and the twenties. But with the new sense of urgency, inventions the studios had previously ignored now became viable.

Thirty-five millimeter (35mm) had been around since the late 1800’s. But eventually, in 1907, the motion picture industry standardized 35mm by international agreement as the professional film gauge. It was also agreed upon that the filmstrip was to be vertically photographed and projected, that each frame was to be four perforations high on both sides and that the projected image should have an aspect ratio (the width of the screen divided by the height) of 1.33:1. This ratio was recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and became known as the Academy Standard. However, as sound came in the Academy Aperture was adjusted to 1.37:1 to allow space for the optical sound track while remaining very close to the original 1.33:1 silent screen shape. In remained unchanged until the 1950’s.

When the National Television Standards Committee developed its standard for black & white television in 1941, it was decided to carry the same 1.33:1 ratio over to television and broadcasting in the United States.

As the second half of the twentieth century began, Hollywood was treating the movie going public to films that were bigger than they had previously experienced and had more “gimmicks” associated with them. “The film industry had three major campaigns involving technical advances with wide-screen experiences, color and scope,” as referenced by Tim Dirks in AMC’s filmsite.org. These were: Cinerama, 3-D and Smell-O-Vision and CinemaScope. Let’s take a look.

The biggest (and longest lasting) of these were the wide screen presentations. The screen grew from its 1.37:1 ratio to several widths depending on the studio or production company that was releasing the production.

The first release of a three camera process was “This is Cinerama.” It was a travelogue designed to keep audiences glued to their seats as they experience a roller coaster ride, a flyover of Niagara Falls and water skiing show from Cypress Gardens. Since it required three complete projection booths and space for a seven-track surround sound system very few Cinerama theaters were built.

In fact, the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood was completed about the same time Cinerama gave up on the three strip process and converted to the single strip Ultra Panavision 70mm. Its first showing under the Cinerama banner was of “It’s a “Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” in 1963. The theater’s Cinerama three strip projection system was never completed until about 50 years later so it could show Cinerama productions in their original format.

Wide screen actually goes back to just prior to 1900 when the designers of the Magic Lantern Shows reproduced still images noticed that if looking at the screen was like looking out a window then they should be able to “fill the entire field of vision with an image, an even greater experience sense of realism would be experienced.” Charles A. Chase designed and patented the “Electro Cyclorama” that he demonstrated over the following decade beginning in 1894.

Wide screen moving pictures got their start in 1927 with the release of Abel Gance’s “Napoleon.” The production illuminated three normal film screens and projected them side-by-side. For the finale, all three were locked together for one wide, sweeping vision. For the earlier reels, the left and right frames portrayed scenes meant to complement the action in the middle screen.

Gance’s “Napoleon” (and a later effort – Raoul Walsh’s “The Big Trail” in 1930) were judged to be “uneconomically viable” for their time but their visions would later set the stage for the Cinerama experience.

Cinerama was invented by Fred Waller, who developed a five camera version of the system named the Waller Gunnery Trainer to train air crews for World War II flight missions. At the time, the Gance “Napoleon” film was considered lost so Waller could only have known about it from a historical perspective.

The Cinerama process was very popular and brought in crowds of filmgoers to experience the magic. By 1963 it had evolved into a single strip of 65mm film shot using Panavision’s Ultra 70 format. Only two narrative films were shot using the Cinerama three camera process (“The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm“ and “How the West Was Won”) before they converted to the Panavision format and single strip 70mm format.

Another reinvention from the past was Professor Henri Chretien’s principle of anamorphotic (later to become anamorphic) photography to demonstrate refinements he had made to an 1897 design by Ernst Abbe. In 1927, Chretien appeared before the Societe Francais de Physique to describe his lens called the “Hypergonar” that “would compress an image, twice as wide as it was tall into a standard film frame when attached to normal camera” mount.

For years, Chretien’s lenses languished in storage. Then in December, 1952, Spyros P. Skouras, president of 20^th Century-Fox, marked the beginning of the modern anamorphic format when he bought the Hypergonar lens and it became Fox’s entry under its trademark name “CinemaScope.” The Fox Movietone spot mistakenly called it “3-D without glasses” although the ad campaign modified this to “The Modern Miracle You See Without Glasses!”

In 1953 Fox premiered the film “The Robe” in a 2.66:1 format. Fox licensed the process to other studios including Columbia, Warner Brothers, Universal, MGM and Walt Disney Productions. According to widescreenmuseum.com, “No other technical advance in the history of motion pictures, including sound and color, gained such a high degree of acceptance among American film makers in such a short period of time.”

Theater owners were provided instructions from 20^th Century-Fox on how to properly set up the system including the larger screen size.

Paramount came up with its own system. In response to Fox’s CinemaScope, they created VistaVision. In 1924, J.H.Powrie, who worked on color for still cameras came up with a frame size of 50 x 38 mm (running the film through the camera sideways with sprockets on top and bottom). In 1953, it would resurface as VistaVision on Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas.”

Unlike many of the other studios embracing CinemaScope, Paramount sought ways to improve overall picture clarity and definition on bigger screen sizes. “Paramount technicians, working with Eastman Kodak, determined that the large format negative, when printed down to standard 35mm provided a vastly improved image on screens up to 50 feet wide.”

The public responded to the wide screens bringing audiences back into theaters that had the capability of showing these wide screen miracles. The studios responded by producing films with the kind of scope to do the huge pictures justice. “How the West Was Won,” “The Robe,” and “Strategic Air Command” were just a few examples of pictures justifying what the audience came to see.

Then there were the gimmicks.

3-D keeps coming and going and never seems to catch on. It first was experimented with in 1922 with a feature length piece titled “The Power of Love.” The film used a dual-strip anaglyphic stereoscopic process (the left component is a contrasting color from the right component). Red is usually used as one of the components. “It is the only commercial film produced in the dual-camera, dual-projector system developed by Harry K. Fairhall and Robert F. Elder.”

In 1952, United Artists released the first full-length 3-D feature sound film “Bwana Devil.” A cheaply-made jungle adventure where its taglines advertised “A Lion in Your Lap and A Lover in Your Arms.”

In 1953, 3-D spanned different genres. There were Musicals (“Kiss Me Kate”), westerns (“Taza, Son of Cochise”), science fiction (“It Came From Outer Space”) and thrillers (Hitchcock’s “Dial M For Murder“). Horror was lead by Warner Brothers “House of Wax” with horror master Vincent Price in the first 3-D horror film to be in the top ten of box office hits in its year of release.

Just as suddenly as it appeared the 3-D fad was over. The last of 50’s productions appeared in March of 1955 with Universal’s “The Creature From the Black Lagoon.” Although the 3-D effect was unable to overcome the inferior quality of most of the films and theater owners were not happy about the goggles or cardboard glasses worn by the audience became expensive as it was difficult to get cinema-goers to give them back.

The audiences found the glasses unpopular and clunky and complained about how the viewing experience was blurry for them. Many people complained about headaches on nausea. But the root cause of the failure was a matter of synchronization.

If the two pictures were out of sync either through the film or the shutter, the audiences would experience anything from eyestrain to headaches and upset stomachs. Technicians looked at the various installations and found numerous cases where on film had been put out of sync because of a splice not made correctly to both prints or that the shutter on the projectors did not match. In both cases, the human eyes send the images to the brain and it tries to resolve the problem. In worst case scenarios headaches and nausea would be the result.

The final nail in 3-D’s coffin came May 19th of 1954. “Audience in Philadelphia shunned the opening day of [Hitchcock’s] “Dial M for Murder.” Warner’s had been the last hold out but with that development, all requirements for 3-D bookings were dropped. In their headline, Variety of May 26th stated, “3-D Looks Dead in the United States.”

Other gimmicks surfaced a little later. A couple revolved around the olfactory impressions of a film. Critics have complained about having to sit through a “stinker” but Smell-O-Vision and Aromarama provided a variety of smells to choose from. Again, combining film and scents is believed to have been invented in 1906 when a theater owner used a fan to send the smell of rose oil during footage of a Rose Bowl parade. Walt Disney also experimented with use aromas but abandoned them due to the high costs involved.

Smell-O-Vision was an invention funded by Mike Todd, Jr. in 1960. Only one production was made – “Scent of Mystery.” Smell-O-Vision is on Time magazine’s Fifty Worst Inventions list. Likewise, Aromarama didn’t score any points with the reviewers. They weren’t major players in the ‘Hollywood pushes back’ game since they surfaced several years later in the late 50’s. They are included since the invention was a track on the film itself that cued what scent to release.

William Castle was a pioneering horror director in 1958. He turned out low budget thrillers that had some kind of gimmick associated with them. The only one that was cued by the film was in “The Tingler.” It starred Vincent Price who was trying to cure people of parasites hiding at the base of their spines. The only way to kill the lobster like infestation was by screaming. The name of the invention was Percepto and was activated at the point the parasite gets loose in the cinema. When the audience member feels “the tingler” at work, they were advised to scream at the top of their lungs. Several stories say the system (built from surplus aircraft parts) worked and others say it was a total bust. In any case, it was another gimmick.

By the time these oddball gimmicks came on line, the battle to bring back the audiences was all but lost. Hollywood studios resorted to the old adage, “If you can’t beat’em, join’em.”

Once it became evident television was going to be around awhile, the studios, shut out of owning stations, figured out they could diversify. They licensed their films for broadcast, opened record labels and created theme parks to generate income. Going forward, television would become the Hollywood studios biggest customer filming and selling television shows!

While attracting audiences back to the theater had only lukewarm results, the film industry, by redirecting their output, did succeed in killing off live television. Live shows that were cancelled made way for a filmed program shot on studio lots. “Live from New York” quickly became “Filmed in Hollywood.”

Over time, through mergers and acquisitions with help from changes in the rules of various government agencies, the two industries have melded into one. In the United States alone, CBS Corporation owns the CBS Television network, CBS Films and has a joint venture with Warner Brothers in the CW network. Comcast owns the companies NBC and Universal Studios. The Walt Disney Company now owns the American Broadcasting Company and Walt Disney Studios. A deal to also include 20^th Century Fox Studios in that mix is expected to close by June, 2019.

The winner of the battle over the who gets the biggest audience may turn out to be an industry that didn’t even exist in the 1950’s – Digital Streaming. Netflix and Amazon are becoming bigger powerhouses. The New York Times probably summed it up best in their Disney-Fox merger article, “Disney is acknowledging that the future of television and movie viewing is online.”

“In New York, people are buried in snow,” announced Professor Charles F. Holder at a Club meeting, “Here our flowers are blooming and our oranges are about to bear. Let’s hold a festival to tell the world about our paradise.”

In 1925, the first wire photo pictures were transmitted and readers could see the pictures in the same week as they were taken. The New Year’s Day tradition had been born.

It took a while longer to get the American football game underway. The early “tournaments” were about jousting, foot races, polo, tug-of-war and chariot races. But American football eventually made its way into the celebration after taking several years to change from chariot racing. In 1916, the tournament became the annual football contest between the best of the Pacific Eight and the Big Ten football conferences. It was played in Tournament Park, the site of the chariot races.  Eventually it became the ultimate site of the Rose Bowl. It also helped the tourist trade that Hollywood was a just few miles just down the road, too!

Interest in the parade lingered on the newspaper pages and in the theatrical newsreels. The football game should have garnered more excitement but it did little to overshadow the parade event. But newspapers nor the newsreels could do it justice. Even with Warner Brothers/Pathe exhibiting a special color newsreel, only a few select highlights could be shown. Those putting up with snow and ice in the Midwest and the east could only imagine what experiencing the parade would be and the event continued to capture the world’s attention.

Then on New Year’s Day, 1940, television made its first appearance via Don Lee’s experimental television station W6XAO (the station’s experimental call letters assignment) lead by engineer Harry Lubcke. In 1930, Don Lee (who already had established a network of radio stations) wanted to develop a television station in Los Angeles. He hired Lubcke to be his Director of Television and Lubcke quietly started making major strides it bringing television out of the laboratory and into the home.

Ed Reitan was an electronics engineer with a keen interest in television. In comments he made to the Early Television Foundation he stated, “The telecast was on a rare rainy day so the iconoscopes would have had sensitivity problems.” But acknowledgement of the pick-up came from owners of some of the few receivers in the area. In his article for the SMPE (The “T” for television in SMPTE had not yet been added), Lubcke observed “At home [TV] receivers seven miles from W6XAO it was possible to see the wet streets at certain camera angles before the announcer admitted it was raining.”

Incidentally, Reitan collected old television receivers and owned an RCA RR-359-B mirror lid model gifted it to him by a gentleman in Los Angeles who told him it was this TV he used to get his neighbors to come in on a rainy New Year’s day and experience the Rose Parade for the first time on television. So television ownership was already making homes popular!

For the parade that year, two RCA 500-A iconoscope cameras were setup on the Elk’s lodge roof overlooking Colorado Boulevard. They were equipped with 6.5 inch lens for wide shots and a 19 inch lens for close-ups. A master control position was set up inside the top floor of club. The picture in the SMPE article, it looks like an attic space. Lubcke adds, “The equipment was manufactured by the Radio Corporation of America and was the first set of the “suitcase” type that was constructed.”

Don Lee Broadcasting was affiliated with the nationwide Mutual Radio network who was going to cover the parade for radio listeners. W6XAO would have use of their feed. However, Lubcke’s article tells us, “There existed a dual problem in synchronizing the camera operations with word description of the event and the proper aural presentation for a nationwide audience.” The network announcers described the parade as they saw it. “It was necessary to have their description of a particular float end as the float reached the limit of the camera panning range.”

After the parade, W6XAO packed up their gear and left the Rose Parade. Lubcke was very busy moving their facility from the Don Lee Cadillac dealership to their new studio site atop Mount Lee above the Hollywood sign. And of course World War II brought many television operations to a halt.

Post WWII, W6XYZ was the first to commit to covering the parade as a yearly event. In 1947, KTLA’s commercial license would not be active until January 22^nd but General Manager Klaus Landsberg, noted for doing live remote broadcasts of many city events, wanted to get the parade on the air. The station had received new Image Orthicon cameras and they were sent out with the remote unit. Pictures provided from the new cameras would be finer and sharper then the capabilities of the Iconoscope pickup tubes.

From the beginning, the Rose Parade has been open to anyone who wants to cover it. Any of the local stations or their networks could take advantage of the entertainment being provided on the streets of Pasadena with no licensing fee.

And they did. According to the Los Angeles Times, beginning in January 1^st, 1948, the year after W6XYZ/KTLA covered the parade, W6XAO returned. Later, they would be licensed as KTSL and later become KNXT and KCBS. Later in 1948, two more Los Angeles stations signed on the air. KFI-TV (Later KHJ-TV/KCAL-TV) and KLAC-TV (Later KCOP) covered the parade the following New Year’s Day, 1949. A third station was also added to that line up. Coverage of the 1949 Rose Parade was the very first program KTTV aired.

In 1950, one more station was added. KNBH (Later KRCA/KNBC) signed on January 16^th, 1949, too late to cover the 1949 parade. In 1950 the NBC Owned and Operated (O&O) station came to Pasadena but only covered the event for the local Los Angeles market. And finally, KECA-TV (Later KABC-TV) would sign on and eventually cover the parade starting in 1951.

In that short time, all seven of the Los Angeles VHF stations either were producing or had produced live coverage of the Rose Parade. By 1961, there had been almost ten years when all of Los Angeles television stations were carrying the parade at the same time. There was nothing else on television in Los Angeles. And they were using separate facilities to do so. As a Los Angeles Times writer wrote “It will be impossible to get anything else on television other than the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Parade this morning.”

As microwave links became available, KNBH teamed up with KFMB in San Diego and KRON in San Francisco. At the 1951 event, KNBH transmitted the festivities live to both cities in the “first three-city hookup via microwave of a Rose Parade telecast.” But for the most part, this was like keeping it all in the family. The live signal could not yet travel beyond the Rocky Mountains. And as long as local advertisers were willing to foot the bill, the stations were happy to accommodate. However, the following year, all that changed.

In September of 1951, President Truman was seen live in the east as he spoke from San Francisco during the Japanese Peace Talks. AT&T had at last completed the transcontinental circuits (a combination of microwave and coaxial cable) and made live television available coast to coast. On the first day of 1952, the NBC network made the Rose Parade a nationwide program for the first time. Viewers across the nation watched enviously as floats covered with live flowers passed through sunny days.

The stations had to settle for black and white facilities as the color standard had yet to be established. Finally, in December of 1953, the Federal Communications Commission approved the RCA color method making it compatible with black and white televisions already installed in homes. Expecting a decision from the FCC at any time, NBC had already scheduled “experimental” tests of the system. The network had scheduled three programs (“Amahl and the Night Visitors,” on December 20^th, “Season’s Greetings,” December 22^nd and a holiday oriented “Dragnet,” December 24^th). These were run from its New York headquarters.

NBC also dispatched two remote trucks to be driven to Pasadena in time to make the color remote pickup.

When the decision came, the FCC scheduled an “effective date for commercial compatible TV January 22^nd,” but allowed that stations could begin airing shows without prior authority the day after the decision. AT&T had assured NBC the transcontinental line from west to east would be color ready by then but would not cover all the affiliates. About twenty-one cities would have access to the upgraded line that would allow them to carry the program in color.

All of this was for a non-existent color television supply that wouldn’t be available until about the middle of the year! But the public wanted to see it and the word (and the pictures) were getting out. There were many locations around the country that made it possible for the average consumer to see color television. From hotel ballrooms to furniture storefronts to newspaper lobbies, first-off-the-line color receivers were set up so the public would be able to view the live event.

Ed Reitan remembered his first color experience well. He was a youngster who, with his family, had gone to the Hotel Paxton through a “cold and overcast day in Omaha that did look black and white.” He described the moment he laid eyes on the TV screen, “it was color and it was gorgeous! – rich Technicolor reds, greens, and blues, from the Tournament of Rose Parade in sunny and bright Pasadena, California.”

Amazingly, NBC didn’t deliver color from the parade in 1955. As Broadcasting magazine reported, “NBC said in November that it was unable to ship a color remote unit to Hollywood from Brooklyn in time to re-assemble and test it properly before the events.” The year instead belonged to KTLA.

In a world without videotape what do you do for the viewers who get up late? You show the program over again using a different crew and facilities! Given the growth of the parade’s length some stations were airing the parade from different vantage points. The first production would take place a few minutes after the parade procession began. They would carefully time it so as one program ended the second would begin. The second coverage would commence toward the end of the parade route as the first units came into camera view. The stations carrying a second airing were still using black and white equipment. But Klaus Landsberg had ordered two RCA TK-40 color cameras early on. When they arrived, he outfitted a trailer for color coverage and stationed it near the parade’s finish line. The first coverage remained in black and white. KTLA used the same announcing team getting them to the second site with a police escort where they would add color to the later show and provide presumably higher audience numbers.

KTTV covered the Rose Bowl football contest the same way it had covered the Rose Parade – the first day of programing, but with a different set of announcers. They began doing repeats of the parade when the NBC network took over covering the football game on the same day it made the Rose Parade a nationwide experience. It was 1952 and was the year of the first coast-to-coast television broadcast of a football game. It should be noted that KTLA was first covering the a Rose Parade football game in 1948 and was bumped by KTTV the following year.

KECA also did an early and a late feed. In their case, they sold the live event to two different sponsors (they also had two different teams announcing it).

In addition to KTLA carrying the festivities in Los Angeles, they provided several feeds to other outlets. In 2014, John Moczulski , KTLA’s Vice President and station manager, told Kevin Downey of Radio/TVNewscheck “We also distribute our production to other Tribune and non-Tribune stations. Our production is also distributed to more than 200 countries around the world.” One group receiving the KTLA signal is the American Forces Radio & Television Service (AFRTS) operating around worldwide.

KTLA was also the first station to introduce stereo audio to its coverage in 1984. Now with HD, they have evolved it to a 5.1 friendly sound system.

KTTV went on to cover the Rose Parade until 1995 under several owners, Fox Broadcasting Company being the latest. In 1989, KTTV produced a version of the Rose Parade in 3-D with glasses provided by Coca-Cola company in Los Angeles, San Diego and Washington,D.C. The video was un-altered in other markets and glasses access was the key to watching the 3-D presentation.

Univision began to provide its own coverage in 1963. Up until then, Spanish language radio stations were coordinating with KNBH/KRCA/KNBC, KTLA or KTTV for feeds and inviting listeners to tune in to their radio broadcasts for the commentary. KMEX-TV is the local Univision affiliate in Los Angeles and produces the telecast.

In 1996, the first cable network joined the parade coverage. The Home & Garden Television’s (HGTV) first live broadcast was provided commercial free. The network repeats the broadcast several more times after the initial live airing.

The changing face of television was reflected on January 1^st, 1999 in the first High Definition coverage of the parade. It was KTLA who broke new ground by using Sony high definition equipment on board a production truck labeled HD-2 from National Mobile Television.

Latest addition is Skylink, a Chinese channel based in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Their live broadcast is in Mandarin and Cantonese languages. They joined the broadcast group in 2014.

Something struck a nerve back in 1890’s Pasadena that has resonated down over 130 years and doesn’t show any sign of letting up. The Rose Parade continues to evolve from its humble beginnings of dressing up horses and buggies. And television has been there from its own beginning and grown with it. The two are attached so firmly that they tower over any other event during the year. When I’m asked will television be around in the future, I have to answer “Yes! As long as we have New Year’s Day we will need some way to watch the Rose Parade!”

It didn’t take long after the war was officially declared over for TV license applications to begin showing up in the FCC’s mailbox. In those days after World War II, particularly in the Americas, there was a hunger to return normal. Before long, hundreds of the forms arrived with companies big and small wanting one of the very scarce number of allocated VHF channels. The FCC barely could keep up with the volume of applications.

Television would supply a diversion that was better than radio and movies. Unlike radio, you could see what was going on. Unlike movies, you could stay home to watch it. As television took off in markets where stations could be received, even if it was a snowy, grainy picture, sets started flying out of department stores. But before a national market could take advantage of that, TV stations needed to be built and put on the air.

Biggest of the yet untapped markets was Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In those early days, Pittsburgh would be the sixth largest behind New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Washington D.C. All of those cities already had multiple VHF affiliates on the air. In January of 1949, the struggling DuMont network lit up WDTV. DuMont was a small operation compared to CBS and NBC. At this point, they only had two stations – one in New York City and one in Washington, D.C. Pittsburgh would be their third (and most profitable) property.

In the FCC’s original allocations the city had been assigned four VHF channels (channels 3, 6, 8 and 10). The new owned and operated station would transmit on channel 3. In addition, the surrounding areas around Pittsburgh (known as the tri-state area where portions of three states converge) were allocated one channel each – Johnstown (ch.13), Altoona (ch.9), Erie (ch.12), Youngstown (Ohio) (ch.13), Wheeling (West Virginia) (ch.12). The local owners of the Johnstown station were authorized to use channel 13 and would go on the air only nine months after WDTV. There was nothing above channel 13. UHF did not yet exist.

Just before the Pittsburgh station went on the air, the FCC instituted a “Freeze” on all additional television channels in the VHF band (channels 2-13). Some were beginning to interfere with each other. And it became woefully clear the 500 plus channels would not be enough. The Freeze began on September 30, 1948, well after the approval of the Pittsburgh station’s license and the building of the physical plant was underway. In fact, less than two months after the Freeze went into effect the station was transmitting a test pattern. The Freeze was intended to last around six months but due the combination of complex problems to solve and the Korean War, ended up being kept in effect almost four years.

There was much hoopla surrounding its commencement of WDTV’s operation. It became the occasion of the “Golden Spike” for television, taking the name from the joining of the east and west branches of the transcontinental railroad at Promontory Summit, Utah Territory in 1869.

Just as Promontory Summit didn’t actually finish the job (Sacramento to Omaha hardly qualified as coast to coast), so, too, television’s Golden Spike only went so far. Yes, it did start in New York but in Pittsburgh it only linked up to include the Midwest (temporarily terminating in Saint Louis, Mo.). American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) still had a lot of territory to cover before they could start sending live pictures from New York all the way to the west coast.

The DuMont operation had virtually no competition. When the Johnstown station (WJAC) went on the air, it was in the fringe of WDTV’s viewing area in the Appalachian mountain range. Other applicants for stations would have to wait until the FCC could get a handle on the problems. In the meantime, WDTV kept the DuMont network on the air. According to Ted Bergman, president of the DuMont network, in Jeff Kisseloff’s book The Box, “Pittsburgh was terrific. It had a gross income of six million dollars and a net of four million dollars. It supported the network.”

While the FCC had several problems to consider, the most relevant to stations and their viewers was the lack of available channels and the interference. The Commission had predicted in 1945, “…the few available VHF channels were inadequate to provide a truly nationwide competitive TV service.” And the interference problems “had not been anticipated when TV broadcasting began,” Broadcasting Yearbook printed in its 1957 issue. Radio propagation in the forties was still an inexact science.

Once the FCC was satisfied on ways to deal with the issues it lifted the Freeze. A document named “The 6^th Report and Order” was handed down on April 14^th, 1952. The Commission dealt with the issues of color television, educational channel assignments and opening a new band of UHF channels for television to alleviate the “VHF only” problems. But the changes in engineering standards and the national assignment plan to prevent interference had the most immediate effect on stations already on the air.

The FCC created three geographic zones for the country providing for minimum separations for both VHF and UHF signals. The United State’s middle-east coast over to Illinois appeared in VHF Zone 1 with a few exceptions. This included the Pittsburgh station’s tri-state area. Due the presence of channel 3 allocations already on the air in Cleveland, Ohio, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Syracuse, New York, WDTV was going to have to change channels. On November 23^rd, 1952, WDTV moved off channel 3 to channel 2 and has stayed there ever since.

Further, the FCC wanted to protect stations not yet on air and refused to grant Pittsburgh licenses long after the 6^th Report and Order had come out. Because of the topography and the close proximity of major cities in the upper Ohio Valley it put those applications on hold.

On the same day WDTV went on the air, the Pittsburgh Sun Telegraph ran the story “Order by FCC Delays 3 Video Stations Here.” In the article the “persistent so-called freak conditions have brought signals into Pittsburgh from farther away then the FCC had originally estimated.” The Commission felt that grants of “the remaining channels in Pittsburgh may be assigned in such a way as to furnish interference-free reception throughout this district.”

Westinghouse Electric Corporation was headquartered in Pittsburgh. They were already sponsoring national shows that were getting noticed. “Westinghouse Studio One” on CBS television was contributing to the Golden Age of Television with live dramas like “The Laughmaker” and “Twelve Angry Men.” While WDTV cleared Studio One in Pittsburgh, the company grew impatient to have control of a VHF channel in their home market.

https://youtu.be/7DkI2I0W5i8

Westinghouse Radio Stations, Inc. was already an established entity that started with the historic launch of the country’s first commercial radio station, KDKA, in November of 1920. Within four years the company had licensed four additional radio stations. Westinghouse wanted more. Now they wanted to expand into television. Their first station was WBZ in Boston. To that they added KYW (formerly WPTZ), Philadelphia and KPIX, San Francisco.

Before the freeze, Westinghouse felt getting the Pittsburgh channel 6 allocation was a going to be a sure thing. The FCC, however, had other ideas. In issuing its mandates to cities around Pittsburgh to be sure further interference wouldn’t be a factor, the Commission moved the Johnstown channel frequency from 13 (clearing the frequency for WQED, Pittsburgh’s educational channel) to 6.

Then after the freeze was lifted, Westinghouse competed with other hopeful applicants to get the channel 9 allocation the FCC had added to the Steubenville/Wheeling market moved into Pittsburgh market. The Commission would not budge and channel 9 (WSTV) along with channel 7 (WTRF) were permitted to go on the air.

From there, Westinghouse appealed to the FCC to allow the educational station that would become WQED to share time with Westinghouse since at the time, educational television only transmitted programming during the day and not in the evening or on the weekends. Again, Westinghouse was denied.

About this same time, the first two UHF stations, WENS and WKJF went on the air thanks to the new higher frequencies the commission had opened up. Unfortunately, all the TV’s sold during the period up to then were VHF channel 2-13 only. The UHF signal could only be successfully received with an expensive converter and a second antenna. And there was no guarantee, because of the mountainous topography of the area, there would be a signal to be received. The public largely ignored UHF. WKJF, after less than a year, failed. This was not unique to Pittsburgh. UHF stations were failing all over the country at an alarming rate for the same reasons.

Clarke Ingram is a DuMont network and UHF historian. He provided more specifics to the situation. “It wasn’t so much that the FCC refused to grant Pittsburgh licenses and/or wished to protect WDTV’s operation, but rather that the two other commercial VHF channels in Pittsburgh (4 and 11) were tied up in competitive hearings and litigation for years.  Once the issues were settled, the licenses were granted.  (WENS, in particular, was very nettlesome to the grantee of channel 11, and finally had to be paid to go away.)” 

Once again, WDTV was left alone in the marketplace. WENS stayed on air but didn’t have a large audience. If you lived far enough to the northeast, you could get the Johnstown station or to the southwest the two new stations from the Steubenville/Wheeling market. They did provide an alternative but back in those days everyone’s antenna was pointed the other direction – toward Pittsburgh. Some homeowners installed another expensive extra – the antenna rotation remote control.

The FCC was now looking at the other VHF applications. Westinghouse was involved with the application process for channel 11. There were rumors that DuMont was having financial problems. Paramount Studios who had stock in DuMont had vetoed a merger with the ABC television network. A merger with ABC-TV would allow both companies to draw on their strengths. For ABC-TV, the DuMont television manufacturing business and for DuMont, the ABC radio affiliates. When the merger was voted down, DuMont was looking for an influx of cash and WDTV might have to be the source..

Quickly, the two companies met and came to an agreement. The asking amount was staggering for the time. During those early years, stations were bought and sold fairly routinely as the market went through its growing pains. But this one was for the record books. Westinghouse agreed to pay DuMont $9.75 million (almost $92 million dollars in today’s dollars). Needless to say, it was assumed the channel 11 efforts would be dropped in the face the news of the WDTV purchase.

On January 10, 1955 Westinghouse took over the DuMont property. A couple weeks later, on January 31, 1955, the legendary channel 2 local newscaster, Bill Burns, made it official changing the call letters from WDTV to KDKA-TV promptly at 12 noon.

After the change in 1956, KDKA-TV moved into the Gateway Center in downtown Pittsburgh. They had started with no studio at the beginning then moved into the Chamber of Commerce building. When they moved to Gateway Center, it was taken over by KQV Radio just as the rock and roll era was beginning. The new building is near where the Monongahela and the Allegheny rivers meet to form the Ohio in an area named Point State Park.

But WDTV (now KDKA-TV) continued on without any competition until 1957 when at last the FCC awarded Pittsburgh’s second VHF station license to the Pittsburgh Post Gazette and gave it the call letters WIIC and affiliated with NBC. A year later, Hearst Corporation received  the third VHF assignment with the call letters WTAE and affiliated with ABC.

As for the UHF stations, WENS held on the longest but in 1955, only about two months after the WDTV purchase by Westinghouse, a freak storm with high winds blew through the area and brought down their transmission tower. They tried to get back on the air through cooperative transmission arrangements with WQED, the educational outlet’s transmission facilities. Ingram added, “They [WENS] did return to the air, using a shorter tower. They limped along until August 1957, signing off the on the day before channel 11 signed on.”

Some closing post scripts to the story of KDKA-TV. That same storm that brought down the WENS tower also twisted the KDKA-TV tower to the point it had to be replaced. All that remains today is the first 160 feet of the free standing tower. The station continues to press it into use for other services as you can see from the picture.

Another part of the postscript is that within two years after the consummation of the sale of WDTV to Westinghouse, DuMont closed its doors for good and became a footnote in the growth of television in the U.S.

Westinghouse’s relationship with NBC went downhill over a deal to swap the Cleveland and Philadelphia stations. After the FCC got involved, KDKA-TV became CBS primary affiliate. In 1996, Westinghouse acquired CBS and KDKA-TV again became an owned and operated station, this time for its successful parent company, Westinghouse.

In the beginning, both films and television shows were viewed with very little on the screen outside the images a camera was able to capture. Something as simple as displaying a show’s title required planning and specialized work by several people called graphics artists in a department known as the graphics department. Going all the way back to silent film, the cards which spelled out the words the silent film stars mouthing were well planned.

Narrative film, whether for television or motion picture, still takes a lot of time to make titles and credits that are easy to read and still have the look that integrates them into the photographic style established for the overall project. Film, now electronically based, is influenced by the way television graphics are created as opposed to the early days when television graphics borrowed from and emulated film styles.

But it did take a while. The equipment did not come easily. Television since World War II went more than two decades before the hardware (and the software) was created to make electronic lettering approach typographical quality – easy to create and equally easy to read in those days before high definition. Any discussion of television graphics prior to 1970 must include a discussion of how engineers were able to combine two video sources together to form a composite picture.

Before the invention of videotape, television was predominately live which meant everything connected with a show was happening as the general public was seeing it. Naturally, that also included the titles, artwork that might be included as part of the program or story and the end credits. Exceptions were for filmed programs that were edited like motion pictures  and able to take the time to build their titles and credits using film techniques. Later, advertising agencies would pay to have animated openings made that would feature their product and allow the director to roll in a film threaded up on a nearby telecine chain (projection island).

Early television broadcasts, more often than not, added motion to their titles or credits from something as simple as art cards being allowed to fall one at a time (“What’s My Line?” closing credits), a paper roll unwinding in front of the lens (“What’s My Line?” main titles) or a setup using miniature models (“Texaco Star Theater”) or live models (“Queen for a Day”) placed somewhere nearby. These setups would be out of the way of the studio audience’s view in normal use. A television camera would dolly off to the side or off stage and, as a floor assistant executed whatever movement was to take place, shoot the main titles or end credits. Many of these were crude and appear off angle, sometimes running outside the frame or out of sync with the narration.

In the late forties and through the fifties, television technical directors experimented with superimposing titles over the live scene. They would carefully split the dissolve bar (or “T” bar) on early video switchers so pictures from two different sources could be combined on one picture.

While the purpose was achieved and the viewer was able to see both the graphic message and the picture that was behind it, the video level of the two sources could only total 100%. Otherwise, the switcher would be transmitting up to 200% video (something engineers were wary of). Care had to be taken in these early tools not to overdrive either signal.

As a result, the live camera usually dropped in brightness level while the art card showed through but was translucent. It took some ingenuity and creativity to make it work. The Fred Waring Show was an example of using an additive mix to its best advantage by building lighting effects into the show open.

Sometimes, the producers didn’t even try to hide the problem. They just embraced it as they did in the initial “What’s My Line?” program when they used the reverse – black letters with a white background.

Anyway you look at it, adjusting the video was still a flawed system. But after a few years, Radio Corporation America (RCA) engineers learned how to refine and advance the process and replace the super imposed video with a new process called the “key.” It was an improvement in the video switching equipment that allowed for the possibilities technical directors were looking for.

“Keying” refers to electronically cutting into the video and replacing it with video from another source. The “Key” can be generated from an art card (usually a black piece of cardboard with white letters hot pressed onto it under pressure and heated to fuse them together). The key allows a solid image to be seen over the underlying video without the background image bleeding through and becoming translucent or allowing changes in the brightness of the background. This would be an internal or normal key. By loading the complete title with a clean video image of the background onto a separate set of crosspoints (called a Mix/Effects bank), the key could be faded on (and off) by setting the switcher to dissolve from the camera to the M/E bank (and then back again).

On November 3, 2014, Bobby Ellerbee did a look back on his Eyes of a Generation website ending up with the breakthrough we’ll get into later in this article – the Vidifont character generator from CBS Laboratories. However, in the example below, Maureen Carney provides an early example of creativity going on in the local stations in addition the experimentation at the networks making good use of the key function..

The previously described setups were referred to as self-key, normal key or internal key. They all used material that was covering up the hole in the video to be the same material cutting the hole.

Several other iterations of the key became available about the same time as the electronics were all related. It could also describe a luminance key, but the blacks had to be adjusted and set up properly (below zero volts) ahead of time. Later on, when color became available, the hole could be filled with an electronically generated color source and became known as a matte key. And of course chroma key. Developed by Frank Gaskins, NBC Burbank’s technical operation supervisor and Milt Altman of the NBC graphics art department, it freed every weather person out there from drawing pictures on maps.

External key, usually available on the same switcher, allowed a third video source to cut the hole in the frame to place information. By adding an external source (normally a white on black drawing, shape or high contrast film), unique effects could be created.

Classic uses of the external key were revealed to the public on the Ernie Kovacs shows (covered in a previous article). Kovacs was one of the first creators to adopt the possibilities of video electronics to his brand of comedy. He used the medium to provide a style that was unique to television and not just a copy of a radio show or movies. Many of his tricks were accomplished through the use of external and luminance keys to pull off the “magic” he used on his shows.

But keying only provided an improvement in the signal. Expensive cameras that were expensive to operate were still required just to shoot art cards and graphics rather than following the action on the set. A live camera was still needed to capture the graphics whether in the studio, on a football field or at a political convention.

The political year was the problem for Rudi Bass, Director of Graphics Arts for CBS News. His desire was to be able to randomly access almost 4000 graphics for each of the two 1968 U.S. political conventions. And if someone interviewed a person not in the database, they would have to go without being identified graphically. On the other hand, many of the names would not be used but had to be in standby just in case. Bass writes about the creation of video lettering in the 1971 edition of The Journal of Typography.

Several companies were building graphics generators hoping the television creative community would embrace them. More would follow. Entertainment shows could continue budgeting a camera and a cameraman to shoot art card graphics. However, in news with its inherent time constraints, they were being used grudgingly.

Just being able to type information on the screen was not enough. Frankly, it needed to look like what the public was used to – professional typesetting they could find in movies, newspapers and magazines and every sign imaginable from billboards to street signs. Even the previously established television art cards had it. It was a step down. Generating it electronically limited television to looking like a computer screen. It just wasn’t natural.

The inability to change font styles generated characters that all seemed to be the same. Changing their size was complicated. The other thing was they all occupied the same width. Whether the letter was an “I” or a “W”, the space allotted to it was exactly the same width. On a credit sequence, it was not possible to create titles that were justified. “Justification” was a typesetting procedure. The old way, with the hot press titles, could do it but it ate up a lot of time and resources.

For example, if you had a lower third name that read “Vice President” (14 spaces) on one line and the name “Spiro T Agnew” (13 spaces) on the next line, you ended up with an extra blank space. If a period was added to the “T” it would use the same space as the “W” and really emphasize the problem.

CBS’s Bass approached Stanley Baron, an engineer at CBS Laboratories, the research arm of CBS. Baron explained the companies building character generators at that time all had “characters based on metric structures and none of them approached the quality of typeset graphics.”

The graphics units being manufactured and sold did not possess the unique abilities Bass and Baron wanted to design into their new character generator. CBS and NBC were among the early users. Major stories, such as the Apollo Eleven moonshot that landed two humans on the moon, used these graphics because they were able to easily type them in and have a graphic ready to go in minutes and not wait for a graphic artist.

Baron went about solving the problem and coming up with solutions. Finally, in the late sixties, based on the research he had done, CBS Labs gave the go ahead to build a feasibility prototype. In his paper, “Inventing the Vidifont: the first electronics graphics machine used in television production,” Baron explains how they solved the problems. In 1967, the prototype was demonstrated to visitors to the Labs. They were positive about it in their comments and believed a market existed. Would this make art cards a thing of the past?

However, Baron adds, “CBS management in New York was not convinced… a market existed for such a device and a request for funding development of a production model was rejected.”

He goes on to add, “Representatives of Visual Electronics showed interest in the Vidifont system… In response to Visual’s request, in October, 1968, I drafted a specification for a graphics generator based on the feasibility prototype.” The two companies entered into a partnership to take it to market. “Visual asked me to suggest a name,” Baron says, “The name I had been using for the feasibility prototype was “Vidifont,” an abbreviation of ‘video font generator,’ and that was adopted.”

CBS, Inc. changed the business model for the Laboratories and rights to the products produced by the Labs were sold to other companies. Eventually,CBS Laboratories ceased operations.

Vidifont was finally unveiled at the National Association of Broadcasters convention in 1971. It permitted production of messages from just a name in the lower third of the screen to long crawls for credits or story exposition. The operator could bring up various fonts in different sizes and mix them on screen. “Broadcasting” magazine on April 12, 1971 explained, “The system provides proportional character spacing, as well as character display color control on a word by word basis.”

The reaction of the attendees was very positive and created a lot of traffic for the booth. The Vidifont quickly established a market for electronic graphics generators that could do more than just put block letters on the screen. John Christopher Burns Design provides a collection of Vidifont promotional images showing what quality of typography owners could expect.

Systems Resources Corporation (SRC) had supplied a message storage device in 1969 to integrate into Vidifont’s off-line capabilities of composing and editing of displays off-line. The staff at CBS Labs shared SRC’s vision of Vidifont’s future, such as RAM storage of fonts, and how that would require further development of peripheral devices.

Since its creation in 1966, SRC had developed several innovative digital technology-based products. They entered the electronic text field providing airport flight schedule (arrivals and departures) displays in early 1970. In 1971, they added the Chiron and entered the broadcast market with a competing character generator with the Vidifont. SRC (Chiron’s) unit controlled the edging of the displayed characters in a manner that took background variables into account. Baron states in his article, “Over the next few years, Chyron came to dominate the market for electronic graphic generators” (When they brought out the new “II” unit, the spelling of the name was changed to ‘Chyron’)

Somewhere between March of 1973 and May of 1976, Thomson-CSF took over responsibilities for Vidifont. They made further upgrades but then BTS Television Systems took it over somewhere around July of 1993.

In 1986, Baron was invited to speak as the inventor of the first video graphics device at the International Conference on the History of Television. Originally, he was scheduled for 20 minutes at nine am. The session finally broke for lunch at just passed noon!

Baron’s article adds, “In 1992, The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences recognized the Vidifont with an EMMY award to CBS.”

In the years leading up to HDTV systems, computers began taking over all aspects of television production. The most obvious was graphics. Years before we had HD all that was needed to design and present high quality graphics was nothing more than a home computer with the correct software and maybe some hardware cards to help it along. But for those graphics to look really good professionals inevitably turned to the high end machines that made their graphics look great and made their jobs easier.