What I watched: The only surviving episode of NBC’s Eyewitness, which aired on February 26, 1948. The episode, hosted by Ben Grauer, is available on YouTube.
What happens: “The Story of Television” is a heavily narrativized recounting of the technological inventions living to television. It is hosted by Ben Grauer, one of the key voices of WNBT, NBC’s flagship station in New York, and one of the leading radio anchors of their station in the same area. Grauer was actually the host of NBC’s first public television broadcast from the 1939 World’s Fair. Here he demonstrates the skills needed to be a successful 40s radio/TV personality: a deep and officious man-from-nowhere voice, and the ability to sell whatever insipid dialogue he’s given.
Much of the program consists of dramatizations of vital scientific steps that contributed towards the invention of television. These dramatizations are all very cheesy, and mostly consist of Europeans who speak like Frank Capra protagonists explaining their inventions before lamenting that they cannot event more. This is a very teleological version of history, in which all of these different, somewhat disconnected inventions are all leading inextricably to the end goal of the 1940s television set.
In particular, one German scientist is shown who seems to have conceived whole cloth of the idea of transmitting images over radio waves, but just doesn’t have the equipment to do it. In this way, decades of stumbling in the dark are redescribed as an orderly step-by-step process to create television. This is finally all put together in the engineers by NBC engineer Vladimir Zworykin, who created the magic box you see before you.
What I thought: Selling television to America was a taller task than it appears in retrospect. This was, remember, not a population obsessed with new technology in the way we are today, and television was going up more established modes of entertainment such as radio and theatre. Spending a lot of money on a machine to watch a small and inconsistently scheduled amount of programming with poor picture quality was not an appealing decision for many. There was another barrier, however: many people did not understand how television worked, and hence distrusted it.
To tell the truth, I’m not sure how common a reservation this actually was. Today, we certainly have no reservations about using technology we don’t understand. But NBC obviously felt that a lack of technological understanding was holding the medium back, and created this episode of Eyewitness in an attempt to make the technology understandable for a public that was not scientifically literate. From what little information I can find on the series, the whole thing seems to be an attempt to demystify the new world of television. It was, I suppose, easier for people at NBC to blame television’s lack of penetration on fear instead of admitting their own programming was not all that attractive.
Eyewitness actually does a pretty good job explaining the technology in layman’s terms, and doesn’t sensationalize it in the way popular media so often does. If anything, it’s a little too genial, coming off as an in-class video. As history, however, it is mostly propaganda. The man commonly credited with inventing television, the excellently-named Philo T. Farnsworth, is not mentioned at all in this program. Instead, the bulk of the credit goes to an NBC and Zworykin. It should be noted that Farnsworth was in many ways a competitor to NBC, and that they had waged a decade-long legal battle over the patent to television before RCA/NBC had be forced to sign a $1 million licensing agreement with Farnsworth. The ulterior motive of Eyewitness, then, is to convince people that NBC had been right all along and it was really them who invented television.
This was the era of cheery and straightforward corporate propaganda, so it’s not surprising that NBC rewrites history in a way that depicts their own company as fulfilling the ambition that frustrated those long-dead Europeans out of the goodness of their hearts. In reality, much of the inventions and experiments that lead to television — most notably the development of radio, as Barnouw argues in Tube of Plenty — occurred not in corporate labs but in the homes of enthusiastic amateurs and marginal engineers, of whom Farnsworth was one. The monolith that was RCA/NBC had a vested interest in presenting the authorship of television as being corporate and not individual. Individual fiddling was all well and good for those frustrated nineteenth-century forebearers, but surely if they had been working under a benevolent collective like NBC they could have achieved their dreams much quicker.
At the end of the program, Grauer sums up the humanist theme which has been awkwardly stapled to this technical history: that all of these people followed their dreams despite the odds, and it created something remarkable, so you should follow your dreams too. Personally, I don’t know how many people dream of creating consumer electronics, but this is very much in line with the way people discuss technology in an increasingly mechanized world. Technological invention is often depicted as a flash of insight or genius, and the dramatizations in Eyewitness are of such moments. With that said, there is also a need to reinforce the capitalist narrative of striving for a seemingly impossible dream and achieving it with hard work and gumption. The ideology of free choice demands that we all follow our dreams, presumably so that we can see those who work menial jobs as simply uninspired and cowardly. None of this has all that much to do with science, which is a collaborative process involving more error than success, but with no narrative at hand that fits reality Eyewitness simply reaches for the old chestnut about following your dreams.
So did scientific education pave the way for mainstream acceptance of television? Probably not. This program would mostly be seen by people who had already purchased sets, after all. More influential was postwar prosperity, increasing availability and affordability of television sets, and the addition of regular programming that people actually wanted to watch. But Eyewitness is an interesting relic of an obsolete era, where television was still mysterious and new and no one had quite figured out what to do with it. In that, it ends up being a pretty interesting aid to history after all.
What else was on?: WNBT now had two competitors in the New York area: WABD, which aired a variety of short programming before a wrestling event that night, and WCBS, which aired a college basketball doubleheader featuring CCNY vs. Brooklyn and LIU vs. Seton Hall at Madison Square Garden. For the first time, I would probably change the channel.
Coming up next: We go high-culture with Alberto Toscanini.
The Eternal Couch Potato 