We've all seen those commercials on television that show the multiple images left by people or objects moving across the screen, so we see a continuous record of all the movements the person or object goes through. This multi-image scene gives us a record, or trail, back through a portion of time to all the changes that have happened. If your eyes worked like the film camera making those spots, you would see a time-trail going back over all the events of your life. You can expand this time trail idea to include things as well as people.
In a historic city like Boston, you'll find buildings that go back to the time of the Revolution. If you visit Paul Revere's house, you can imagine a long time-trail going back to that one dark night when he set out on his ride. Besides people and objects like houses, you can imagine a time-trail for some thing a bit more intangible. How about the local car agency that now covers a square block but started out twenty years ago across town in one small building? Here's a business which has been housed in different places and been different sizes, but it's been the same business all along. And that, of course, brings me to the point.
Broadcasting has a time-trail that stretches a long way back.
Right now you may see only your part of it, perhaps only a studio with a batch of machines you know you can run success fully. But what of all the other departments of the station? How did the news department get separated from the production department? Who first had the idea of selling something as intangible as time? Where did all the machines come from? If we follow broadcasting's time-trail back about a century, we can get some ideas of how it got in the position it's in now.
We'll find there are two distinct aspects to this trail, though.
One is the technical side, the development of the tools and gadgets and machines that give us sounds and pictures. The other side is how the technical materials were used-how stations were set up, how they were organized, how broadcast content was determined, how controls were set up, and so on.
But let's go back to the beginning of the trail and follow on up to the present day.
THE THEORIES AND THEIR EARLY USE
We can start with just one man-James Clerk Maxwell. He knew about electricity, knew that messages could be trans mitted across wires by Morse code, and knew still pictures could be sent over wire. With that knowledge, plus the knowledge of how light waves behave, he began thinking about how waves from the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum must behave. So in many senses, we can say the beginning of the broadcasting trail starts in 1873 with his publication of a paper describing the nature of radio waves. Until he explained what these wave ought to be, no one could do any experiments to see if they were this way. But once the paper was out, a man named Heinrich Hertz started experiments to test Clerk Max well's theories. In 1888, Hertz published his results and verified the predictions. The trail grew wider as more people started trying different things with radio waves. An Italian named Guglielmo Marconi developed radio as a medium to send messages. All through the early 1900s, he built transmission stations and receivers and set up companies. The First World War slowed all this and changed the ownership situation so that it wasn't until 1920 that we can say radio broadcasting really began in this country. True, in 1909, Dr. Charles David Herrold of San Jose, California reportedly distributed crystal sets to friends in his neighborhood and kept them entertained with music and news, but organized broadcasting came after the war.
KDKA, Pittsburgh, is most frequently recognized as the pioneer broadcast station. The station, operated by the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, began its operation on 2 November 1920, with coverage of the Harding-Cox presidential election returns. However, at least one station in Detroit went on the air prior to KDKA's first broadcast. A news paper, the Detroit News, chose the occasion of the Michigan primary elections on 31 August 1920 to begin operation of station 8MK. Another Westinghouse station, WBZ, Springfield, Massachusetts, did in fact receive the first commercial broadcasting station license authorized by the Department of Commerce and Labor under the Radio Act of 1912 on 15 September 1921. The license for station WBZ has since been moved to Boston.
KDKA was licensed on 7 November 1921. Station 8MK was later licensed under the call letters WWJ. All three are still on the air today, and that is no small accomplishment when compared with the fate of many of the early stations. Until the Radio Act of 1927, there was little control exerted over who could build a station and at what power and frequency a station could operate. Consequently, a great many people built "radio stations." By late 1922, there were no less than 600 stations on the air and almost one million receiving sets in American homes. Many of the stations were poorly equipped and mismanaged and suffered the life span of a butterfly. But in the following year, the first step was taken in developing something which was to prove more deadly to radio than all the poor equipment and bad managers around.
TELEVISION ARRIVES, RADIO GROWS
In 1923, Vladimir Zworykin patented something called the iconoscope. That was the first essential step in the development of television. Up until then, people had been trying to devise a mechanical way to send out moving pictures. Their efforts had concentrated on whirling discs with holes in them, so only a small portion of a picture would be visible at any one time. To see the whole picture, the disc had to go very fast and the picture had to be fairly small. Zworykin got away from the discs by breaking down a picture electrically instead of mechanically. He used something very small, smaller than any hole in a disc, to scan the picture-individual electrons. These electrons moved faster than any disc, as fast as the speed of light. So his iconoscope was a way to see a picture in bits no bigger than an electron and to see it very rapidly. Thus television got its first start. However, the American audience knew nothing of this.
They were just beginning to react to radio and by 1923 had only been listening for about three years. Already, though, they were becoming sophisticated and discriminating listeners. They were no longer intrigued with the magical talking box in their living rooms. No longer were they satisfied to turn on their receivers and listen to just anything. There was a clamor for higher-quality reception, and better and more regular programming. Most stations were not broadcasting regularly or for extended periods of time, had little power, and suffered from a high degree of interference.
The outcry for better programs was satisfied in 1926 and 1927 with the birth of the networks. Prior to 1926, radio had been something less than a huge financial success for station owners.
In fact, no station had finished a year in the black. It takes money, a great deal of money, to provide regular, high-quality programming. Without money, the normal program diet consisted mostly of lengthy interviews, lectures and discussions, plus some amateur musical talent. Virtually all station income was derived from advertising time sold to small local store owners. This started out as ads to come in and buy radios and only slowly expanded to other products. The large and wealthy national advertisers were not interested in expending their advertising dollars in small-time radio.
The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) began operation of its National Broadcasting Company (NBC) on 15 November 1926 with a twenty-five-station network extending from New York to as far west as Kansas City. On 1 January 1927, NBC established a second network. The two networks were designated NBC Red and NBC Blue so that telephone engineers could distinguish between them on routing maps. A third network, Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), began operation 18 September 1927. The first coast-to-coast network service was inaugurated by the original network, NBC Red, in December of 1928. A fourth network, Mutual Broadcasting System, initiated programming in 1934.
Because these networks were formed, radio could now offer the major advertisers the potential of reaching large national audiences. For the first time in history, a person's voice could be pitched the length and breadth of the nation. Advertisers decided it might as well be a sales pitch. Radio's total advertising revenue in 1927 was 64.82 million. In 1929, the total had risen to 626.8 million. This economic stability provided the base for a new level of quality programming.
In the late twenties and early thirties, the lectures disappeared; and quiz shows, dramas, variety shows, and situation comedies appeared. Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Eddie Cantor, Al Jolson, Will Rogers, Ed Wynn, and Fred Allen were household radio personalities. One program, "Amos 'n Andy," was so popular in the early thirties that it has been estimated it was heard in more than one-half of all radio homes--a total exceeding ten million. Soap operas became the back bone of daytime radio. At their peak in 1940, fifty-seven different soaps were on the air.
The other problem mentioned was interference. By 1926, stations were interfering with one another's transmissions to such a degree that in some areas, the audience could not tune their receivers to some frequencies without receiving interference from competing stations. The situation was so bad the broadcasters themselves asked the government to step in and set up some rules to control transmission. So in 1927, Congress passed the Federal Radio Act. Under its guidelines, the Federal Radio Commission (FRC) was formed to license broadcasters and regulate the assignment of broadcast frequencies and the power of station transmitters. It was this act which stopped the broadcasters from choosing for themselves the location from which they would broadcast, the power they would use, and even the spot on the dial where they would be heard. This act was modified in 1934 to establish a few more rules and a seven-man board called the Federal Communications Com mission. It's this body which still presides over radio and television today.
TELEVISION ADVANCES
Some of radio's big problems were solved, but what of television? Some people still thought that spinning disc was the big problem and went on working on it. As a matter of fact, a man named Chester Jenkins worked hard on it, eliminated a lot of the bugs and came up with a model he tried to sell in 1925. But clever as he was, that approach was a dead end.
The more productive research was electronic, using Zwory kin's approaches. At the telephone company in 1927, a man named H. E. Ives demonstrated how to get a moving picture from Washington to New York. He used the iconoscope to get the picture but, because he worked for the phone company, he used wires to send the picture up the coast.
But others were going a bit further-they were getting rid of the wires altogether. During the twenties, using the iconoscope, groups working for RCA, Westinghouse, and General Electric refined the pictures they could get from a crude 60 lines upwards into the hundreds. They also broadcast these pictures from one point to another without wires.
Ives didn't give up trying though, and in 1929, he showed something no one else could come close to matching. He sent pictures in color! He was still a phone man at heart though, because he was still using wires to send out the pictures. That, however, wasn't the path television transmissions were to follow.
Throughout the thirties, research centered on wireless electronic transmission. In the early part of the decade, a man named Allen B. Dumont started making tubes very like the picture tubes we find in home sets but used then as basic tools in research. That research led from a two-inch, 60-line screen to a nine-inch screen with increased brightness and 441 lines.
With all these improvements, the man who started the decade just making tubes ended it in 1939 by marketing the first home set. That's also the year David Sarnoff started regularly scheduled television broadcasting with a speech from the New York World's Fair. Lots of events had been televised before then, things like dramas in 1928 and President Roosevelt's inauguration in 1933, but nothing was done on a regular basis. Besides, these earlier events went mostly to receivers in laboratories or to the houses of some electronics fans who built their own sets. But with this broadcast by Mr. Sarnoff, the president of RCA, regular broadcasting to a home audience began.
All this left the FCC with a problem. They knew Britain had authorized television broadcasting in 1936 but at only 405 lines.
That's as good a picture as they could get then, but it wasn't too clear, and by 1939 they felt stuck with it. The FCC didn't want to freeze development at too low a point the way the British did.
They decided to allow limited commercial operation at 441 lines so development could continue without locking everyone into one form.
RCA, however, had put millions of dollars into the development of television and badly needed to get some of its investment back. So it decided to go all-out to sell sets on the 441-line standard. If enough receivers were out, the audience size for programs would be large enough so that RCA could charge sponsors for putting their messages on the air.
The FCC then decided to take back their authorization, because they were getting exactly what they didn't want-a lot of home receivers built to one particular standard, in this case, 441 lines. It took until May of 1941 before they issued standards for full, not limited, commercial operation. The line standard was up to 525, the sound was to be FM and not AM, and there were to be 18 VHF channels.
Then came the Second World War. Development in both radio and television came to a halt. No new station licenses were granted, no new receivers were built, no station equipment or even replacement parts were built. The six television stations went on broadcasting a few hours a week to about ten thousand sets. In contrast, radio was already well established and the long-range effects of the war were actually minimal. In fact, one great plus which emerged from this period was the rapid development of radio as a major news medium.
Only thirteen hours a week were devoted to news by the four networks in 1941. At war's end, in 1945, the total weekly news output had grown to thirty-four hours per week.
One change occurred during the war, although it was not caused by the war. NBC was ordered by the courts to sell one of its networks. In 1942 they sold the Blue network and in June 1945, it was named the American Broadcasting Company (ABC). At this point, of course, it was strictly a radio network.
POSTWAR BROADCASTING
At the end of the war, radio was the primary entertainment medium, but television was coming up fast. CBS started arguing the case for color broadcasting. They had a system which gave good, full-color pictures but wasn't compatible with the then current black-and-white standards. That is, the receivers people already had couldn't pick up a CBS color show. However, since so few sets were working at the end of the war, it seemed a good time to change to color. The FCC pondered, but didn't think the system was ready yet and so gave the go-ahead to the black-and-white system.
The CBS color system depended on a spinning wheel. No, we aren't back in the 1920s, but the problems are similar. The spinning wheel was mechanical and therefore a bit slow. The color looked good but seemed to waver almost as if heat were rising in front of it. The disc was in three primary colors, and a different scene appeared as each color came up. If the disc went fast enough, the colors appeared to blend. But sometimes the actors moved rapidly and seemed to leave a trail of pure color behind them. Nobody, not even CBS, found all the answers to the spinning disc problems.
So at the end of the forties, the sets were still black-and white and were tuned to shows starring Milton Berle, roller derby stars, live drama, or variety with Ed Sullivan. The formats made popular by radio were adopted by television, plus several more. During the year 1948, stations more than doubled in number, cities with stations increased from eight to twenty three, and set sales went up five times over the preceding year.
But the audience increased by 4,000 percent! Once again the FCC got worried.
There was interference on the channels. There weren't enough channels to accommodate the demand for stations.
Color was still a problem. What to do? They decided to freeze all applications for the construction of new stations while they figured things out. And that would take some time.
Meanwhile, back at the stations, things were going great.
More and more sets were being sold, more advertisers were switching from radio to television, and more and more stations were making back a bit of the money they had invested in this new medium. The station owners didn't have to flounder around wondering how to organize themselves or whether or not they could sell anything to an advertiser. Those problems had been solved in the early days of radio, and now television just moved in.
Obviously, if advertisers were moving from radio to television, things weren't going quite so well at the radio stations. The amount of programming provided affiliates by the networks began to decrease. Affiliates found themselves with more and more time to fill locally. It should be pointed out, however, that even at radio's peak, the networks provided less than half of their affiliates' programming. The remainder of the time was filled locally. Recorded music was the most common filler. Also, at no time were more than half the existing stations affiliated with the networks. The majority of stations were independents responsible for programming all of their broadcast time. Re corded music had long been their major programming source.
Radio's new face developed by taking advantage of television's weakness. Because of the great expense involved in building and operating a television station, stations were clustered in and around metropolitan areas. Programming was either originated by the network or, if local, concerned itself almost entirely with issues of interest to the metropolitan audience. Large segments of America had little personal con tact with television fare.
Radio localized. It personalized. Local news, local talk, and local people: radio became the voice of its community. It gave up the prime-time hours of the evening to network television.
Programmers defined the radio audience as being most avail able in the mornings when people first get up and in the after noon when those same people first leave their jobs. The late morning and early afternoon hours belonged to the housewife.
The age of the disc jockey ensued.
Recorded music interspersed with commercial announcements read by a local announcer had been a major programming form at many stations since the early forties. The networks had provided the forerunner for Top 40 radio way back in 1935 when they first aired "Your Hit Parade." Disc jockeys had appeared on the networks in the 1947-1948 season. By the mid fifties, most stations were staffed almost totally by disc jockeys who provided virtually round-the-clock Top 40 music.
AFTER THE FREEZE
About this same time, the FCC decided to lift its freeze on new station construction. This was in 1952, and they also decided on a new allocation pattern so television stations wouldn't interfere with each other, on putting UHF on the list of channels on which stations could operate, and in favor of the CBS color wheel. RCA, then building a system based totally on electronics, didn't like that and took them to court.
CBS won, but the Korean War put a stop to building any color system. By the time that was over, RCA had perfected their electronic system to the point even CBS was glad to abandon the color wheel. So in December of 1953, the FCC adopted new rules for color television, this time based on the RCA system.
But most sets kept shining with a blue-white light. Color didn't catch on for quite some time. NBC, the company owned by RCA, broadcast color programs every so often from the very first, but the sets were expensive and most people didn't go for them. It wasn't until Walt Disney presented a show called the "Wonderful World of Color" that people really started wanting to buy a color set. Color sales started going up in 1968, a full fifteen years after the adoption of color standards.
What was coming through on these sets? A lot of live presentations were shown in 1953 because there was no way yet to record television programs, and the big movie companies weren't turning loose of any of their films. Television was hurting attendance at the movie theaters, and they didn't want to make things worse by giving the films to an industry which was becoming their biggest competitor. With all these live presentations, how could the shows be seen out in the midwest where the phone company still didn't have the cables to hook up all the town for simultaneous showing? Someone finally hit upon filming the picture off a picture tube, and the kinescope was born. The quality wasn't too good, but at least it was a way to get shows to those towns still off the cable line.
The shows going on these kinescopes, as well as many others, were the creations of the sponsors and their ad agencies. Television was still cheap enough that one sponsor could buy a whole show. Therefore, s/he often "packaged" it.
That is, s/he approved the script, hired the actors and director, provided the sets, and presented the entire show to a television network as a package. As audiences grew larger and operating expenses got bigger, sponsors found they couldn't so easily pay for an entire show. As they started to pay for just half, or a quarter, or even just for commercials within a show, their control over the content slipped away. More and more, the networks started producing shows, creating new series, and planning more specials. Finally, by the late sixties, sponsor control of program content had almost totally vanished.
One reason for the increased prices, and hence the loss of control by sponsors, was an increased audience. The phone company did get the cables in to all the towns, and everyone was finally able to see programs at the same time. With more people watching, the networks were able to charge more money for commercials. It makes sense that if a commercial going to five people costs a dollar, a commercial going to ten people should cost two dollars. That's the way the networks figured it, and so their rates went up. Another reason was increased production costs. As the various unions got higher and higher wages for technicians, actors, directors, and so on, the costs of making a show went up.
There's also another reason why the sponsors lost control over shows. In 1955, a game show called "The 9364,000 Question" went on the air, packaged and sponsored by Revlon, Inc.
It was hugely popular and soon several big money quiz shows were on. But in 1959, former contestants had been talking to everyone in sight and saying the whole thing was rigged. And it was. The contestants who were to win were given the answers in advance. The public felt cheated and was outraged at being made suckers by believing the programs. So the networks were forced to stop allowing the sponsors to have such total control, and they began to take some part in program production.
CHANGES: FORMATS, AUDIENCES, EQUIPMENT
By the time the sixties began, both radio and television faced some major technical changes. For television, this was videotape. Finally there was a way to record television programs with no loss of picture quality. Tape became responsible for a great decline in live programming, but it also is responsible for a great number of events we can see on short notice. For example, a non-broadcast presidential announcement at 11:30 A.M. can be seen on the noon news. Video recording is also responsible for the instant replay of that last touchdown. Other than filmed shows from Hollywood and live shows like news, practically all other presentations end up on tape.
The technical change for radio was the advent of FM and stereo. FM wasn't a new thing, but the development of it was.
More and more people started buying FM tuners because the quality of the sound was so much better. Then stereo was added, and FM really took off. The FM stations didn't try to attract every listener available but instead appealed to those particularly interested in the sound they were putting out. This became as great a change for radio as the introduction of stereo.
This change in radio formats has placed a growing reliance on demographics and the desire to reach a segmented audience.
Demography is defined as the study of the characteristics of human population. In the fifties, stations were interested in reaching the largest possible audience. This helped breed a rather stereotyped sound. Stations all seemed to have similar sounding announcers playing similar-sounding music. Today's station managers are no longer as interested in reaching the largest possible audience as they are in reaching the largest possible marketable audience; the listener with the dollars in the pocket. The potential audience is divided up into smaller audiences distinguished by characteristics such as age, sex, and income. Advertisers want to reach the listener with the cash in hand, and they spend their advertising dollars with those stations that reach that audience. Since most of the money is in the hands of adults between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-five, those stations reaching that age group are often among the most financially successful in their areas. Their format may be middle-of-the-road (MOR) or "beautiful" music or talk or all news. Whichever it is, it has been chosen in order to reach the buyers.
Other station programmers have been successful with formats geared to reach a youth audience (Top 40 or Progressive Rock) or some other cross-section of America with a Country & Western, Ethnic, or Classical format. While each can be successful, you will probably find the leading station in terms of income in a multiple-station market will be one whose programming is tailored to roughly a twenty-five to fifty-five age audience.
There are many stations today making a relatively small profit. Many are making no profit. Salaries are one rather good indicator of station security. While many announcers in major markets are well up in five figures, even today, in the face of the shrinking dollar, many small market announcers are working for $125 a week or less.
Still, it appears radio has weathered the dawning of television rather well. The number of radio stations has more than doubled since 1952. There were 2,331 AM stations and more than 800 FM stations on the air in January of 1952. Today, there are more than 4,300 AM and 2,700 FM stations broad casting.
Television too has grown, although the stations number around 1,000 instead of several thousands. They have not gone after certain segments of the audience as has radio, so they are still trying to get mass audiences with shows of mass appeal. Only rarely do they go into special presentations, generally news documentaries covering urban riots or foreign affairs, which draw small, select audiences. When they do, it's usually at the prompting of some government official who attacks television in a speech. Newton Minnow, a commissioner of the FCC, caused just such a reaction when he characterized television as a "vast wasteland." And yet, the two biggest events of the decade of the sixties, and perhaps of the century, were made more real to all Americans because of the coverage of television-the assassination of President Kennedy and the landing of a man on the moon.
But in general, we can say the stations themselves have not tried to create specialized programs for small audiences.
Instead, the moves in that direction have come from Congress.
We cannot yet say television programming has been made to provide better programs for everyone, but that's been the intent of a couple of changes. The first was a law requiring all television sets made after 1963 to be able to pick up UHF stations as well as the regular VHF ones. That meant eventually every one would be able to tune to eighty-three channels, so a lot more stations could be put in each city. That would produce a lot more competition and hopefully that will result in better shows. The second was the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. That set up a program of federal funding for use by the noncommercial stations. The intent is to upgrade the quality of their shows, which are generally a little more adventurous and a little more specialized than those of commercial stations. The funding wasn't long-term, so it wasn't free of political maneuvering and attempts at control, but it was a start.
In both areas of broadcasting, we find the changes are now centered on programming rather than on technology. Color, FM stereo, videotape, miniaturized electronics, and so on have had great impact on broadcasting; and the technological changes and improvements of the future will continue to have great impact. But broadcasting of the seventies is a story of changing programming. The most immediately apparent aspect of that is the reasoning behind the prime-time access rule for television. In 1972, the national networks were restricted to providing three hours of programming to their affiliates in the top 100 markets (hence everywhere) during the evening hours.
The hope was that more independent production companies would spring up, offering a greater diversity of programming to stations, and that stations themselves would produce more of their own shows. Technology had nothing to do with this ruling. The result, by and large, was that stations bought more of the game shows and reruns which had been available all along. So, as you would expect, arguments were soon heard to go back to things the way they had been, since increased programming of higher quality and greater diversity had not occurred.
But in one area, stations did start doing more of their own shows and generally of a greater quality than many of those game shows and reruns. Many stations started expanding their news operations. An hour or hour and a half of local news in the early evening began to be, if not common, at least wide spread. The Vietnamese war and the Watergate scandal were partly responsible, in all likelihood. Regardless of whether we agreed or disagreed with what was going on, we wanted to know what was happening. In spite of the feeling many expressed of being isolated from power and being unable to affect events in our government, we needed news broadcasts to tell us what we were isolated from. Those who didn't feel isolated needed the same news so as to know what had occurred that they were going to support or attack. From either point of view, we were participating in the news, and it was broad casting that brought us that news. The proof that we took broadcasting's actions very seriously came with all the arguments about bias and unfair reporting. Having an opinion of the fairness of news coverage came to be an expected part of the intellectual equipment of every citizen.
Radio, of course, participated in this expansion of news coverage but with one unexpected side effect. It has been suggested that listeners found they got a great sense of reality from radio news. The descriptions and sounds of on-the-scene reporting created reality in their imaginations, and that was the same process radio drama had used years ago for its listeners.
The result, therefore, was a newfound audience willing to listen to radio drama once more, whether it be replays of old "Green Hornet" shows or new presentations of plays written just for radio. The audience wasn't big, but for twenty years it hadn't existed at all.
So what is done came to be more important than how it's done. The use of equipment became more important than the technical improvements of that equipment. And with that emphasis, we began teaching children how to read instead of how to go on a hunger strike if Mommy didn't buy Crispy-Toasties for breakfast. We began to consider the news reporter's impact at the news scene instead of assuming "the neutral observer" completely described the reporter's status. And more of us began to think more often about just what we want broad casting to do for us. These are concerns of the present and the future, not the past. Since you have an idea now of what's gone into that past, you may be able to make better guesses about what will go into the future. Into that future, after all, is where the history of broadcasting is going.