In 1948, only 1 percent of America’s households had a TV set; by 1953, more than 50 percent had one; and since the early 1960s, more than 90 percent of all homes have TV. Television’s rise throughout the 1950s created fears that radio—as well as books, magazines, and movies—would become irrelevant and unnecessary, but both radio and print media adapted. In fact, today more radio stations are operating and more books and magazines are being published than ever before; only ticket sales for movies have declined slightly since the 1960s.

Three major historical developments in television’s early years helped shape it: (1) technological innovations and patent wars, (2) the wresting of content control from advertisers, and (3) the sociocultural impact of the infamous quiz-show scandals.

Early Innovations in TV Technology

In its novelty stage, television’s earliest pioneers were trying to isolate TV waves from the electromagnetic spectrum (as radio’s pioneers had done with radio waves). The big question was, If a person could transmit audio signals from one place to another, why not visual images as well? Inventors from a number of nations toyed with the idea of sending “tele-visual” images for nearly a hundred years before what we know as TV developed.

From roughly 1897 to 1907, the development by several inventors of the cathode ray tube, the forerunner of the TV picture tube, combined principles of the camera and electricity. Because television images could not physically float through the air, technicians and inventors developed a method of encoding them at a transmission point (TV station) and decoding them at a reception point (TV set). In the 1880s, German inventor Paul Nipkow developed the scanning disk, a large flat metal disk with a series of small perforations organized in a spiral pattern. As the disk rotated, it separated pictures into pinpoints of light that could be transmitted as a series of electronic lines. As the disk spun, each small hole scanned one line of a scene to be televised. For years, Nipkow’s mechanical disk served as the foundation for experiments on the transmission of visual images.

Electronic Technology: Zworykin and Farnsworth

The story of television’s invention included a complex patents battle between two independent inventors: Vladimir Zworykin and Philo Farnsworth. It began in Russia in 1907, when physicist Boris Rosing improved Nipkow’s mechanical scanning device. Rosing’s lab assistant, Vladimir Zworykin, left Russia for America in 1919 and went to work for Westinghouse and then RCA. In 1923, Zworykin invented the iconoscope, the first TV camera tube to convert light rays into electrical signals, and he received a patent for it in 1928.

Around the same time, Idaho teenager Philo Farnsworth also figured out that a mechanical scanning system would not send pictures through the air over long distances. On September 7, 1927, the twenty-one-year-old Farnsworth transmitted the first electronic TV picture: He rotated a straight line scratched on a square of painted glass by 90 degrees. RCA, then the world leader in broadcasting technology, challenged Farnsworth in a major patents battle, in part over Zworykin’s innovations for Westinghouse and RCA. Farnsworth had to rely on his high school science teacher to retrieve his original drawings from 1922. Finally, in 1930, Farnsworth received a patent for the first electronic television.

After the company’s court defeat, RCA’s president, David Sarnoff, had to negotiate to use Farnsworth’s patents. Farnsworth later licensed these patents to RCA and AT&T for use in the commercial development of television. At the end of television’s development stage, Farnsworth conducted the first public demonstration of television at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia in 1934—five years before RCA’s famous public demonstration at the 1939 World’s Fair.

Setting Technical Standards

Figuring out how to push TV as a business and elevate it to a mass medium meant creating a coherent set of technical standards for product manufacturers. In the late 1930s, the National Television Systems Committee (NTSC), a group representing major electronics firms, began outlining industry-wide manufacturing practices and compromising on technical standards. As a result, in 1941 the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) adopted an analog standard (based on radio waves) for all U.S. TV sets. About thirty countries, including Japan, Canada, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and most Latin American nations, also adopted this system. (Most of Europe and Asia, however, adopted a slightly superior technical system shortly thereafter.)

The United States continued to use analog signals until 2009, when they were replaced by digital signals. These translate TV images and sounds into binary codes (ones and zeros like computers use) and allow for increased channel capacity and improved image quality and sound. HDTV, or high-definition television, digital signals offer the highest resolution and sharpest image. Receiving a “hi-def” picture depends on two factors: The programmer must use a high-definition signal, and consumers must have HDTV equipment to receive and view it. The switch to digital signals has also opened up new avenues for receiving and viewing television on laptops, smartphones, and tablets.

Assigning Frequencies and Freezing TV Licenses

In the early days of television, the number of TV stations a city or market could support was limited because airwave spectrum frequencies interfered with one another. Thus a market could have a channel 2 and a channel 4 but not a channel 3. Cable systems “fixed” this problem by sending channels through cable wires that don’t interfere with one another. Today, a frequency that once carried one analog TV signal can carry eight or nine compressed digital channels.

In the 1940s, the FCC began assigning channels in specific geographic areas to make sure there was no interference. As a result, for years New Jersey had no TV stations because those signals would have interfered with the New York stations. But by 1948 the FCC had issued nearly one hundred TV licenses, and there was growing concern about the finite number of channels and the frequency-interference problems. The FCC declared a freeze on new licenses from 1948 to 1952.

During this time, cities such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles had several TV stations, while other areas—including Little Rock, Arkansas, and Portland, Oregon—had none. In non-TV cities, movie audiences increased. Cities with TV stations, however, saw a 20 to 40 percent drop in movie attendance during this period; more than sixty movie theaters closed in the Chicago area alone. Taxi receipts and nightclub attendance also fell in TV cities, as did library book circulation. Radio listening also declined; for example, Bob Hope’s network radio show lost half its national audience between 1949 and 1951. By 1951, the sales of television sets had surpassed the sales of radio receivers.

After a second NTSC conference in 1952 sorted out the technical problems, the FCC ended the licensing freeze, and almost thirteen hundred communities received TV channel allocations. By the mid-1950s, there were more than four hundred television stations in operation—a 400 percent surge since the prefreeze era—and television became a mass medium. Today, about seventeen hundred TV stations are in operation.

The Introduction of Color Television

In 1952, the FCC tentatively approved an experimental CBS color system. However, because black-and-white TV sets could not receive its signal, the system was incompatible with the sets most Americans owned. In 1954, RCA’s color system, which sent TV images in color but allowed older sets to receive the color images as black-and-white, usurped CBS’s system to become the color standard. Although NBC began broadcasting a few shows in color in the mid-1950s, it wasn’t until 1966, when the consumer market for color sets had taken off, that the Big Three networks (CBS, NBC, and ABC) broadcast their entire evening lineups in color.

Controlling Content—TV Grows Up

By the early 1960s, television had become a dominant mass medium and cultural force, with more than 90 percent of U.S. households owning at least one set. Television’s new standing came as its programs moved away from the influence of radio and established a separate identity. Two important contributors to this identity were a major change in the sponsorship structure of television programming and, more significant, a major scandal.

Program Format Changes Inhibit Sponsorship

Like radio in the 1930s and 1940s, early TV programs were often developed, produced, and supported by a single sponsor. Many of the top-rated programs in the 1950s even included the sponsor’s name in the title: Buick Circus Hour, Camel News Caravan, and Colgate Comedy Hour. Having a single sponsor for a show meant that the advertiser could easily influence the program’s content. In the early 1950s, the broadcast networks became increasingly unhappy with the lack of creative control in this arrangement. Luckily, the growing popularity, and growing cost, of television offered opportunities to alter this financial setup. In 1952, for example, a single one-hour TV show cost a sponsor about $35,000, a figure that rose to $90,000 by the end of the decade.

David Sarnoff, then head of RCA-NBC, and William Paley, head of CBS, saw an opportunity to diminish the sponsors’ role. In 1953, Sarnoff appointed Sylvester “Pat” Weaver (father of actress Sigourney Weaver) as the president of NBC. Previously an advertising executive, Weaver undermined his former profession by increasing program length from fifteen minutes (then the standard for radio programs) to thirty minutes or longer, substantially raising program costs for advertisers and discouraging some from sponsoring programs.

In addition, the introduction of two new types of programs—the magazine format and the TV spectacular—greatly helped the networks gain control over content. The magazine program featured multiple segments—news, talk, comedy, and music—similar to the varied content found in a general-interest publication or newsmagazine of the day, such as Life or Time. In January 1952, NBC introduced the Today show as a three-hour morning talk-news program. Then, in September 1954, NBC premiered the ninety-minute Tonight Show. Because both shows ran daily rather than weekly, studio production costs were prohibitive for a single sponsor. Consequently, NBC offered spot ads within the shows: Advertisers paid the network for thirty- or sixty-second time slots. The network, not the sponsor, now produced and owned the programs or bought them from independent producers.

The television spectacular is today recognized by a more modest term, the television special. At NBC, Weaver bought the rights to special programs, like the Broadway production of Peter Pan, and sold spot ads to multiple sponsors. The 1955 TV version of Peter Pan was a particular success, with sixty-five million viewers. More typical specials featured music-variety shows hosted by famous singers, such as Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, and Nat King Cole.

The Rise and Fall of Quiz Shows

In 1955, CBS aired the $64,000 Question, reviving radio’s quiz-show genre (radio’s version was the more modest $64 Question). Sponsored by Revlon, the program ran in prime time (the hours between 8 and 11 P.M., when networks traditionally draw their largest audiences and charge their highest advertising rates) and became the most popular TV show in America during its first year. Revlon followed the show’s success with the $64,000 Challenge in 1956; by the end of 1958, twenty-two quiz shows aired on network television. Revlon’s cosmetic sales skyrocketed from $1.2 million before its sponsorship of the quiz shows to nearly $10 million by 1959.

Compared with dramas and sitcoms, quiz shows were (and are) cheap to produce, with inexpensive sets and mostly nonactors as guests. The problem was that most of these shows were rigged. To heighten the drama, key contestants were rehearsed and given the answers.

The most notorious rigging occurred on Twenty-One, a quiz show owned by Geritol (whose profits climbed by $4 million one year after it began to sponsor the program in 1956). A young Columbia University English professor from a famous literary family, Charles Van Doren, won $129,000 in 1957 during his fifteen-week run on the program; his fame even landed him a job on NBC’s Today show. But in 1958, after a series of contestants accused the quiz show Dotto of being fixed, the networks quickly dropped twenty quiz shows. Following further rumors, a TV Guide story, a New York grand jury probe, and a 1959 congressional investigation during which Van Doren admitted to cheating, big-money prime-time quiz shows ended.

Quiz-Show Scandal Hurts the Promise of TV

The impact of the quiz-show scandals was enormous. First, the sponsors’ pressure on TV executives to rig the programs and the subsequent fraud put an end to any role that major sponsors had in creating TV content. Second, and more important, the fraud undermined Americans’ expectation of the democratic promise of television—to bring inexpensive information and entertainment into every household. Many people had trusted their own eyes—what they saw on TV—more than the words they heard on radio or read in print. But the scandals provided the first dramatic indication that TV images could be manipulated. In fact, our contemporary love-hate relationship with electronic culture and new gadgets began during this time.

The third, and most important, impact of the quiz-show scandals was that they magnified the division between “high” and “low” culture attitudes toward television. The fact that Charles Van Doren had come from a family of Ivy League intellectuals and cheated for fame and money drove a wedge between intellectuals—who were already skeptical of television—and the popular new medium. This was best expressed in 1961 by FCC commissioner Newton Minow, who labeled game shows, westerns, cartoons, and other popular genres as part of television’s “vast wasteland.” Critics have used the wasteland metaphor ever since to admonish the TV industry for failing to live up to its potential.

After the scandal, quiz shows were kept out of network prime time for forty years. Finally, in 1999, ABC gambled that the nation was ready once again for a quiz show in prime time. The network had great, if brief, success with Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, which hit No. 1 that year.