A logical but not so simple follow-on to radio, television benefited from concentrated engineering effort from the 1920's on. By 1939, it was ready for showcasing among the future-oriented features of the New York World's Fair. President Franklin D. Roosevelt opened the Fair with a brief televised greeting which drew reactions ranging from curiosity to extravagant speculation on what was to come from the new medium. But the swift onset of World War II turned the attention of communications companies to military production and essentially put television on the shelf until 1946.
New Living Room Guests
In the first full year after the war, there were 6,000 expensive television sets in the nation, with screens typically of seven and ten inches in diameter. Full-scale commercial production did not begin until 1947. While New York City had competing CBS, NBC, and Dumont stations, now identified as channels, many areas of the country had one or none.
A fortunate New Yorker could watch a 15-minute news summary after supper and then choose among several live entertainment forms, usually song-and-dance, interviews, live drama, wrestling, or movies. The latter had to be independent studio productions or foreign films, because the major studios, eyeing television as competition, refused to sell or rent to the TV companies until 1955. One's movie was likely to be a British classic like "The Thief of Baghdad" or a western out of Republic Studios.
Baseball was predominantly a daytime sport in that era, and the home games of the New York Yankees, New York Giants, and Brooklyn Dodgers were televised by 1947. The development proved timely, because the Dodgers and Yankees met in the World Series that year in the first Fall Classic that Americans, even beyond New York, could see live. College football made many Saturday afternoon schedules, but other professional sports were much slower to take to the new medium. Wrestling, which had gained an early foothold, was looked upon more as a staged show rather than a serious sport.
But it was not merely the TV sets that had invaded America's living rooms and dens. The relatively affluent set owners felt constrained to invite neighbors and relatives to join the watching. It was not uncommon for sofas, chairs, and floor space to be fully occupied for popular shows, particularly after comedian Milton Berle became the first major television star with a must-see variety show in 1948, followed soon, less spectacularly but more durably, by Ed Sullivan.
The Medium Matures
By 1951, there were 12 million TV sets in the country. Many stars of radio and film had seen the potential of the new form of entertainment and either adapted their shows to TV or created new ones. Jack Benny, Burns and Allen, Eddie Cantor, Jimmy Durante, and Ed Wynn moved over with little difficulty. New comedy sensations Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis made regular appearances. That year, a trans-continental cable made coast-to-coast programming routine and made Hollywood a TV as well as movie capital.
Politics was slowly but surely being impacted. Senator Estes Kefauver, a Tennessee Democrat with presidential aspirations, headed a Crime Investigating Committee. His televised questioning of colorful organized crime figures put him on the political map and made him a leading contender for the 1952 Democratic nomination. The 1952 conventions of both parties were televised in their entirety and won supporters for their nominees, General Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson.
Important sessions of the United Nations, particularly in connection with the then-raging Korean War, were covered. But perhaps most powerfully and dramatically, the televised hearings of a Senate committee in 1954 helped end the career of a demagogic anti-Communist crusader, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.
By 1955, TV was in half of the homes of the United States. Great developments were yet to come, not all good.
Reference: Grolier Encyclopedia, Histtory of Television
