Made In America (44 page)

If radio’s resource enhancement capabilities were underutilized, they were as nothing compared with television once it got going. Most of us think of television as a comparatively recent development, but in fact in terms of its practical applications it is nearly as old as radio. It just took longer to get established. As early as the 1880s it was known in theory what was required to make a working television, though the necessary valves and tubes had yet to be invented.
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The word
television
dates from 1907, but in the early days it went by a variety of names –
electric eye, iconoscope, electric telescope, televisor
or
radio vision.

Unlike other technologies television was the result of work by numerous inventors in different places – Herbert Ives, Charles Jenkins and Philo T. Farnsworth in America, John Logie Baird in Britain, Boris Rosing in Russia. The first working television – that is, one that broadcast something more profound than silhouettes and shadows – was demonstrated by Charles Jenkins in Washington in 1925. Baird, a Scotsman, demonstrated a similar model, but with sound, four months later.

Television didn’t attract much public notice until Bell Telephone demonstrated its new system in New York in April 1927. Shown on a screen just two inches high by three inches wide – slightly smaller than a pack of cigarettes – the broadcast consisted of a brief speech of encouragement from Washington by Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover,
followed by some entertainment from the AT&T studio in Whippany, New Jersey – a vaudeville comic who first told some Irish jokes and then changed into blackface and told some ‘darky’ jokes. Sadly his jokes were not recorded. (It is curious that from its inception people instinctively grasped that this was a medium built for trivializing; when Baird demonstrated the first colour transmission in London in 1928 – yes, 1928 – his viewers were treated to the sight of a man repeatedly sticking out his tongue.)

The
New York Times
gave much of page 1 and almost the whole of page 20 to this big event under the headline:

The reporter marvelled that ‘as each syllable was heard, the motion of the speaker’s lips and his changes of expression were flashed on the screen ... with perfect fidelity’. None the less, he considered television’s prospects doubtful. Its future, ‘if it has one, is thought to be largely in public entertainment – super-news reels flashed before audiences at the moment of occurrence, together with dramatic and musical acts shot on the ether waves in sound and picture at the instant they are taking place at the studio’.
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In 1928 Baird made the first transatlantic broadcast from a studio near London to one in Hartsdale, New York, and the following year the cumbersomely named W2XCW in Schenectady, New York, became the country’s first ‘regularly
operating television station’, though in fact its telecasts consisted of three thirty-minute programmes a week – usually just shots of an unidentified head talking, laughing or smoking – and of course there was almost no one to watch them. By the end of 1929 there were twenty-six stations in America, though only those that were supported by big corporations, such as W2XBS in New York (which evolved into WNBC), were destined to survive through the 1930s. There was no great impetus to promote the industry in America because of the lack of a market during the Great Depression and the government’s refusal to allow commercials until 1941.

Many people got their first glimpse of television at the New York World’s Fair in 1939. The
New York Times,
with its now standard lack of prescience, forecast that it would never be a serious competitor for radio because ‘people must sit and keep their eyes glued on a screen; the average American family hasn’t time for it’.
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The year 1939 also saw the first television sets go on sale to the public, but still there wasn’t much to watch (unlike Britain where the BBC was celebrating its tenth anniversary). During the war years, America had just nine television stations in five cities – New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Schenectady – and just 7,000 sets on which to watch the meagre programming available. In the autumn of 1944, for instance, on Wednesday and Saturday nights there was no television at all in America. On Thursdays only CBS was on the air, with fifteen minutes of news followed by an hour of local programming where available and a half-hour show called
Missus Goes A Shopping.
On Sundays the American viewer could watch DuMont Labs’
Thrills and Chills
followed by
Irwin Shane’s Television Workshop,
or nothing.
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With the end of the war, American TV was unleashed at last. By 1947, the number of television sets in American homes had soared to 170,000. In that same year a
programme called
Puppet Television Theater
made its début. A year later it was renamed
Howdy Doody,
and television had its first hit.

As late as 1949, radio was still generating profits of over $50 million, while TV was making losses of $25 million.
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But as the 1950s opened, television became a kind of national mania. As early as 1951, advertisers were cashing in on the craze. McGregor Sportswear took a full-page ad in
Life
to unveil its new sportswear range for go-ahead guys, ‘Videos’, which featured such televisually appropriate fare as the reversible ‘Visa-Versa Jacket’, ‘the Host Tri-Threat Jacket,’ the ‘Durosheen Host Casual Jacket’ and matching ‘Durosheen Host Lounge Slacks’, all expressly designed for wear in front of the TV. Soon people everywhere were buying folding tray-tables so they could eat their ‘TV Dinners’ while glued to the box. America was well on its way to becoming a nation of couch potatoes, though that expression would not of course be used for many years. (Its first appearance has been traced to the unlikely forum of
American Banker
magazine of 30 December 1980, but the context suggests that it was already current, at least in California.)
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By 1952, the number of sets had soared to 18 million, 105 times as many as there had been just five years earlier. The seminal date for television was Monday, 19 January 1953, the date on which Lucille Ball gave birth to ‘Little Ricky’ on national television (by happy coincidence she gave birth to the real Desi Arnaz, jun., on the same day). The nation was so enthralled it hardly noticed that Dwight D. Eisenhower had been installed as President that afternoon.
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The first television networks were run by NBC, CBS, ABC (which had evolved from the NBC Blue radio network) and the now largely forgotten DuMont Labs, a leading electronics company of the 1930s and 1940s. As a television network it struggled for years – by 1955 it had just two shows on the air – and finally expired altogether in 1957, though the
company itself, renamed Metromedia, lives on as a chain of television and radio stations.

Many early television programmes were simply lifted from radio.
The Lone Ranger, Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, Sky King, Meet the Press, Queen for a Day, Stop the Music
and
Gunsmoke
had all begun life as radio shows, though the transition to a visual medium often required alterations of cast. The squat and portly William Conrad, who played Marshal Matt Dillon on the radio, was replaced on TV by the more slender figure of James Arness. A more telling alteration was the adaptation of the popular
The $64 Question
from radio, but with the pay-offs raised a thousandfold, reflecting television’s sudden, staggering wealth. The show became not just a hit but a phenomenon. When a Marine Corps captain named Richard S. McCutchen won the $64,000 pay-off, the story made the front page of the
New York Times.
Inevitably it spawned a legion of imitative quiz shows –
Dotto, Twenty-One, Tic Tac Dough, Name That Tune
(one of whose early contestants, Marine Major John Glenn, won $15,000 by naming twenty-five tunes), and the brazenly derivative $64,000
Challenge.
Almost all relied on the formula of ending the shows with the winning contestant having to defer until the following week the agonizing decision of whether to take his or her winnings or press on at the risk of losing all, thereby ensuring a supply of eagerly returning viewers.

The difficulty was that contestants had an exasperating tendency to blow an answer late in the programme, thus precluding the possibility of an even more exciting return performance the following week. To get around the problem the producers of several shows hit simultaneously on a simple expedient. They cheated. Each week they supplied selected contestants – among them a respected minister from New Jersey – with the correct answers, which made the results rather easier to forecast. Unfortunately they failed to consider
that some contestants, having got a taste of success, would grow miffed when the producers decided that their reign should end. A contestant named Herbert Stempel blew the whistle on
Twenty-One
when its producers told him to ‘take a dive’, and soon contestants from several other quiz shows were sheepishly admitting that they too had been supplied with answers. And that was pretty much the end of such shows. None the less, the expression ‘the $64,000 question’ has shown a curious durability.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the boom years of the 1950s saw the development of another great electrical breakthrough: the home air-conditioner. Air-conditioning had been around for a long time. It was developed in 1902 by a twenty-year-old fresh out of Cornell University named Willis Carrier. As we have seen elsewhere, Carrier didn’t call it an air-conditioner but an
apparatus for cooling air. Air-conditioner
was coined four years later by a North Carolina textile engineer named Stuart Cramer, who invented a device designed not to cool textile mills but to humidify them.
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By the 1920s air-conditioning was being widely used for specific applications – in hospitals and cinemas, for instance – but the considerable cost and the need for outsize ducts acted as a disincentive for its use in most homes and office buildings. Even in the late 1940s, a home air-conditioning unit – which Carrier called an ‘Atmospheric Cabinet’ – was as big as an upright piano and as noisy and as expensive to run as you would expect a piano-sized appliance to be. The development of small window models in 1951 made the industry take off. In 1952 sales of home units went from virtually nothing to $250 million, and they have never looked back. Today Americans spend $25 billion a year, more than the gross national products of some countries, just on the electricity to run their air-conditioners.

Three years after the window air-conditioner made its
début, another durable household appliance entered the world: the microwave oven. The first was called the
Radarange.
It was large and bulky – it weighed over 700 lb. – required a lot of complicated cooling apparatus and didn’t cook food very well. Renamed the
microwave oven,
the first consumer unit was produced in 1955 by Tappan, but the product and word didn’t become familiar to most Americans until the late 1960s when further improvements and advanced miniaturization of components – not to mention the increasing busyness of American women – made it at last a realistic proposition for home use.
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Such was the proliferation of gadgets and appliances that by the 1960s it was possible to perform almost any daily household task while scarcely rippling a muscle – from opening cans to brushing one’s teeth to juicing an orange to carving a turkey. Instead of becoming more versatile and innovative, household appliances mostly just became more complex. Blenders accumulated a dazzling array of buttons. One had no fewer than sixteen buttons that the user could activate in an almost infinite selection of permutations, though, in the candid words of one executive, it still ‘couldn’t do much more than whip cream’. Labelling the buttons presented a linguistic as well as marketing challenge. A manufacturer, quoted in Susan Strasser’s history of domesticity,
Never Done,
recalled that ‘eight of us sat up two nights straight, trying to get words with five letters, each one sounding a bit higher than the other’.
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Perversely, this plethora of labour-saving devices didn’t translate into greater leisure. The average ‘non-working mother’, as they are so inaccurately called, spends as much time doing housework now as fifty years ago – about fifty-two hours a week.
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Although she has the benefits of countless appliances, the increased productivity they have brought her has been effectively offset by the larger size of modern houses, more wide-ranging lifestyles (her
great-grandmother didn’t run children everywhere in the family station wagon and her groceries were probably delivered) and more scrupulous standards of household cleanliness.

Leisure in any meaningful sense is actually quite a modern concept.
Sightseeing
didn’t enter the language until 1847 and
vacation
not until 1878, and even then both were diversions for the well-off few. For millions of people a vacation was a once-in-a-lifetime indulgence that they experienced only on their honeymoon, or
bridal tour,
as it was often called until about 1900. Honeymoon has existed in English since 1546, but originally signified only the first month of marriage. It didn’t become associated with a trip away from home until about the middle of the nineteenth century.