The purpose of this research is to examine a business article written in 1937 with a view toward evaluating the credence and prescience of its predictions regarding the development of the television industry. The plan of the research will be to set forth the salient points of the article and then to compare its predictive content with what actually happened in the years following.
The ubiquitous nature of television in the modern period makes it difficult to consider that telecommunications technology is less than 100 years old, having been first successfully tested in the mid-1920s. Over the course of the 1920s and 1930s, rival patent holders on the technology relevant to the development of "visual broadcasting" ("AT&T," 1937) were continually suing each other in court. In 1937, however, rival technology manufacturers Philo T. Farnsworth, an independent inventor, and AT&T (a telephone-technology company that held patents under agreement with the Radio Corporation of America, a major broadcasting company) settled their patent rivalry with an agreement whereby "either [party] is allowed to use the other's patents--present or future--without royalty payment" ("AT&T"). The practical importance of that settlement was reported as enabling Farnsworth to proceed with manufacture of television transmission hardware installations that included hardware technology, such as vacuum tubes, patented by AT&T. The actual prediction contained in the Business Week notice of the settlement, however, is that TV-transmitter production "is likely to prove a rich field, for the carrying power of each transmitter is virtually limited by the horizon, and consequently there will have to be a great many more of them o attain any kind of coverage comparable to that achieved by radio broadcasting" ("AT&T"). A secondary prediction is that "wire hookups will be impossible except by use of Western Electric's coaxial cable, one circuit of which . . . has been strun...