The History of the Television Industry

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, ho

Related Essays

Martial arts and History .... US (de Castro, et. al., 1993) as well as capturing the imagination of the film and television industry. As will be demonstrated .... (2814 11 )

California History through Film .... In the context of the entertainment industry, the California .... a center for the production of television programming. .... They illustrate the rich history of a state .... (722 3 )

Pseudo-News of Television .... was prepared to preserve the industry from some .... While the forces operating on network television and network news .... Jeff Kisseloff offers a history of KTLA-TV in .... (6573 26 )

Scandals in the Televangelism Industry .... of televangelism has a long and interesting history. .... Rex Humbard was the next television preacher to .... and 1970s, the televangelism industry became increasingly .... (2943 12 )

Deregulation of the Cable Industry In 1984, Congress passed the .... Although cable TV did not become popular until the 1980's, the cable television industry actually has a long history which dates back to the late 1940's. .... (2187 9 )

ith RCA), and ABC (a spinoff of NBC) in that its provenance was equipment manufacturing. The head of the company created broadcast programming as a method of promoting sales of DuMont televisions. The radio presence of the other three networks was to put them ad a distinct advantage over DuMont, a fact aggravated by the regulatory climate of the 1940s and 1950s, which favored better capitalized radio broadcasters and which more or less arbitrarily established the television bandwith for VHF, or Very High Frequency, stations at 12 channels along the electromatic spectrum. As a practical matter, that meant that the signals of adjacent channel numbers, hence stations and hence signals, could easily overlap. In any given local area, that meant that for optimal transmissions it was necessary to assign channel numbers to stations as nonadjacent as possible and to keep actual transmission locations at least 150 miles apart. A maximum of three stations would fit on the dial for technical reasons, although there is a view that ABC stations were generally a much weaker third broadcast presence in most markets until 1960 (Boddy 36). Any fourth station that did have a presence in a given market and that would lose out in such an area was usua

Category: Business - T