#COLOR TV TIMELIME SERIES#

The Sarnoff Collection’s 2020 temporary exhibit traces the history of color television. Interactive Exhibit and Blue LED Demonstration.Great Expectations: How ‘Titanic’ Burst the Wireless Tech Bubble.Computer Fun for the Whole Family: Video Games & The Sarnoff Collection.Vinyl Videos: A History of the RCA Selectavision Project.In Living Color: A History of Color Television.A partial bibliography of sources is here.

Written by Claudia Reinhardt and Bill Ganzel, the Ganzel Group. The information gap between urban and rural is not as pronounced as it was when the 1940s began. So, satellite dishes have sprouted in farmyards across the country, and folks in rural towns have cable TV boxes, just like their urban counterparts. Today, rural areas still get only two or three local stations broadcasting over the air. The demand for television sets and programs in the late 1940s set the stage for a revolution that would expand in the 1950s and 60s and change American family life, business, politics, economic, and society.

Most parts of rural America had to make do with a single television station. TV programming did not run all day and night. What did families watch on those little picture tubes? Well, for a time, the most watched thing on TV was the test pattern that was broadcast before and after the station signed on. 'Every so often, we'd say, 'Oh, that's a good picture.' 'It was so fuzzy you could hardly see it,' he says. Kelly Holthus remembers that he and his wife went out to his folks' farm most nights when they got a television set. 'Then, why, we didn't because it was something that never had happened before.' Harry Hankel was impressed by the 'newness' of it. 'The picture was little bitty,' she says. Looking back now, Mildred Hopkins is surprised at her own excitement for their first TV. And, of course, color broadcasts and sets didn't arrive until much later, in 1954. Most had picture screens between 10 and 15 inches wide diagonally, inside large, heavy cabinets. The 1940s TVs didn't look like today's televisions. The first family in the neighborhood to get a TV would invite friends and neighbors to come over and watch. Even if there was only one, snowy, black and white station on the air, farmers and their children wanted that TV set. Entrepreneurs hurried build television stations to reach every part of the country. Americans were buying 100,000 sets every week.įarm families were not far behind their city brethren. In the late 1940s there were 98 commercial television stations in 50 large cities.īy 1949, prices of TV sets had gone down. A year later, CBS and NBC networks started 15-minute nightly newscasts.

#COLOR TV TIMELIME SERIES#

In 1947, President Harry Truman's state of the union address and the baseball World Series were televised. Within nine months after they bought a TV they listened to radio, but only for two hours a day. But four years later, most Americans had heard of television and wanted one! According to one survey in 1950, before they got a TV, people listened to radio an average of nearly five hours a day. In 1945, a poll asked Americans, 'Do you know what television is?' Most didn't. Production of the cathode ray tubes that produced the pictures was redirected to radar and other high tech war uses.Īfter the war television was something few had heard of. When World War II started, all commercial production of television equipment was banned. The sets were very expensive and New York City had the only broadcast station. The first practical TV sets were demonstrated and sold to the public at the 1939 World's Fair in New York. In the process, the new medium turned on the lives of rural residents connecting them to the rest of the world even more than newspapers or radio. In the 1940s, television started, stopped, started again and then took off.

Rural America Turns On to TV in the 1940s

Color tv timelime