In 1940 the Empire State Building was the tallest man-made structure in the world, and if you stood at the top of it you could see the future.
Specifically, you could see this: the first NBC television broadcast transmitter, intermittently blasting 49.75 MHz audio and 46.5 MHz video signals across a hundred-mile swath of megalopolis.
A turnstile antenna, a ring of linked dipoles, and a crowning lightning rod formed the sharp point at the literal apex of human achievement. This is the lance that scraped the sky deeper than it had ever been scraped, the tip of the spear for a high radio modernism that would soon conquer the world. This is the needle that pierced the veil of the corporeal and pulled the thread of human culture into a realm of deracinated ghosts forever haunting the invisible airwaves.
Maybe this sounds overwrought and spooky. But I’m not just editorializing on my own here: this is how some of the guys who invented television talked about it!
I found this out by reading We Present Television , a collection of essays by various stakeholders in the earliest American TV broadcast systems—“televisionaries”, as they are occasionally referred to in the text. I rescued my copy from being pulped after it was weeded from a library. What got me to look at it was the odd handwritten title on the spine, and what got me to keep it was the shockingly early copyright date of 1940. This is not a pat description of a settled feature of American life; these pieces were written from the bleeding edge of a brand new technology. They were intended for the edification of a public for whom TV was a curious experimental luxury that only your richest friend’s richest friend might own 1 .
The essays read roughly 90% as prosaic technical notes on the state of the art and 10% as wild-eyed futurist prophecy. Both modes offer a fascinating glimpse of a transformative new art in the process of being born. It is an approachable, Scientific American -style primer, but also, at times, the closest thing I have ever found to a dread grimoire written by the successful summoners of an Elder God.
In my mind, prior to reading We Present Television, the history of TV was a pretty firm thing stretching from the present back to the early 1950s and I Love Lucy . What was on TV before Lucy ? I had no clue really. I suspect most people don’t. Lucy stands as a cultural totem of “early TV” the way that The Wizard of Oz and Frankenstein stand in for all of “early film” in the popular imagination.
But here was a book about television from a decade before Lucy and Desi ever got up to a single shenanigan! What could possibly have been going on on TV back then?
The answer is, for the most part, some weird stuff that it’s impossible to watch today. To continue the film analogy: “Talkies” as a medium have the advantage of a single solid genesis point with The Jazz Singer in 1927, just as “Classic TV” has the genesis point of Lucy being shot on 35mm film that allowed it to be preserved for future generations. The nascent television documented in this book is more akin to film in the 1900s and 1910s: a frontier technology still undergoing rapid technological progress and gradual artistic maturation 2 . And like those flammable early films, early TV was seldom preserved to leave any kind of cultural footprint, rendering it forgotten to all but a scholarly few today.
We Present Television is in large part the textual equivalent of a How It’s Made episode for “1930s television programming”. It comes at the subject from every angle and through every stage of the process, and ends up illuminating why early TV evanesced from the cultural memory even as the concept of television pervaded culture.
If you associate “inventor of television” with a single name, it is likely Philo Farnsworth, the Utahan tinkerer who received the first US patent for it. The fabulously-named Waldemar Kaempffert , science editor for The New York Times from 1927 to 1956 and author of We Present Television ’s introduction, thinks that’s a load of crock.
Kaempffert was evidently fond of technocultural prognostication (he got the NYT gig after writing an essay for Forum magazine on “The Social Destiny of Radio”), so a lot of his introduction falls into the realm of Prophecy and will be covered later in the review. But he also does a bit of historiography right at the top. In Kaempffert’s telling, television was inevitable from the moment the first fax machine was conceived in the 1840s 3 , and it was midwifed into existence not by any one nameable genius but by the concerted effort of technocapital itself: