The Infant Grows Up

Television is all the talk--and all the talk is big. Its enthusiasts are sure that it will eventually (maybe sooner) make radio as obsolete as the horse--and empty all the nation's movie houses. Children will go to school in their own living rooms, presidential candidates will win elections from a television studio. Housewives will see on the screen the dresses and groceries they want, and shop by phone.

Television's future, says Jack R. Poppele (rhymes with floppily), president of the Television Broadcasters Association, "is as expansive as the human mind can comprehend. Television holds the key to enlightenment which may unlock the door to world understanding."

The Big Talk. Whether the prodigy will live up to its pressagentry, or whether its blessing will be unmixed, no one yet knows for sure. But one thing is certain: television is coming. It is already where aviation was when Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic in 1927--imperfect but inevitable. The chances are that it will change the American way of life more than anything since the Model T.

So far, not more than one American in ten has seen it. In all the U.S. there are only 27 television stations (radio has over 1,600). And there are only 325,000 tele-sets--nearly half of them clustered in the New York area (there are 66 million radios in the U.S.). But the infant is growing like Gargantua. Last week's television news:

P: In Newark, N.J., WATV went on the air, giving the New York area its fourth television station. Buffalo's first station took to the air, and Boston is scheduled to start this week. On June 15 the New York Daily News will open its stationWPIX (New York City's fifth). A mile away, on the roof of the Hotel Pierre, ABC will start transmitting over station WJZ-TV (New York City's sixth) in August.

P: Los Angeles, Don Lee's W6XAO, the oldest TV station in the U.S. (17 years), quit calling itself experimental, and went commercial. In Atlanta, Louisville, Cincinnati, Fort Worth, Stockton, Calif, and 50 other U.S. cities, television towers were going up.

P: The number of sponsors, according to Television Magazine, has jumped nearly 800% in a year. (The $10 million to be spent by television advertisers this year is peanuts beside radio's $447 million.)

P: Near Augusta, Ga., A.T. & T. was closing the last gap between the East Coast network and the great coaxial cable joining Los Angeles with Miami. But about 400 special television boosters will have to be built before New Yorkers can see Hollywood stars, or Californians can see a World Series. A Chicago-to-Denver-to-San Francisco system of radio relay towers may provide a shortcut. Without cables or relays, television's world would stretch little farther than the local horizon.

By the end of the year, the number of U.S. sets in use will be nudging the million mark; there will be 60 stations on the air. By 1950 the U.S. will have its first coast-to-coast television network, and by 1954, if the trend holds, television will have 16 million receivers and an audience of 65 million.

The Little Now. Despite all the bustle and the big talk, anyone who bought a television set last week would have to be a sport fan, a connoisseur of antique films, or a man with a lot of patience. Most stations telecast only four hours a day. With some exceptions, their programs are at the level of movies in the heyday of the Keystone Cops, or of radio in the era when fans stayed up all night to hear Pittsburgh.

The television stations do not deny this, but do offer a few excuses. Program directors have operated on the skimpiest of budgets (until recently as much as 80% of television's money and personnel was spent on the engineering end), and against exasperating odds: inadequate studio equipment, a Petrillo ban on live musicians (which ended only nine weeks ago), and Hollywood's cold shoulder. Under the circumstances, it is perhaps remarkable that TV has offered anything at all worth looking at.

Sport takes up a quarter of television's program time, not only because it is good but because most everything else is bad. It is probably the chief reason why television caught on first in the bars & grills. (Quipped Fred Allen: "There are millions of people in New York who don't even know what television is. They are not old enough to go into saloons yet.")

Boxing, wrestling, tennis and other sports that are fought out in a small area or follow a prescribed course are apt to be as good on the screen as on the spot. Baseball, football, hockey, horse racing and basketball are tougher problems. Too frequently, watchers are dragged through eye-straining "pans" as the camera races to catch up with the action. Baseball telecasts, says the show business magazine Variety, "are right back where radio was when a batter would rattle a hit off the fence for two bases and Ted Husing would call it a 'Texas Leaguer.'

But they are improving. CBS in particular has hired commentators and camera directors with some knowledge of the game. A television announcer has to be more of an expert than his opposite number on radio: there is no point in describing what the audience can see for itself; the announcer has to interpret for the ignorant without annoying the informed.

At first the camera kept its eye close up, on pitcher & batter, and followed the runner to first. It has since learned that one of television's big thrills is watching Outfielder Joe DiMaggio take a practiced look at a ball heading his way, turn, and without looking back spurt to the right spot, swing around casually and let the ball fall into his glove. The unexpected makes some of television's brightest moments: a rainstorm breaks, and the camera shows ground keepers covering the pitcher's box with canvas, then sweeps across the bleachers, singling out soaked fans huddling under newspapers. The key man is the camera director, who must watch on small screens the action of three or four cameras, to decide which image to send over the air at any moment.

Pocket-Size Dramatics. Televised plays are often more embarrassing than entertaining. NBC's Kraft Theater and Theatre Guild are the best; the directors, after a few cluttered mishaps, have wisely stopped trying to paint extravaganzas on their Lilliputian canvas. The intimate kind of show they settled for hardly rivals the razzle-dazzle-of Hollywood, but it fits neatly between the living-room sofa and the book case. One recent success: Great Catherine, with Gertrude Lawrence, who back in 1938 appeared in the first televersion of a Broadway play (Susan and God). CBS, screening digests of current Broadway hits, made a cramped marionette show out of Mister Roberts, but last week's television of The Play's the Thing was tailored to size.

News telecasts rarely get off the ground: an announcer reads from a script, with downswept eyes, pointing occasionally to a map, a cartoon or a still photograph. A few (notably the NBC Camel-Fox Movietone News and Du Mont's Tele-News) offer first-rate, up-to-the-minute newsreels. But mostly spot news pickups are only a lick & a promise. Exception: such foreseeable events as political rallies where the cameras, being set in place, catch unscheduled incidents. Television looks forward to the summer's forthcoming conventions, which will be carried by 18 stations (LIFE will cover with NBC), to do for their industry what the 1924 conventions did for radio.

The Toscanini telecasts, with their remarkable, moving close-ups of the maestro and the orchestra, were a television milestone (TIME, March 29). But pictures of jazz bands tootling are as dull on television as they are on a movie screen. Crooners, in particular, are finding the telecamera's unwinking stare an embarrassing experience. (Notable exception: NBC's pretty Singer Kyle MacDonnell, an unknown to radio listeners, but already becoming television's No. 1 pin-up girl.)

What else does television offer? Mostly a routine stew of quiz shows, man-in-the-street interviews, cooking lessons galore, charades, fashion shows, vaudeville turns, illustrated weather forecasts, and pickups of radio broadcasts (beginning June 1 We the People will be seen as well as heard). And then there are films, the wilted coleslaw on television's bill of fare. The ancient cabbages that are rolled across the telescreen every night are Hollywood's curse on the upstart industry. Televiewers, sick of hoary Hoot Gibson oaters and antique spook comedies, wonder when, if ever, they will see fresh, first-class Hollywood films.

It won't be soon (though WPIX and Chicago's WGN have arranged to televise some less ancient English pictures). One stumbling block is Hollywood's fear that television will kill its theater market; another is that release rights of recent films are wrapped up in expensive red tape. More important is the fact that television's purse is no match for its appetite. The top price tag for a radio program (around $25,000 a week) would not pay for two, minutes of a big Hollywood movie, and the entertainment budget of the entire television industry is not as much as the soap companies alone spend on radio.*

Most telecasters believe that eventually Hollywood will be forced to spend at least 50% of its time and effort on making films that television can afford. So far, except for a few shorts, the only films being specially made for television are commercials, which often add a new dimension of irritation to radio advertising. In a typical TV plug, the camera peers fixedly at a chart, showing the superior cushion effect of Firestone tires. Or it may ogle a picturesque blonde, pointing out the virtues of a refrigerator. Rarely has television hit on a first-class formula, like Lucky Strike's animated marching battalions of cigarettes.

The Slow Past. Television is imperfect and crude, compared with what it will be, but it is a modern miracle. The process of sending electronic pictures through the air and reassembling them in the living room is one of the great achievements of modern science. It all began in 1873 with a sharp-eared Irishman and a leprechaun sunbeam.

The place was Valentia, Ireland, European terminus of Cyrus Fields' newly laid transatlantic cable. A young telegrapher named Joseph May heard an unfamiliar hum on his code receiver. He stumbled on the cause: a shaft of sunlight, streaming through the window, fell on an electrical resister and jammed his code receiver. When May passed his hand between the light and the resister, the hum stopped. But why? May decided, rightly and brightly, that the resister (or the selenium that coated it) must have what are now called photoelectric properties; i.e., that it could convert light values into electric values.

A hundred scientists of a dozen nations seized on May's incandescent hunch. In 1884 a German, Paul Nipkow, invented a whirling metal disc, which eventually picked up vague picture outlines and was the basis for mechanical television. Italy's Marconi, with his wireless, and America's Edison, with his motion picture, added ears and movement to the dim silhouettes that were forming.

In 1906 Lee de Forest invented the vacuum tube--a milestone for television as well as for radio. In 1923 a Russian immigrant, Dr. Vladimir K. Zworykin (now an RCA engineer) patented the iconoscope--the tube that changed television from a somewhat mechanical to a purely electronic science. In 1928, a Scot, John Logie Baird, telecast a woman's face from London to the S.S. Berengaria, 1,000 miles out at sea, and in the U.S. fuzzy facsimiles of Felix the Cat were televised. Three years later, in a Montclair, N.J. basement, Dr. Allen B. Du Mont brought forth a workable television receiver. The image was becoming clearer.

The U.S. public first saw electronic television at the New York World's Fair in 1939. (Britain's BBC, using a lot of U.S. equipment, had a three-year head start.) Before the U.S. could take a good look, the war interfered; the toy had to be put back in the closet for five years. When it was examined again, it had two heads: one (a CBS product) was gaudy with all the colors of the spectrum; the other (by RCA) was black & white. Since the industry could not go off in both directions, and still take the public along,* the Federal Communications Commission had to make a hard choice. In a momentous decision (TIME, March 31, 1947), the color process, at present impractical commercially, was sent back to the laboratory, and the black & white boom was on.

At last it became possible to buy a set without fearing that it would be outdated tomorrow. Telesets appeared in bars, and a dog in Greenwich, Conn, was stricken with television-induced eyestrain.

Last fall, over three million people saw the World Series on television, and the big, grid-shaped antennae began to appear on the rooftops of New York City houses and apartments. The Louis-Walcott fight in December was witnessed by more than a million people. On the Monday and Tuesday after the fight, RCA sold 2,400 telesets./-

The Big Future. Television, predicts NBC's Executive Vice President Frank Mullen, "will be a six-billion-dollar industry, four times as large as radio today." Allen B. Du Mont (who runs the Du Mont network) thinks it will be "one of the first ten U.S. industries in five years."

One worried radioman thinks that television is "a Frankenstein monster that will destroy its creator." But if the monster's rivals can't lick it, they are determined to join it. The industries that have most to fear are the ones giving it the most support.

NBC is Mr. Big of television, operating a six-station network in the East, and ready to link it to a seven-station Midwest network in December. By the end of the year, NBC will be up to half-steam, owning all the stations FCC allows (five), and beaming programs to 31 affiliates. Paramount Pictures already has two stations in operation, and a 29% interest in the Du Mont network. A fortnight ago, Warner Bros. applied for a station in Chicago; last week 20th Century-Fox asked for a San Francisco license.

Apparently undisturbed at losing $1,700,000 on TV last year, NBC expects to lose $5,000,000 more before it turns a profit--about five years from now. NBC's parent company, RCA, squatting triumphantly atop the field, has made as many television sets as the other 46 manufacturers combined.*

Radiomen are worried by a recent NBC poll of homes that have both television and radio. Eight times as many people were tuned to a Theatre Guild telecast as were listening to radio's popular Fred Allen. Though some experts are already counting radio out, most think it will survive, if only as an auxiliary arm of television. Best guess: radio will be absorbed into the teleset. And there will still be programs for the 9,300,000 automobile radios, for housewives who are too busy to look, and for the blind.

Insidious Demands. The housewife is still one of TV's biggest question marks. The problem is whether or not women will find time to sit down and look. Yes, says Mullen: "Women find time to play bridge, to shop, to go to Ladies' Aid. They'll find time for television." Radio can be turned on and ignored; TV insidiously demands full attention. There are some who believe that TV may deliver the final blow to the art of conversation.

How will television affect U.S. family life? "It will re-cement it," insists CBS's Vice President Adrian Murphy. "I talked with a man who had seen his teen-age daughter for the first time in two months. He bought a set, and now she brings her boy friends home." At first television's novelty value was so high that it some times altered the usual standards of hospitality. Many TV owners, faced with a houseful of curious friends & neighbors, required regulars to bring their own refreshments.

The most enraptured fans are children : the limpest puppet show or the most ancient Western will bring in neighborhoods of bug-eyed, awestruck kids. "The hours between play and bed used to be the most hectic part of the day," says one Manhattan mother. "Now I know where the kids are. The television set is the best nurse in the world."

Performers are eyeing the new monster warily. Radio's Mary Margaret McBride last week decided to take off 20 lbs. to make herself more telegenic. And politicians have reason to fear it. Says NBC's Vice President John F. Royal hopefully: "Television will strip the phony, the mountebank, the demigod, as bare as the day he was born." Adds RCA Chairman David Sarnoff: "Political candidates may have to adopt new techniques ... Their dress, their smiles and gestures . . . may determine, to an appreciable extent, their popularity."

Broadcasting Magazine recently polled a group of television experts on the presidential candidates. The score: Truman, Vandenberg and Wallace all rated high; Dewey was hampered by his mustache, Stassen by his youth, MacArthur by his baldness, but all three managed to pass; Taft was the "shakiest" of all, both in appearance and delivery.

In Godfathers' Image. Like the atom, television has in it tremendous possibilities of both good and evil. Educators are looking to the telescreen to solve the teaching shortage and improve the quality, if not the warmth, of the teaching process. They rhapsodize over the thought of an Einstein or a Toynbee lecturing to hundreds of classrooms at once. Johns Hopkins University has televised several operations, is equipping its two newest surgery rooms with telecameras, to bring thousands of medical students closer to the operating table.

But the best way to measure television's future is to look at the men who control it. And since radio and Hollywood are television's godfathers, the child will probably grow up in their image, with their considerable virtues--and their considerable vices.

* NBC charges a minimum $1,000 an hour to television advertisers. It will probably hike its rates again in October. * Color requires costlier equipment, both in the studio and the home. It also needs a wider channel than black & white, therefore a higher frequency. /-The second Louis-Walcott bout, June 23, is being touted as a television event to set beside the 1921 Dempsey-Carpentier fight, which gave radio its first big push. * RCA's table model costs $325; its most expensive set, $1,195-Cheapest model: Tele-tone Corp.'s at $149.95. Costliest: Du Mont's, at $2,495.

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