Classic TV: The 40s : They had TV shows in the 40's?

They had TV shows in the 40's?

It boggles the mind! I thought TV didn't exist till the 50's. Like the Andie Griffith was the first show.

Re: They had TV shows in the 40's?

Yes, and the one family on the street who had a tv had all kinds of friends.

Re: They had TV shows in the 40's?

1. Commercial television started in the USA in 1946 (though broadcasts go as far back as the 1930s. 1946 was when "network" TV started in that country), with British broadcasting starting in the 1930s.
2. "Andy Griffith Show" is from the 1960s.
3. Popular series of the 1940s included: "Toast of the Town", "Texaco Star Theatre", "Cavalcade of Stars", "The Voice of Firestone" and "The Life of Riley" (though "Riley" didn't become a really big hit until re-runs were done after the star of the show became famous).
4. The oldest complete United States telecasts preserved at museums come from 1947. The oldest existing TV footage of *any* country comes from Germany from the Hitler era, since unlike America and the UK, the Germans made many of their very first shows on film, though sadly post-WW2 German TV itself has a poor survival record (methods to record live TV did not exist until 1947, and even few took TV preservation seriously).
5. The oldest "live" show to have a mostly complete run surviving in an archive is "The Morey Amsterdam Show", which aired from 1948 to 1950.




"It's Bucket 'o Nothing! Surprise your friends, amaze your family, annoy perfect strangers!"

Re: They had TV shows in the 40's?

I thought KUKLA FRAN and OLLIE began in '49. Berle st... er, borrowed dozens of old night club and vaudeville shtik on his show c.1948, onward.<gangh gangh>

Re: They had TV shows in the 40's?


1. Commercial television started in the USA in 1946 (though broadcasts go as far back as the 1930s. 1946 was when "network" TV started in that country)
You're confusing two different things. Commercial television broadcasting in the United States began in July 1941. Regularly scheduled network television broadcasting began in 1946 (the DuMont network)

Re: They had TV shows in the 40's?

It does indeed appear I was wrong, and you are right.




"It's Bucket 'o Nothing! Surprise your friends, amaze your family, annoy perfect strangers!"

Re: They had TV shows in the 40's?

my dad brot our first tv home in the 50s I've been glued since then.




Re: They had TV shows in the 40's?

Morey Amsterdam that was Dick Van Dikes sidekick !!!

Re: They had TV shows in the 40's?

The earliest anything I can recall watching on television were cartoons which were broadcast about 1949.

Television was in the development stage as early as the 1920's. There is a sequence in the 1927 classic Metropolis in which the Mastermind of Metropolis uses a television to check on some workers.

Bela Lugosi was in Murder by Television (1933).

To God There Is No Zero. I Still Exist.

U.S. television stations on the air in 1944

U.S. Television stations on the air in 1944:

WNBT New York, NY NBC
WCBW New York, NY CBS
WABD New York, NY Allen B. DuMont Labs, Inc.
WRGB Schenectady, NY General Electric
WPTZ Philadelphia, PA Philco
W6XAO* Los Angeles, CA Don Lee Broadcasting
W6XYZ* Los Angeles, CA Television Productions Inc.
WTZR Chicago, IL Zenith
W9XAL* Kansas City, MO First National Television

* Experimental, non-commercial

Most television programs in the 1940s were locally produced. But here is the network television schedule for 1946–1947:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1946–47_United_States_network_television_ schedule

1947–1948:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1947–48_United_States_network_television_ schedule

Re: They had TV shows in the 40's?

In Britain, broadcasting pretty much stopped for the war.

http://www.notebookinhand.com
Writers, Artists, Creative people, join!

Re: They had TV shows in the 40's?

The Sunday morning news program "Meet the Press" debuted in November 1947.

Inventors had been working on the idea of TV for sometime,long before the 1940s.

In the 1933 W.C. Fields movie "International House" ;
The plot line concerns a Chinese inventor trying to sell a "radioscope", an early version of television. Unlike real television, this imagined mechanism did not need a camera, but its monitor could zoom in on acts around the world.

That's fiction of course but had it not been for World War 2,who knows,we might have had regular viewing TV between 1941-1945.


From www.tvhistory.tv site : Tuesday July 1st, 1941 -- A famous television history date. On that day, the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) activated new non-experimental call letters for two stations (WNBT, later renamed WNBC & WCBW) in the United States, and permitted commercial advertising. It officially marks "DAY ONE" of American television. Any broadcasting before that date was considered "experimental".

Not all stations switched from experimental to commercial at once. It was a slow process which took years to complete. By way of a side note, the official start to public "experimental" USA television is April 30, 1939, with the televised opening of the New York World's Fair. That would make the Fair the first TV show, if you want to talk about the experimental period.

The WNBT Program card shows what the first day of television was like. We can use this program card as a guide to several "First" events, as they relate to "Commercial" television's start. Some examples are:

FIRST GAME show or QUIZ show --- "Truth or Consequences" with Ralph Edwards (This was their debut show)
FIRST show or program on day one --- Baseball game at Ebbets Field, Brooklyn Dodgers vs. Philadelphia
First Newscaster -- Lowell Thomas, for Sunoco Oil


There's a full article on Wikipedia also that can give you the pre-1948 history of people trying to invent Television. Just go there and search with "Television".

HaPpIpUPpI 13 *Arf!*

Re: They had TV shows in the 40's?

WW2 was probably a good thing for TV. Without it, the economic doldrums might have continued. Wartime electronics research and mass production of items like radar and communications gear must have benefited peace-time TV manufacturing in various ways: improved technology, mountains of surplus parts, and trained workers.

Re: They had TV shows in the 40's?

Who? OP, Andie Griffith? Is that somebody or Hitler's girlfriend?

Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it.

Re: They had TV shows in the 40's?

You've never heard of Handie Andie?

Re: They had TV shows in the 40's?

I thought that was a washing up liquid. Either that or a persimmon blue in heat.

Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it.

Re: They had TV shows in the 40's?

And let us not forget the great Bela Lugosi, prophetic film, Murder by Television (1935) in which TV signals are sent out to instantly kill people....instead of the reality of just sapping their wills and making them die mind numbingly slow.
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