A Guided Tour Of Some Of Television’s Early Studios…

You may have seen this before, but may not have known the historic places you were seeing. Today, we will remedy that with a guided tour of this film, so let’s get started.

At 1:58 we are in GE’s WRGB in Schenectady NY. RCA began as a part of GE and early on, this facility was the GE experimental television center.

At 2:36 we see in the foreground at WRGB a three wheel camera “trolley”. It survived and is now on display at the Schenectady Museum along with two of these camera.

At 3:00 we see television’s first ever Mobile Unit…the twin van RCA creation with the camera control in one and the transmission gear in the other. These 38 foot units were built in 1938.

At 3:20 an RCA Field Iconoscope camera is being mounted and just after that, we are in the camera control van.

At 3:55 we see an RCA Type 1840 Orthicon camera in action. This is the first version of this camera we saw here yesterday.

At 4:04 we enter hallowed ground. This is NBC Studio 5F which was home to the first ever television film chain with a 35 and 16MM capacity. It was built in 1936, just after Studio 3H was converted from radio to television.

At 4:15 we get a rare look as CBS Studio 41…the largest of the two production studios at their Grand Central Terminal location. The cameras are the RCA A500 Iconoscope models. Studio 42 was a bit smaller.

At 5:06 we see the first ever animated television ID. I think the voice is Ben Grauer. This was rolled from Studio 5F.

At 5:30 we see the NBC antenna atop the Empire State Building

At 5:44 we are back inside WRGB where we get a look inside one of the GE Iconoscope cameras.

At 8:14 we are inside the RCA plant in Camden.

At 8:40 we may be inside the RCA Labs in Princeton where much of the early television testing was done.

Enjoy and share! -Bobby Ellerbee

A U.S. Armed Forces report about the future of television in 1945. Footage from this subject is available for licensing from www.globalimageworks.com

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