Camera Rarities 3, Of 3…The NBC Studio 8G Cameras

NBC’s official grand opening date for 8G, their second ever television studio at 30 Rockefeller Plaza is listed as April 22, 1948. Actually, television had been coming from 8G long before that, while it was still designated a radio studio.

The first show ever to come from 8G was also television’s first variety show…”Hourglass”, which debuted May 9, 1946. at the link is a good story from 1948 on “Hourglass”. https://books.google.com/books?id=WkYEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA83&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false

At this link, you can see Studio 8G in action, during a broadcast of “Hourglass”.

Later that year, “Let’s Celebrate” was done here as a one time show on December 15, 1946 with Yankee’s announcer Mel Allen as host.

“The Swift Show” (a Swift Company sponsored game show), and “Americana” (a game show about American history) started here in 1947.

NBC knew television had to grow fast after WW II, but there were still war related shortages, like phosphorus for kinescope screens and military embargos on technology like the Image Orthicon which was used in guidance systems. Believing that new cameras would come more slowly than RCA’s October ’46 promise date, NBC engineers knew they had to have more than the Iconoscope cameras in 3H to work with.

On the sly, RCA gave them four Image Orthicon tubes, and four seven inch kinescopes for the VF and they started to work building a camera I call the NBC ND-8G. The ND was an NBC engineering code that stood for New Development.

These cameras were ready for use by the spring of 1946. “Hourglass” debuted from 8G on May 9, 1946 which was six months before the TK30 scheduled release in October. NBC got their first five TK30s in June, just in time for the Billy Conn – Joe Louis rematch at Yankee Stadium.

8G, as a radio studio, did not have built in audience seating like 6A, 6B and 8H, but it was thankfully three times the size of NBC’s only other television studio, 3H. “Radio Age” states that 8G could handle four consecutive shows, which meant the often fifteen minute, and half hour shows, with only one small set, could be staged one after the other from different walls of the studio. -Bobby Ellerbee

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