When the cameramen are draping handkerchiefs over their heads, when they’re wearing pith helmets like they’re on safari, when actors’ makeup is sliding off their faces and sweat is raining off everyone in the room… you don’t need a thermometer to know the place is boiling. NBC’s Studio 3H, home to three iconoscope cameras, often felt less like a studio and more like an oven.

And the culprit? The lights. In the late 1930s and early ’40s, television lighting was a brute‑force affair: carbon arcs in the earliest days, followed by banks of high‑wattage incandescent lamps. The iconoscope needed intense illumination to produce a usable picture, and those lamps were basically space heaters on stands. Temperatures routinely pushed past 100°F, made worse by poor ventilation in converted spaces like 3H, GE’s WRGB studios in Schenectady, and CBS’s Studio 41 at Grand Central Terminal.

The live models simply couldn’t endure more than a few minutes under those blistering lamps. So, the wardrobe, wigs, and makeup demonstrations were handed off to someone who never complained, never perspired, and never fainted under the heat: Miss Patience.  For your amusement, here are the newspaper stories breathlessly reporting this “earth‑shaking” development.