On June 20, 1948 ‘The Fred Waring Show’ debuted on CBS. It is believed to be the first weekly one hour music show, however, the show was cut to a half hour in ’52. For the first few years, it aired just after the Ed Sullivan Show, at 9 on Sunday nights.

Below is a video compilation from the show and you may be as surprised as I was to see what’s here. The  Blues In The Night piece has some awesome production values for 1948, and the last piece has a remarkable sax player dancing, twirling rope and playing all at once…quite vaudevillian. I think you’ll enjoy this…really.

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ULTRA RARE: May 1949, Sid Caesar’s First Series

‘The Admiral Broadway Review’

Caesar began his television career when he made an appearance on Milton Berle’s Texaco Star Theater. In early 1949, Sid and producer Max Liebman met with Pat Weaver, president of television at NBC (and father of Sigourney Weaver), which led to Caesar’s appearance in his first series, ‘The Admiral Broadway Revue’ which also included Imogene Coca.

Above is a photo of Sid on stage at NBC’s first television converted theater, The International at 5 Columbus Circle. When NBC first began to use the theater with the “Admiral Broadway Revue” show, it was a three camera show done with a mobile unit feeding the show back to 30 Rock on an AT&T line. By the time YSOS debuted, NBC had installed a control room and four permanent RCA TK30 camera chains.

The Friday night show was simultaneously broadcast on NBC and the DuMont network. Odd, but it was done so the show to be carried on the only TV station then operating in Pittsburgh, DuMont’s WDTV. The show was an immediate success, however, its sponsor, Admiral, an appliance company, could not keep up with the demand for its new television sets, so the show was cancelled after 26 weeks. According to Caesar, an Admiral executive later told him the company had the choice of building a new factory or continuing their sponsorship of Revue for another season.

On February 23, 1950, Caesar appeared in the first episode of ‘Your Show of Shows‘, a Saturday night 90-minute variety program also produced by Max Liebman.

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‘Time For Beany’

Below, Cecil (Stan Freburg) and Beany (Daws Butler) entertain an audience of all ages in 1950, while just on the other side of the wall, two KTLA TK10s capture the fun. Even Albert Einstein admitted that he watched the show. The original puppet show version aired from Feb 49 till late in 54. It returned in ’59 in cartoon form.

Originally created as a children’s show, the genius of the creators and writers soon became evident and the show began attracting more adults than children. When it was Time For Beany, the entire family was crowded around the set. The crux of Beany’s success was the intermingling of current political issues and fiascos that appeared as thinly veiled plots easily recognizable as lampoons of current political issues or personalities. The Shakespearian asides given by Beany, Cecil and the rest of the cast were magnificent and often alluded to embarrassing public fiascos or personages, on which the adult audience immediately picked up. That those gems of wisdom are lost forever is a great literary tragedy…there were just a few Keniscopes of the show saved.

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This was a live color broadcast from NBC’s Brooklyn Studios and it was a huge production with lots of sets. Most of the actors in this musical were members of the original Broadway cast, except a very young Jack Klugman who sang and danced. I would have loved to been there for a live color broadcast. You too?

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ULTRA RARE: Classic Photo

Here are two of America’s most famous clowns ever, together…Emit Kelly and Clarabell. The photos is on the set of a 1949 WNBT show who’s name, I think, is ‘Television Screen Magazine’ and this is most likely in famed NBC Studio 3H. The lady is co host, Ursula Halloran.

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One That Never Made It

RCA once disclosed that they had spent over $200,000,000 developing color television. I don’t doubt it…it was expensive work to do and this Tri Color Vidicon tube is proof.  Here in this photo from April of 1953, Dr. Paul Weimer of RCA Labs poses with the new tube idea and the color camera that never was. By ’55, the concept was abandoned due to the cost involved.

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Friday, September 7th, 2022 was the 95th anniversary of the invention of electronic television. In 1927, 21 year old Philo T. Farnsworth and his 18 year old bride, Pem, demonstrated their invention to two Crocker Bank investors in the second floor lab of a rented garage at 202 Green Street in San Francisco.

That day, Farnsworth’s image dissector camera tube transmitted its first image, a simple straight line. The source of the image was a glass slide, backlit by an arc lamp. An extremely bright source was required because of the low light sensitivity of the design. By 1928, Farnsworth had developed the system sufficiently to hold a demonstration for the press. His backers had demanded to know when they would see dollars from the invention, so the first image shown was, appropriately, a dollar sign.

In 1929, the design was further improved by elimination of a motor-generator, so the television system now had no mechanical parts. That year, Farnsworth transmitted the first live human images using his television system, including a three and a half-inch image of his wife Elma (“Pem”), with her eyes closed because of the blinding light required.

Many inventors had built electromechanical television systems prior to Farnsworth’s seminal contribution, but Farnsworth designed and built the world’s first working all-electronic television system, employing electronic scanning in both the pickup and display devices. He first demonstrated his system to the press on September 3, 1928, and to the public at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia on August 25, 1934.

In 1930, Vladimir Zworykin, who had been developing his own all-electronic television system at Westinghouse in Pittsburgh since 1923, but which he had never been able to make work or satisfactorily demonstrate to his superiors, was recruited by RCA to lead its television development department. Before leaving his old employer, Zworykin visited Farnsworth’s laboratory and was sufficiently impressed with the performance of the Image Dissector that he reportedly had his team at Westinghouse make several copies of the device for experimentation. Zworykin later abandoned research on the Image Dissector, which at the time required extremely bright illumination of its subjects to be effective, and turned his attention to what would become the Iconoscope.

In 1931, David Sarnoff of RCA offered to buy Farnsworth’s patents for $100,000, with the stipulation that he become an employee of RCA, but Farnsworth refused. In June of that year, Farnsworth joined the Philco company and moved to Philadelphia along with his wife and two children. RCA would later file an interference suit against Farnsworth, claiming Zworykin’s 1923 patent had priority over Farnsworth’s design, despite the fact they could present no evidence that Zworykin had actually produced a functioning transmitter tube before 1931.

Farnsworth had lost two interference claims to Zworykin in 1928, but this time he prevailed and the U.S. Patent Office rendered a decision in 1934 awarding priority of the invention of the image dissector to Farnsworth. RCA lost a subsequent appeal, but litigation over a variety of issues continued for several years with Sarnoff finally agreeing to pay Farnsworth royalties. Zworykin received a patent in 1928 for a color transmission version of his 1923 patent application, he also divided his original application in 1931, receiving a patent in 1935, while a second one was eventually issued in 1938 by the Court of Appeals on a non-Farnsworth related interference case, and over the objection of the Patent Office.

The photo shows Philo and Pem at the demonstration of a 1935 version of his television camera.

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ULTRA RARE CLASSIC PHOTO!

See the just added video…see it here!

Together, working on a very early 1952 edition of ‘See It Now’, we see two legends of CBS News…Edward R Murrow, and, the shows first director, Don Hewitt. This is the first and only image I have ever seen of both of them together in the studio.

This looks like there is actually a camera in the control room, so this may even be a rehearsal from the first broadcast as they kind of set the stage for the viewers.

Murrow’s set would later move to the other side of the glass in later years, but in the studio it would remain very “control room looking”

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On September 4, 1962 CBS became the first network to air a half hour of television news. Walter Cronkite had replaced the original anchor, Douglas Edwards, in April of that year.

A week later, The Huntley-Brinkley Report at NBC went to a half hour as well.

On May 3, 1948, Douglas Edwards began anchoring ‘CBS Television News’, a regular 15-minute nightly newscast. It aired every weeknight at 7:30 PM, and was the first regularly scheduled television news program.

In 1950, the name was changed to ‘Douglas Edwards With The News’, and the following year, it became the first news program to be broadcast on both coasts, thanks to a new coaxial cable connection, prompting Edwards to use the greeting “Good evening everyone, coast to coast”.

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