October 5, 1947…First Televised Presidential White House Address
October 5, 1947…First Televised Presidential White House Address
On this day in 1947, President Harry S. Truman delivered the first televised presidential address from the White House. As far as we know, this was the first White House pool feed and was handled by NBC.
Television was still in its infancy and there were only about 44,000 TV sets in U.S. homes, concentrated in a few cities, compared with some 40 million radios.
Though Truman pioneered the now-familiar ritual of a White House telecast to the nation, he was not the first president to appear on television. President Franklin Roosevelt was telecast from the New York World’s Fair on April 30, 1939, but FDR’s remarks on the fair’s opening day were seen only on receivers at the fairgrounds and at Radio City Music Hall, in midtown Manhattan. The next day, TV sets went on sale to the public, as RCA and NBC, began broadcasting on a daily basis. Telecasts were then largely suspended for the duration of World War II.
In his speech, Truman called on Americans to conserve food to help hard-pressed Europeans, still recovering from the devastation caused by the war and threatened with a massive winter famine. He asked the agricultural industry and distillers to reduce grain use. He asked Americans to forgo eating meat on Tuesdays and eggs and poultry on Thursdays and to consume one fewer slice of bread every day. The food-saving initiative was short-lived, however, as the Marshall Plan spurred Western Europe’s economic revitalization. Enjoy and share! -Bobby Ellerbee
Correction: There were some folks outside of the fair and at the RCA building who saw the FDR telecast. DuMont – among others – already had sets for sale. Estimates are that 1,000 people saw the broadcast on about 200 sets.
And of course Herbert Hoover was the first not-yet president to have his image transmitted by television, when he was Secretary of Commerce and participated in an AT&T two-way “proto-Picturephone” demonstration in the 1920s.
Several things pop out at me. The camera and mics are not marked. The 10 year old RCA 74A ribbon mic on the left which is obviously NBC as they were the only ones to use the rectangular Cannon connector and the 15 year old WE 618A on the right which is CBS, again, as they were the only ones to change out the regular connector with a Cannon P connector.