Early TV: "Tomorrow Television" circa 1945 Army Navy Screen Magazine 12min
more at
http://showbiz.quickfound.net/
Shows mid-1940s production of
TV shows by
New York NBC station
WNBT (now
WNBC) using
RCA gear, and Includes an interview with
David Sarnoff.
Public domain film from the
Library of Congress Prelinger Archive, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and equalization.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army-Navy_Screen_Magazine
The Army-Navy Screen Magazine was a short film program, which was shown to the
American soldiers around the world during
World War II. It included a newsreel and a cartoon of
Private Snafu.
It was produced from June 1943 until early 1946 by the
Army Signal Corps under the supervision of director
Frank Capra. The
Snafu series was produced by the staff of
Leon Schlesinger Productions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WNBC
...What is now WNBC traces its history to experimental station
W2XBS, founded by the
Radio Corporation of America (a co-founder of the
National Broadcasting Company), in 1928, just two years after NBC was founded as the first nationwide radio network.
Originally a test bed for the experimental
RCA Photophone theater television system, W2XBS used the low-definition mechanical television scanning system, and later was used mostly for reception and interference tests.
The call letters W2XBS meant W2XB-south, with
W2XB being the call letters of the first experimental station, started a few months earlier at
General Electric's main factory in
Schenectady, New York, which evolved in later years to commercial station
WRGB. GE was the parent company of both RCA and NBC, and technical research was done at the
Schenectady plant.
The station left the air sometime in 1933 as RCA turned its attention to all-electronic cathode ray tube (
CRT) television research at its
Camden, New Jersey facility, under the leadership of Dr.
Vladimir K. Zworykin. The station originally broadcast on the frequencies of
2.0 to
2.1 megahertz. In 1929, W2XBS upgraded its transmitter and broadcast facilities to handle transmissions of sixty vertical lines at twenty frames per second, on the frequencies of 2.75 to 2.85 megahertz. In 1928,
Felix the Cat was one of the first images ever broadcast by television when RCA chose a papier-mâché (later Bakelite)
Felix doll for an experimental broadcast on W2XBS. The doll was chosen for its tonal contrast and its ability to withstand the intense lights needed in early television and was placed on a rotating phonograph turntable and televised for about two hours each day. The doll remained on the turntable for nearly a decade...
In 1935, the all-electronic
CRT system was authorized as a "field test" project and NBC converted a radio studio in the
RCA Building—now the
GE Building — in
New York City's
Rockefeller Center for television use. In mid-1936, small-scale programming began to air to an audience of some 75 receivers in the homes of high-level RCA staff, and a dozen or so sets in a closed circuit viewing room in 52nd-floor offices of the RCA Building. The viewing room often hosted visiting organizations or corporate guests, who saw a live program produced in the studios many floors below.
Viewership of early NBC broadcasts was tightly restricted to those authorized by the company, whose installed set base eventually reached about
200.
Technical standards for TV broadcasting were in flux as well. Between the time experimental transmissions began in 1935 and the beginning of commercial TV service in
1941, picture definition increased from 343 to
441 lines, and finally (in 1941) to the 525 line standard used for analog TV from the start of full commercial service until the end of analog broadcasts in mid-2009. The sound signal also was changed from AM to FM, and the spacing of sound and vision carriers was also changed several times. Shortly after NBC began a semi-regular television transmission schedule in
1938,
DuMont Laboratories announced TV sets for sale to the public, a move RCA was not yet contemplating because of the ongoing shift in technical parameters. In response, NBC ceased all TV broadcasting for several months...
On June 24, 1941; W2XBS received a commercial license under the calls WNBT (
NBC Television). It was one of the first two fully licensed commercial television stations in the
United States, along with
CBS'
WCBW (now
WCBS-TV). The NBC and CBS stations were licensed and instructed to
sign on simultaneously on July 1 so that neither of the major broadcast companies could claim exclusively to be "first." However WCBW did not manage to sign on the air until 2:30 p.m., one full hour after WNBT. Thus, WNBC inadvertently holds the distinction as the oldest continuously operating
TV station in the United States, and also the only one ready to accept sponsors from its beginning...