What the Times had seen was a demonstration of “mechanical television,” which featured rotating scanners and offered low-resolution images and in the hurly-burly of the time was invented first. In tandem, and so in competition, others were developing so-called electronic television, which was the brainchild of a remarkable inventor named Philo Farnsworth. The son of devout Mormon farmers, raised on a remote homestead in rural Utah, Farnsworth experimented for years on the use of cathode-ray tubes for making and receiving electronic images, and a TV system based on this technology eventually won the day. The tussle between the two systems was on occasion difficult and divisive, recalling the struggle between Edison and Westinghouse, between DC and AC, in the field of power generation. To this day, feelings remain strong among supporters of the two camps, one side complaining that the other stole this or that.
But the simple fact is that technicians worked tirelessly over the ensuing years, swiftly erasing any lingering public skepticism over the coming of television and confirming the general accuracy of the Times’ forecast. In 1939 David Sarnoff, who fifteen years before had so adroitly recognized the value of radio as a point-to-mass broadcasting medium, recognized in television exactly the same thing. He had at his fingertips (thanks in part to his own laboratories at RCA, which had developed and improved cathode-ray-based receivers) a technically suitable mechanism for performing the same broadcasting task as radio, only with moving pictures, too.
His company already owned station WEAF as the New York City flagship for NBC Radio. Now he inaugurated the cumbersomely styled W2XBS, with an antenna at the top of the newly built Empire State Building, for the sole purpose of transmitting television. Sarnoff himself, never backward at coming forward, decided that he would go on air first, ostensibly to show off the new RCA pavilion at the World’s Fair across the East River in Queens. “It is with a feeling of humbleness,” he said, “that I come to this moment of announcing the birth of a new art so important in its implications that it is bound to affect all society.”
The signal carrying his speech from the Avenue of Progress went out to only about two hundred sets and barely more than a thousand viewers. But it was quite evidently the start of something unimaginably big. World War II interrupted developments, though some kind of a network was begun during the conflict, with connecting lines opened to stations in Pennsylvania and Schenectady. Once peace had returned and the country was flush with returned men and released cash, the postwar commercial boom got into full swing, and television began its remarkable takeoff into the stratosphere.
Its staggering potential was first publicly recognized by a former newspaper reporter, Wayne Coy, whom President Truman had appointed to run the Federal Communications Commission. In 1948 he made a famously prescient declaration: “Make no mistake about it: television is here to stay. It is a new force unloosed in the land. I believe it is an irresistible force.” It seemed at the time that Mr. Coy might be sticking his neck out. The television industry was looking far from robust: there were just 172,000 TV receivers in the entire country and only 28 broadcasting stations, compared with the 1,600 that transmitted radio.
But then, right on cue, the price of sets went down dramatically. In 1950 a Philco receiver with a twelve-inch screen had cost $499, but in 1955, an Admiral with a twenty-one-inch screen cost $149. It suddenly became a man’s solemn duty to acquire a television and help his country’s postwar economy. To do so was also an affirmation of family values, for everyone would gather in front of it and laugh and cry together. Suddenly, buoyed by the beginnings of well-researched cleverness of the Madison Avenue advertisers, every American with space in a living room was demanding a set. Sales rocketed.
In 1952, eleven years before my moment with Johnny Carson, there were fifteen million televisions in America. A year later, exactly ten years before my time in Burbank, twenty-four million. By 1955, there were thirty-two million. When Carson began his career as the King of Late Night in 1962, well over 90 percent of the seventy-two million American households owned at least one television.
But while television sets in those years were cheap and became nearly ubiquitous, the making of television shows remained costly, far more costly than producing radio shows. Radio required only a quiet room, a microphone, and a transmitter, but television required studios, sets, cameras, film-processing equipment, and all manner of expensive technology and the personnel to handle and repair it. It was easy and economically feasible for many to make radio shows; but the price of producing TV allowed the industry swiftly to be dominated by a very few organizations with very deep pockets.
The consequence was profound. With so few masters and with the choices they offered their viewers at any one moment of broadcast time so necessarily circumscribed, almost everyone in America with a television was being offered exactly the same stream of warmly comforting entertainment. Television offered a sudden unification of culture such as had never been seen or imagined before in the country’s history—but a kind of unification quite different from what had gone before.
Roads, railroads, telegraph systems, canals—these were creations that had allowed Americans to merge and mingle with one another on an individual basis—to become physically unified with ever-increasing ease and speed. The telegraph and telephone had similarly permitted connection via conversation. In theory the technologies behind radio and television might also allow the same thing. There is no technical reason why both kinds of devices could not be employed to let people talk to one another and see one another while doing so.
But in practice the marketplace allowed almost none of this. Both kinds of electronic media were employed to permit the dissemination of a unified mass culture. Although for about three glorious twentieth-century decades, commercial radio had played a seminally important role in doing so, everything switched across to the more exciting technology once television got properly under way. Television’s role in unifying mass American culture, then in time encouraging that same culture to seep out under the doorway into the rest of the world, is now well-nigh impossible to exaggerate.
Within a decade of that first David Sarnoff broadcast, television watching had become the favorite pastime of almost half of the American people. It was a leisure activity that had ripple effects few can have imagined. Water companies had to prepare for sudden increases in consumption during commercial breaks; electrical companies, for sudden surges in demand when shows ended. Furniture companies created new kinds of chairs and sofas to help make the endless hours of watching more comfortable. The food industry came out in 1954 with premade, preplated, artificially preserved meals designed to be eaten while watching. Lexicographers noted the arrival of new-minted phrases, boob tube in 1963, couch potato in 1976, and a score of others, many migrating swiftly from slang to the mainstream. Political parties now had to groom candidates for appearances, for debates, for sudden twists and turns in policies demanded by a public that was watching all the time. Some benefited—John Kennedy, for one. Others—Richard Nixon, Joseph McCarthy—did not.
The shows that helped create this almighty mass culture have become part of the American language: Gunsmoke, Perry Mason, The Ed Sullivan Show, Dragnet, Dallas, The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show. The weekly lunacies of I Love Lucy transfixed the nation throughout the 1950s: forty-four million people, almost 70 percent of the TV-owning public, tuned in on January 19, 1953, to watch while Lucille Ball gave birth, in real life, to her first baby. Half as many people tuned in the following day to watch President Eisenhower’s inauguration ceremony. Seventy million watched the finale of a Korean War medical comedy show, M.A.S.H.
In the years that followed, sporting events, political debates, moon landings, assassinations, attacks—all these were consumed by an ever-fascinated public principally via television, the griefs and triumphs shared, the conversation united. Millions got their news from men who would become trusted, avuncular figures—Edward R. Murrow, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, Walter Cronkite—whose timbre an
d manner suggested an almost godlike authority. Governments feared their power; the loss of Cronkite’s support for the Vietnam War was an important factor in President Nixon’s decision to wind the conflict down.
But then, after just thirty years of domination by the major television networks, a domination that helped create a cultural and psychological unification of the states, there came something new: cable television. And with cable there came further changes, which began to erode TV’s brief role as the electronic welder-in-chief of the country.
The technology behind cable TV is simple enough: rather than having the TV signals sent through the air by local stations affiliated with the networks that supplied most of their programs, the signals could be relayed directly to household by wire, without the need for a station in between.
In the early days, the late 1940s, these wires were generally put in for reasons of necessity. Out in the mountainous regions of the country, for example, many could simply not receive line-of-sight broadcast signals. A Pennsylvania appliance store owner and lineman named John Walson, in the Appalachian hill town of Mahanoy City, is generally credited with founding the industry in 1948. He had offered to connect those customers who had bought televisions from him but received only poor signals to an antenna he had built on a local hillside. He would connect them with a cable and through it would bring them three channels of programming for $2 a month.
Walson used a specially made high-volume coaxial cable that could carry half a dozen channels at the same time. In time the capacity of such cables increased tenfold, and by the 1970s, when cable television became a realistic commercial prospect, customers could have many scores of channels beamed directly into their televisions. Today coaxial metal cables have been replaced by fiber-optic cables. Now hundreds and potentially thousands of channels can be carried, and viewers—now usually city and suburb dwellers who buy cable by choice rather than necessity—can choose from a nearly limitless menu of entertainment, education, news, and commentary.
The result has been to dilute and disperse the unifying potential power of television even more dramatically than that of public radio. Radio had become diluted because so many geographically separated public radio stations were established, hundreds of small fiefdoms that for one reason or another proved unwilling or unable to talk to one another. Cable television, on the other hand, created no stations at all; it diluted the overall effect of the medium by virtue of the vast spectrum of choices it offered to the viewer.
The huge TV-watching population, encouraged by advertisers using clever demographically based or interest-based algorithms, swiftly began to split itself into subgroups. Some were based on demographics, with all youngsters watching this kind of television, older white people watching another kind, and young African American women yet another; others were based on interests, with those liking golf, fashion, numismatics, basketball, British comedy, and erotica tuning in to specialty channels. Cable television allowed all of these bodies of humanity to enter their own personal echo chambers, to retreat into cultural laagers and become cut off from the mainstream broadcasts for which television had been originally intended.
The consequence was immediate, dramatic, generational, and continuing, remaining a work in progress. In the 1950s and ’60s, American popular culture had been unwittingly homogenized by an almost monotheistic devotion to network television. It generally ignored such criticism as that most notoriously made by Newton Minow, another chairman of the FCC, who in the 1960s derided television as a “vast wasteland.” He made himself an archenemy of the networks by condemning their output as little more than “a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western badmen, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly commercials—many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom.”
Today, with cable television attracting more than half of the American population, the monoculture reared on such entertainment—for it is difficult to suppose that a modern Newton Minow would find much changed—has started to evaporate. The cultural firmament has fractured, each splinter attracting its own cohort of viewers, each wedded by fiber-optic cable or satellite transponder to the unseen broadcaster, viewers separate from one another and each group separated from the others also.
The fracturing of taste has changed the family, too. What was once an indissoluble unit gathered around the flickering blue television screen now is spoiled for choice and spoiled by choice. One parent might be watching one sport on one cable channel while another views a gentler pastime on a second set and the children are each shut away behind closed doors, watching yet other channels or, more likely, a transmission of cultural omniscience that is available by way of electronics’ most recent and indisputably most profoundly important newcomer: the Internet.
THE ALL OF SOME KNOWLEDGE
I was in a sheep station in a remote corner of northern Australia when I first realized the Internet’s extraordinary potential. It was the mid-1990s. I was living in Hong Kong, owned a cell phone the size of my hand, and worked on an Apple computer the size of a small filing cabinet. I had been using e-mail for the previous six years.
The Internet of the time was slow, hesitant. Enthusiasts, of which I was unashamedly one, spent hours trawling through the booths at the somewhat shady Golden Supermarket in a tenement in Wanchai to buy gadgets and listen to suggestions for making their connection marginally faster. But the basic fact was: an Internet existed, and even in those slow days, most who used it were in awe.
But on Stockholm Station, in western Queensland, people didn’t have it, had never heard of it. In the farm office, there was a mechanical adding machine, handle and all, and the farmer looked mystified at the sight of my portable—or in those days, luggable—computer. The farmer’s son, a seven-year-old sheepherding Land Rover–driving boy much older than his years and named Rupert, said he had heard his by-radio School of the Air teacher, one Mrs. Bishop, describe a computer, but he had never seen one. He was in consequence more enthralled than mystified by mine, as was his pet lamb, named Gidgee, who always seemed to be gamboling cheerily along at Rupert’s side. He asked me for a demonstration of what it could do. He sat down beside me, and Gidgee, obligingly charming, jumped up onto his lap and nestled there, watching, too.
First I showed him some e-mails. Though mundane now, they were quite extraordinary then, especially in the remote red heart of outback Australia. This first was a letter from Hong Kong, I explained; the next, from France; two more, from New York. Then I typed a note for a friend in San Francisco, mentioning that I had a lad named Rupert sitting beside me. “Hi, Rupert,” she returned, seconds later. The boy stirred uneasily in his seat.
But now, I said: the Internet. He had no idea what it was, so I explained as best I could. Anything he wanted to know about, anything, I could show him with a click, in pictures, sound, text, film. So employing the Microsoft slogan of the moment, I asked him: “Where do you want to go today?”
He thought for a second. Then . . . could I perhaps show him a picture; he hesitated, presumably not wishing to sound foolish . . . a B-1 bomber? He had always been fascinated, ever since reading about them in a magazine.
I knew there had been some test aircraft at Edwards Air Force Base in California, logged on to the website, and in moments I had film clips of a B-1B soaring into the skies over the Arizona desert. Rupert’s eyes were as big as dinner plates. Then he fell rather quiet, looked away for a second, then said in a nervous whisper: “Could your computer possibly . . . take me to Mars?”
It was an obsession, he confessed. He had always tried to see it in the clear nighttime skies. His dad’s binoculars were helpful. But if it were possible to see a close-up . . . ?
I clicked over to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, and by happy chance there was a satellite, the Sojourner, flying over the Martian surface. Every ten minutes or so, it w
as sending a picture, which JPL was posting on its website. Slowly, line by line, an image of the red desert landscape revealed itself. Craters, canal-like canyons, mountaintops—all were being seen for the first time here in Australia just as they were in California. Then I heard a stirring beside me.
Rupert was astonished, his eyes even wider than before. He didn’t seem to know what to do—until he then placed his hands gently across Gidgee’s wooly face and pointed the creature’s eyes directly at the screen. He lowered his head and, desperate to share the moment with his best friend, said solemnly to the little lamb, “Look Gidgee! It’s Mars!”
I left my computer behind in Australia for Rupert, who soon began sending e-mails to me, and I bought another machine the moment I arrived back home. The new one was faster, smaller, lighter, and cheaper. Access to the Internet was getting easier. Converts were accumulating all the time. The addition of that one small child convinced me that the effect of connection to this parallel universe of knowledge was of seminal importance. There was no stopping it now.
And the Internet revolution has not stopped its acceleration, not for one microsecond in all the years since. Whether for ultimate good or not remains to be seen, but as a phenomenon, it seems as permanent as the pyramids, only a very great deal younger.
The dates of its early stirrings and the names of those who can lay some claim to having created it present a marvelous confusion. Almost all of its origins are American, and a great deal of them involve—as with the expeditions, the surveys, the roads, the railways, the waterways, the telegraph, and a score of other unifying events and entities—the United States government.