The National Broadcasting Company -

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The National Broadcasting Company, as a service of RCA, has been in the vanguard of television pioneering and development since the earliest days of experimentation, when about the best that could be produced were barely recognizable pictures of Felix the Cat on screens the size of a playing card, or smaller. NBC’S first experimental, on-the-air broadcast was on July 7, 1930.

Those were trying and crucial days for the new art. For if sight and sound were to be combined and go anywhere in the public interest, it was agreed by the pioneers, broadcasting had to keep pace at least with receiving techniques.

It was, in a sense, repeating the old riddle of the hen and the egg: which should come first?

NBC engineers were prepared to participate with RCA in field-testing television. They moved the equipment of RCA’s experimental station W2XBS, which had been in operation since 1928, from Van Cortlandt Park to the New Amsterdam Theatre Building in New York, and began broadcasting 60-line pictures.

The year 1931 saw the establishment of a landmark in New York and in television history. Atop the Empire State Building, the world’s newest and highest skyscraper, NBC erected the transmitting antenna for experimental station W2XBS as the predecessor to WNBT, America’s No. 1 television station. (Twenty years later NBC was to share this site with four other leading New York television stations.)

In the course of extensive field tests, NBC and RCA engineers succeeded in increasing the quality of transmitted pictures to 120 lines, to 240 lines, and then 343 lines.

On June 29, 1936, NBC began field-test television transmissions from W2XBS, using the all-electronic television system under development by RCA. These transmissions were received on experimental receivers scattered throughout the New York area.

As a result of the continued tests, scanning was stepped up to 441 lines, and television programming was extended to include pickups remote from the studio. NBC’s mobile television vans, then a great curiosity, appeared on the streets of New York for the first time on December 12, 1937.

The first major dramatic star to make an appearance on television in America was Gertrude Lawrence, who played scenes from the then current Broadway hit “Susan and God” at NBC’s studios in Radio City, on June 7, 1938.

Two months later, NBC conducted the first televised sidewalk interviews, with cameras trained on passers-by in Rockefeller Plaza.

Then, on April 30, 1939, came the official introduction of television as a service to the American public. This premier event was arranged by RCA, in cooperation with NBC, at the opening of the New York World’s Fair -appropriately named the “World of Tomorrow.” Participating was President Franklin D. Roosevelt as the first Chief Executive ever to be televised.

This was the great jumping-off point for television as a service in the United States, and for NBC in its plan to lead in extending this new art for the widest possible coverage.

There has followed a long string of “firsts” for NBC's cameramen, engineers, program directors, and management.

NBC covered the first televised football game (1939), the first major-league baseball game (1939), college football game (1939), hockey game (1940), basketball game (1940), inter-collegiate track meet (1940) and the first world’s championship prize fight (1941), in its efforts to bring sporting events to its ever-increasing television audiences. It was the first to present opera (1940), the first to pick up the Ringling Brothers-Barnum and Bailey Circus from Madison Square Garden (1940), the first to cover a national convention of the major political parties (1940), the first to enter the Halls of Congress and the White House (1947).

While television was largely curtailed during the war, NBC provided valuable aid by televising air-raid instructions, and arranging for its regular programs of entertainment and news to reach wounded service men hospitalized in the New York area. In addition, NBC engineers contributed substantially to the war effort by work on airborne television.

In 1944, with victory in sight, NBC outlined to its affiliated stations plans for television’s nation-wide expansion. It had continued, meanwhile, to pioneer in the development and application of advanced equipment and techniques that were to prove so effective in extending and improving service.

Presaging its coast-to-coast network, NBC established owned-and-operated stations in Washington (1947), Cleveland (1948), Chicago (1949) and Hollywood (1949), in addition to New York. By the end of 1948, proclaimed to be television’s first truly adult year, the network had 25 independent affiliates; by 1949 the number had reached 55, and more were building. Today, the NBC-TV network has 63 affiliated stations in areas of population estimated at 92,000,000.

Back in the days of the first television transmission from the New York World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, it was considered a, remarkable feat to send the program by microwaves for rebroadcast from the Empire State Building, 8 miles away. And viewers were happy to pick up the program within a radius of 20 miles from the transmitter on the world’s tallest building.

Today television signals destined for the network cross the entire nation by microwave radio relay, and excellent reception can be obtained 40 to 60 miles from each well situated television transmitter. The RCA-NBC historic advance, known as kinescope recordings, also makes it possible for stations not linked directly in the network to receive television programs on film.

To serve the network with the finest in entertainment, NBC has engaged the top stars of radio, stage and screen and has extended its facilities by transforming many noted theatres in New York, Chicago, Hollywood, and other leading cities into television studios, supplementing studios in Radio City.

NBC and its affiliates, thus prepared, are scoring continuously impressive “firsts” in the field of entertainment, as well as in news, special events, education and religion. The challenges of the future will find them ready.