Moments in Time

Anyone who has studied the recent history of the United States can see that cultural change and technological progress are closely related. New technologies like radio and television help broaden the perspectives of their audiences by exposing them to people and ideas they might not have a chance to encounter in person. Such "opening up" of society tends to make a culture more diverse and varied and also more complex.

Television, especially, can be a powerful force for social change. When we laugh or cry with a story on TV, we get a deeper understanding of the universal struggles that all humans experience, and we feel connected to a larger world.

family watching television with inspiring image on screen

Of course, before a technology can change hearts and minds, it has to progress to the point where it becomes widely available and relatively easy to use. As you'll learn in the informational article "Six Things You Never Knew About Television," early TV had a long way to go before it became the influential medium it is today.

Read the article below to explore some of the stranger milestones in the history of TV. Then click the Begin button, and use the questions beside the text to consider how the article represents a series of technological changes.

obscure
luxurious
tiny
craziest

Describing the development of early television as crazy isn't really accurate (it's not "crazy" that the technology started out imperfect), but use of the word makes the information seem more exciting and interesting.

If that sounds like magic to you now...
...electric televisions manipulated electrons inside a vacuum tube.
It was a complicated process...
...electric TV sets could pluck electromagnetic waves from the air...

Framing the development of electric television as "magic" suggests that it was more than just technological progress--it went beyond the previously recognized limits of science and nature. Using a strong adjective like magic implies that the change was extremely positive.

chronological
specific to general
reverse chronological
spatial

This paragraph starts with the increase of available networks before the 1950s, then describes the "explosion" in TV's popularity from the 1960s to today.

They know the name of the news anchor who was sponsored by Camel cigarettes.
They are aware of the medical and scientific evidence that smoking is deadly.
They believe that exposing children to cigarette ads has no effect on their risk of smoking.
They watch more public television than mainstream network programming.

For this section of the article to be surprising, the reader has to know that cigarette smoking is lethal. For audiences of 1948, it was probably not exceptional at all to see a newscaster chain-smoking, but modern audiences would find this kind of blatant advertising shocking and dangerous.

It presents only the most interesting facts in a way that's quick and easy to read.
It leads readers into great depths of knowledge on the subject of early television.
It provides a tightly ordered chronological view of the advancement of television.
It conveys the complex relationships between significant steps in television's evolution.

A list of "bite-sized" facts and anecdotes is a popular form for informal web articles aimed at casual readers who just want some quick, amusing information. A more in-depth exploration would be organized as a more traditional article or essay.

Questions answered correctly:

Questions answered incorrectly:

Six Things You Never Knew About Television

It may be hard to believe today, because they’re in almost every American home, but television was once an obscure, experimental, and expensive technology. Just after World War II, owning a television set was considered almost as luxurious as driving around in a fancy car. TV screens were tiny then, and TV shows weren’t the finely-tuned distractions they are now. Television has come a long, long way in the last 100 years, and there were plenty of bizarre half-solutions along the way. Here are six of the craziest developments in television technology.

1. Early concepts for TV appeared in the 1800s.

The basic question behind the invention of the television was simple: How can we transmit a picture from one place to another? For thousands of years, the answer was “draw it and hand it to another person or put it in the mail.” That answer started to change during the 19th century, though. It’s hard to imagine Abraham Lincoln watching television, but the earliest TV concepts were developed just twenty years after his death.
In the 1880s, a man named Nipkow invented the “Nipkow disk,” a plate with holes that used natural light to divide images into pixels as they spun around. If you matched up two Nipkow disks just right, they could play back the same image, even if they were far away. It wasn’t HDTV, but it seemed extraordinary to people at the time. The Nipkow disk was the first mechanical ancestor of the modern TV—it did not use electricity to “project” its image.

2. The first images sent through a TV were terrifying.

The first machines to expand on the concept of the Nipkow disk appeared in the 1920s, but the technology was extremely limited. On these early screens, human faces seemed flat, distorted and sometimes downright disturbing.
Instead of starting with human faces, mechanical TV pioneers like John Logie Baird transmitted puppets with exaggerated facial characteristics. Baird could pass images through hundreds of miles of telephone wire, and even though the figures in these pictures looked like the stuff of nightmares, they marked an important step forward in the development of television.

3. Television broadcasts travelled at the speed of light.

The cranking mechanical television sets of the 1920s never caught on. Even the most sophisticated models could only produce highly pixelated images in one color. However, a few inventors were working on a different kind of television at the same time: TV powered by electricity.
Instead of mechanically moving a disk around a light source, electric televisions manipulated electrons inside a vacuum tube. It was a complicated process—electric TV sets could pluck electromagnetic waves from the air and reshuffle their coded information into pictures and sound. If that sounds like magic to you now, imagine how amazed the first television viewers were in the mid-20th century. By the 1950s, TV broadcasts were leaping from one antenna to another at the speed of light, and it must have seemed to the people watching that scientists could now do anything.

4. Early TV was basically Radio 2.0.

In the early 20th century, radio was the most popular form of home entertainment in the United States. It was a simpler time, and people were happy to sit in front of a box and listen to the news, dance to music, or hear voices acting out stories.
Americans expected similar programs to appear on television, and early TV broadcasts did little to challenge that expectation. The first programs were basically radio shows that you could see. Instead of listening to a man read the news, you could watch a man read the news. He might point to a chalkboard with headlines every once in a while, but that was it. In the early years of electronic TV, producers weren’t sure yet what to do with this new, highly visual medium.

5. The first TV sets cost as much as a year of college.

At first, very few people were rushing to department stores to buy the new-fangled “television sets.” Just after World War II, only 40,000 American homes had a TV, and those were mostly urban homes. That’s because most television sets cost around $435, which doesn’t seem too expensive now unless you know that the average annual income at the time was $2,600, and the average house cost around $5,000. In the beginning, television was mainly a diversion and a status symbol for rich folks in the city.
Over time, though, the number of available networks, or channels, multiplied. The popularity of television grew quickly during the 1950s, and mass production kept driving down the price of a TV set. By 1960, around 90% of American homes had television, which is not too far from today’s levels—98%.

6. One of the first newscasters had to smoke constantly.

In 1948, a cigarette company sponsored a news program on NBC called Camel News Caravan. According to the rules of the sponsorship deal, the show’s news anchor had to appear with a lit cigarette during the broadcast. He also had packs of cigarettes stacked in front of him on the desk, along with an ashtray displaying the Camel brand.
In the early days of TV broadcasting, issues related to news standards, ethics, and objectivity were far from most people’s minds. Some television commercials for cigarettes even included cartoon characters praising the product’s “smooth flavor.”

To be fair, most people didn’t know about the dangers of smoking—or the consequences of letting a business dictate what could be on the news. Those sorts of problems led to the creation of public television in the 1950s. Around this time, the U.S. government realized that it should probably regulate what was broadcast to an audience that included children, and that cartoon dogs telling kids it’s cool to smoke should fall outside that standard.

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