Finding Philo

It is currently raining in this part of NJ, which means my satellite TV signal is glitchy. So, this is a good moment to write about TV instead – something I’ve been meaning to do for a couple of days.

Saturday night I watched the 1941 The Wolf Man on Me TV, a nostalgia cable/satellite channel. The Wolf Man wasn’t the first werewolf movie, but it set the standard for all the ones that followed. I’m not sure why I watched it since I own a DVD of it, but somehow it drew me in. It and other Universal monster movies appeared frequently on non-network TV channels when I was a child; there was still a shortage of original content in those years, so old movies got a lot of air time. I don’t remember the first time I saw it but it likely was prior to 1960 and certainly wasn’t much later. I know I had seen it multiple times before assembling an Aurora plastic model of the Wolf Man sometime in the early 60s. All of my elementary school friends had seen it, too, and that is the point I pondered (during commercials) on Saturday.

TV’s hundredth birthday is less than a decade away. In the past few decades we have seen Wunderkinder dropouts design cutting edge personal computers, programs, videogames, social media platforms, smart phones, apps, and other tech, but youth is nothing new in technology. In 1920 14-year-old Philo T. Farnsworth in Rigby Utah showed his high school science teacher his designs and accompanying formulae for a scanning cathode ray television system. It was way over his teacher’s head, but the fellow was supportive and referred him to Brigham Young University. Philo soon moved to California. Despite working with limited funds out of his own workshop, by 1927 he had a fully functional television system from camera to screen. (Herbert Hoover, Secretary of Commerce at the time, appeared on TV on April 7, 1927.) As so often happens when available components and theory make a new technology ripe, several inventors simultaneously were developing similar systems: notably Vladimir Zworkyin who had the resources of RCA at his disposal. In the patent dispute that followed, however, Farnsworth prevailed because his high school science teacher still had his sketches thereby proving his work was prior.

Television broadcasting began in the UK and Germany in the 1930s and in the US in 1939, in which year Franklin Roosevelt became the first sitting president to be televised. Nonetheless, the eye-watering cost of early TV sets, the Depression, and then World War 2 prevented the technology from taking off commercially. Prior to the end of the war, home TV sets in the US numbered in the mere hundreds. After the war, pent up civilian consumer demand quickly changed all that. US TV sets numbered in the millions by 1949. My parents bought their first set in 1948.

This collection of Vidal's 1950s
TV screenplays still holds up well

Television broadcasting in the 1950s was better than one might expect of a fledgling medium. (I was a little young to judge it at the time, but I did like to watch reruns of The Little Rascals before school and acquired my taste for scifi after school.) Top notch writers were hired for weekly dramas, vaudeville performers still on their game got their own shows, innovative series such as The Twilight Zone got a footing, and (bringing us back to The Wolf Man) older movies were introduced to a new generation. Because the channels were few, the effect was to homogenize popular culture in a way that radio hadn’t. People from all regions and walks of life watched the same shows and televised movies. So much was this the case that everything from water usage to restaurant attendance varied predictably depending on what was on. You could talk about the latest Ed Sullivan Show at a party and be pretty sure most people there had seen it. As late as the 1970s shows like All in the Family and The Jeffersons had diverse audiences of 30 or 40 million per episode.

No longer. The proliferation of channels and the blurring of television and internet have split us into niche audiences. We can pick and choose as we please among near endless options. Viewership divides along ideological, ethnic, and generational lines (among others) even where one wouldn’t expect. That is not entirely a bad thing. Greater choice is something I’m certainly happy to have. It is not the job of video entertainment (in whatever format on whatever screen) to homogenize popular culture. It is worth noting, though, that it once did and now doesn’t.

On the other hand, some of the niches span the divides in curious ways. Look at the membership, for example, of classic movie or science fiction or detective fiction discussion groups on Facebook. The members bear little in common but enjoyment of the genre. (By the way, the term "idiot box" is unjustified. Academic and IQ scores actually are higher in countries that watch more TV. Within countries there is a bell curve: in the US, academic scores are positively correlated with TV viewership up to 3 hours per day but fall off above that.) So, while we no longer can assume the people we meet  have seen the same television and movies as we, it’s easy enough to find some folks who have: so much so that if I had kept that Wolf Man model in the box it would be worth something. That’s not a common culture, but it will do.

Blondie’s ode to TV: Fade Away and Radiate