The Box That Ate the Living Room

Renee: Christmas morning, 1981. I am 13 years old. My parents have committed an act of chaos that I did not fully appreciate until, like, you know, many years later. They put a television in my bedroom. A television?

Marc: A bedroom TV at 81, you know, for a 13-year-old?

Renee: I'm telling you, they were either visionaries or they just needed me out of the living room.

Marc: Yeah, it was probably a little bit of both.

Renee: I gotta tell you, though, I watched Late Night with David Letterman. Okay, this is the thing. It was on, so late night started it like late at night, like 1230 in the morning, right? But I would watch, okay, I would get dressed for school. I'm not kidding you. I would get dressed for school. I would crawl into bed and I would watch late night with David Letterman from 1230 till 130. Like I, for years, it got me through high school, dude. Like for years, like that stupid human tricks, stupid pet tricks. Like it was all. Pet and teller. Right? Yeah. Like all of that. But what was it, the top 10 list? Like, I never missed Letterman. Like, for me, and mostly because he was a C student that did well. Like, yes, yes, I could relate.

Marc: I don't know. I'm not sure. Yeah. I don't think I could have done that. I don't think I could have done that.

Renee: Right? So I was 13, right? My moral framework was still developing. The point is, there was something about that TV in my room. It just felt like a portal that had been installed in my house. Like, someone had cut a hole in the wall. And the other side was everywhere else but Carrick.

Marc: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I don't know. My version is probably the family TV, which, you know, it was my dad's, you know, you know, he kind of, you know, took care of that. You know, we had one until much later, we had one downstairs and then one upstairs. Right. The one was the one downstairs was this like, you know, with the, the big wooden case, you know, and, you know.

Renee: When TVs or furniture.

Marc: Yeah, I do remember, you know, Jeopardy at 730 and then, you know, there was news and stuff and there was a lot of, a lot for my mom, soap operas and, you know, for me, game shows and things like that. That was nice. Yeah. So once in a while, you know, it'd be like the golf tournament or something like that. But yeah.

Renee: Yeah. Well, golf tournaments are sacred text, right? For dads, like my dad, like you could walk into the living room on any given day and he's watching NASCAR. Like my dad was a big race car guy.

Marc: Yeah. That makes sense. I mean, for me, it was the sacredness of the golf was definitely my grandfather. That was, you know, that's the only thing. You know, you saw that in 60 minutes, right? But, you know, the rest of the time, the TV, you know, sat there in the corner of the room. It was kind of the center of the room. All the sorts of arguments and discussions, sometimes meals in front of it. For us now, definitely, you know, there's kind of times that food is in the same place as the TV and sometimes not. You know, it was the fireplace, you know, that we'd actually replaced the fireplace with.

Renee: So someone had to build the first one. Some person at some point looked at the idea of a glowing box that could show you moving images from somewhere else and decided to make it real. And the story of how they did it and who stole credit for it, which, my gosh, you know what? How many times have we done this where someone stole credit for things? And how a corporation tried to bury a farm kid from Idaho is one of the most dramatic things that happened in the 20th century. And you know what? I say it a lot, but we don't talk about it enough.

Marc: The story's got everything it's got patents and betrayal and you know i love the world's fair so we'll talk about the world's fair.

Renee: A potato field

Marc: Yeah the potato field is you know that's where everything kind of starts.

Renee: All right we're gonna get there so i'm renee

Marc: And i'm Marc.

Renee: And this is the nostalgic

Marc: Nerds podcast there you go.

Renee: Bring this picture around on my

Marc: All right, go for it.

Renee: All right, here's something strange about how we talk about television. It gets treated like it's just showed up one day, like fully formed, like somewhere around 1955, right alongside TV dinners and the Eisenhower administration, like it materialized in the American living room without anyone having to do anything to make it happen.

Marc: Yeah, except it didn't, right? The foundational ideas behind television stretch back to the 1870s, before cars, before widespread electric light, before the telephone was a decade old.

Renee: It was, think about this. People in top hats were theorizing about how to transmit images through wires. And the argument about how to actually do it took 50 years, and it destroyed at least one man's chance at the credit he deserved.

Marc: The central concept that everyone was working toward was pretty much the same. If you can break an image into a series of tiny pieces and transmit them fast enough to reassemble somewhere else, you can send a picture. The question is always the how.

Renee: And the first series answer to that question was mechanical. Paul Nipkow, a German inventor, patented the spinning disk approach in 1884. A disk with a spiral pattern of holes in it spinning in front of an image, scanning it line by line into an electrical signal. And it worked. I mean, it was crude, but it worked. And you could transmit a picture. It was blurry. It was low resolution. It looked roughly like trying to identify a face through frosted grass from a moving car. but the principle that it was real

Marc: You know what this reminded me of when i looked at this it reminded me of when we talked about the film and film tech the audio where they encoded the audio in little like dark and light bands of you know and then shined a light through it and then it oscillated you know, so totally analog right but the early you know this early invention 30 lines of resolution 30, 3-0. Today's HD television has, you know, 1080 or 4,000 or whatever number you want to use. 8K, right? But the point is, is it scanned line by line, top to bottom. It's sort of like plowing a field.

Renee: And John Logie Baird took that approach further than anyone. He built a working mechanical television system in the mid-1920s out of things he found in a workshop. A tea chest, bicycle lights, a hat box, darning needles. Oh, by the way, I had to buy like 50 of them, darning needles. Am I the only one left on Earth that buys them, but I have to buy them in bulk? He literally MacGyvered the first publicly demonstrated television system out of hardware store odds and ends.

Marc: Is like the OG Doc Brown. And it totally worked. January 1926, he demonstrated live moving images to members of the Royal Institution in London, real-time transmission of a human face.

Renee: Which is astonishing, but mechanical television had a ceiling that was baked into the physics. The spinning disk can only go so fast before it becomes physically dangerous. Again, again, Again, one more thing that when it's first invented might kill you. The resolution can only get so high before the mechanical precision required becomes impossible to maintain. Baird could tinker at the edges forever and never get past a certain point. And the people who understood that were already working on something else entirely.

Marc: Yeah, something with no moving parts at all.

Renee: Something that changed everything. And the person who built it was 19 years old and grew up on a farm.

Marc: So the piece of hardware that makes all electronic television possible is the cathode ray tube. Like, not anymore, right? But like back then, you know, and the operating...

Renee: My one in my bedroom was a tube. When you turned it off, it all shrunk down to this tiny little thing and then it disappeared. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, mine was a tube.

Marc: I can't even remember the first non-tube TV. I'm trying to remember. It was definitely after Meredith and I were married.

Renee: So we had one. It was my grandfather's. It was a projection TV. And so when you opened the K and had the screen behind it, and then it would have red, green, and blue, and it would project it up onto the... Yeah. Yeah, that was the first one I ever saw that wasn't a glass tube. Anyway, go ahead.

Marc: Anyways, all right. So yeah, the CRT, right? Catheter and tube. The operating principle, you know, let's go over it.

Renee: Let's do it.

Marc: Yeah, all right. So you take a glass tube, you seal it, and you pull almost all the air out. Just so it's vacuum inside. At one end, you have an electron gun, which generates a focus beam of electrons and fires it down the length of the tube. At the other end, the inside of the screen is coated with a phosphorescent material that glows when electrons hit it. Now, here's the cool part. Because electrons are charged particles, you can steer the beam using magnetic fields precisely and quickly in any direction you want. So you can move the glowing part of the electron impact anywhere on the screen you want.

Renee: And if you move it in a controlled pattern across the screen, sweeping left to right, line by line, top to bottom, fast enough that the human eye interprets the result as a complete stable image rather than a moving dot.

Marc: Then you've got television. No gears, no disks, no moving parts anywhere. Just electromagnetism, phosphor, and, you know, my friend, physics.

Renee: The thing I've always found most poetic about CRT technology is that it's using the same perceptual trick as film, right? You're not actually showing a moving picture. You're showing a rapid sequence of still moments fast enough that the human brain fills in the continuity. We are, at some level, completing the illusion ourselves.

Marc: Yeah, yeah. Persistence of vision. The visual system holds onto an image for a fraction of a second after it disappears. At 30 frames per second, which is what early broadcast television ran at in the U.S., you never consciously notice the gap. Your brain just decides it's continuous.

Renee: Actually, why 30? Was there some magic number? Like, was there something magic about that? Or is that just it? That was the limit of the technology? What was that?

Marc: It's actually tied to electricity. So the U.S. power grid runs at 60 hertz, so 60 cycles per second. So the engineers picked a vertical scan rate that locked that at 60 hertz and made the frame rate half of that. So 30 frames per second, 60 fields per second. The reason is that any electrical noise inside the television, you know, the mains hum, you know, they would show up as a stationary pattern rather than something rolling across the screen. Rolling would drive you crazy. Stationary, you barely notice. And the horizontal scan rate is 15,750 hertz, which is 525 lines times 30 frames. So every 63 microseconds, that beam swept across the entire screen left to right. Then it snapped back. Then it swept again, line after line, all night long, every set in America.

Renee: 15,750 times a second.

Marc: I did have to do the math on that. And it did it in an interlaced order, which is a whole kind of other trick. The beam doesn't draw the whole picture line by line. 1 through 5, 25, and then start over. It draws all the odd-numbered lines first. Then it goes back to the top and draws all the even ones in between. So you get two half frames stitched together to make one whole frame. 60 fields per second, 30 frames per second, and your brain welds them together into continuous motion. The same bandwidth is 30 FPS, but perceived motion is smoother because something on the screen is updating twice as often. And every once every one of us watched that trick for decades and probably, you know, none of us knew that.

Renee: No wonder we were all so exhausted. You know, we really do live inside engineering compromises that we never actually stopped to think about, I think.

Marc: Did you ever, like, get really close to the tube, you know, and, like, stick your head right there and your eyes? Yeah, I did that once a lot of times.

Renee: No, but I do know you had to fine-tune it, right? It would get wobbly or it would get—yeah, you would have to fine-tune it, though.

Marc: That's what the song for this week is all about, which is funny.

Renee: Okay.

Marc: Anyway, so there's one more piece of it that I really like, which is the vertical blanking interval. The beam has to get from the top of the screen back to the top before it can start the next field. That retrace takes time. So during that time, the beam is blanked. It just turns it off. Nothing is broadcast. Nothing on the screen. It was empty airtime holding inside every frame of every broadcast. And that empty airtime got exploited later for things nobody watching had any idea were happening. Closed captions wrote inside of that, teletext in Europe, time codes, data services, whole side channels of information tucked into the paws where the beam was moving. If you ever saw the picture roll on an old TV and there was a black bar between the frames, that was the vertical blanking interval and you could just barely see it.

Renee: You know, humans are extremely easy to fool. But it's totally a theme in human history. We're just boneheads. We're boneheads.

Marc: We are boneheads. Yeah, it's definitely a recurring theme.

Renee: Okay, so the technology exists as a concept. The question is, who actually builds it first? Philo Farnsworth. Okay, he should be everyone's personal hero. Like, Philo Farnsworth.

Marc: Yeah, he should be everyone's personal hero for sure.

Renee: Philo Farnsworth, Taylor Farnsworth, born in 1906 in a log cabin in Utah, raised in Idaho, one of those child prodigies who read scientific journals at 11 and spent his teenage years rebuilding electrical equipment in the family farm. And in 1921, at 14 years old, he was plowing a potato field in Idaho. He was cutting furrows back and forth, parallel lines across the entire field. And he looks back at what he's done and he sees it. The image, scanned line by line, the electronic television system he's going to spend the next decade building. Remember, he's 13, right? Like, he's going to spend the next decade building this.

Marc: He was plowing dirt.

Renee: Right? Inspiration comes from everywhere.

Marc: Yeah. So he draws it out for his high school chemistry teacher, a guy named Justin Tolman, right after he plows this field. He drew it on the blackboard, explained the whole concept, and Tolman took him seriously, engaged with it, and remembered those diagrams in detail.

Renee: And those diagrams, and Tolman's memory of them, became legally divisive evidence years later when a corporation tried to take everything Farnsworth had built and claimed it as their own. But we're getting ahead of ourselves, because first, Farnsworth actually built it.

Marc: Yeah, so September 7th, 1927. Farnsworth is 21 years old, working in a lab in San Francisco with investors he'd spent years convincing to take a chance on him. He transmits the first fully electronic television image in history. The image is a single straight line.

Renee: No spinning disk anywhere in the system, no mechanical components, pure electronics, start to finish. He was 21 years old when he did it.

Marc: Yeah, so he tells the investors, there you have it, electronic television, just like that, composed, like he had just changed the world.

Renee: And now we get to David Sarnoff, who's fascinating and infuriating figure because he was brilliant and he was a visionary. And he used every single one of those qualities to crush an inventor who had beaten him fair and square.

Marc: So, man, you just want to, you know, the underdog here. So Sarnoff was the president of RCA, the Radio Corporation of America. Boo. He had the little dog, you know. Yeah, boo. Boo. He had built it into the dominant force in American communications by understanding something that pure inventors often miss, which is that controlling the infrastructure matters more than any single device. How many times have we said that?

Renee: Well, how true is that about AI?

Marc: Yeah, exactly.

Renee: Don't go digging for the gold. Sell the picks and axes. Yeah, go ahead.

Marc: That's right. So RCA obviously had done it with radio, and Sarnoff had been saying publicly since the early 1920s that television was going to be the next platform he intended to own.

Renee: RCA had their own television research team, Vladimir Zvorkin, a Russian-born inventor who had filed patents in the 1920s for an electronic camera tube and a picture tube. And the historical record on his early patents is murky because it was a substantial evidence that what he filed did not actually describe a functional device. Fun with patents. Like, I think something like this could exist one day. I'm going to file patent for it so that somebody else develops it, I get the patent, right? We still do it that way, by the way. This was more theoretical architecture than a working system.

Marc: Yeah, the patent described a concept. Whether it described a device that actually operated the way the patent claimed is something historians and engineers have argued about for decades. The short version is probably not, at least not at the time of filing.

Renee: So in 1930, he makes a visit to Farnsworth Labs in San Francisco. He's framed as a fellow researcher, a collegial scientific exchange. Let's just talk about it. I'd love to see it. I'm going to come stop by. And Farnsworth's team shows him everything. The camera, the display, the entire working system. Sorkin reportedly looked at Farnsworth's camera tube for a long time, and he called it beautiful. Can I just tell you, that's probably what Elon did with that car. He probably looked at it a long time and thought, that's rad. Yeah.

Marc: And within a very short window after that visit, RCA's research program made specific targeted progress on the exact problems they had previously been stuck on.

Renee: So the bomb was not the first time the Russians pulled a fast one on us. I just want to put it out there, right? That's a remarkable coincidence. Yeah.

Marc: Very convenient.

Renee: Sarnoff then went to Farnsworth directly and offered to buy his patents for $100,000. In 1930 money, that was real. It was also obviously a fraction of what Sarnoff believed the technology was worth. Farnsworth says, eh, no. Which is one of my most favorite moments in technology history because it was the right answer, and he had every reason to take the money, and he didn't.

Marc: Yeah, and Sarnoff responded the way powerful corporations respond when someone won't sell, which is to file patent challenges claiming that RCA's technology predated Farnsworth and that Farnsworth was the one that was infringing.

Renee: Yeah, that's a move that relies entirely on having more lawyers than the other guy. And RCA did, right?

Marc: It's such a dirty tactic.

Renee: Right, right.

Marc: Patent trolls. RCA had essentially unlimited legal resources. Farnsworth had his investors and, you know, a chemistry teacher.

Renee: His chemistry teacher, who had remembered diagrams drawn on a blackboard in 1921, in 1934 and 1935, after years of patent proceedings, the United States Patent Office ruled in Farnsworth's favor. They found his documented work predated RCA's claim, and the key inventions of the electronic television were legally his. Good for him. 24 years old. He legally owed the patent to TV. Yeah.

Marc: And for the first time in RCA's history, the company paid royalties to an outside inventor. They had always been the ones collecting. Now they were writing checks to a kid who had grown up plowing fields in Idaho. You know, you got to wonder if that tactic you worked for them before. You know, if they were the ones that were always, you know, collecting royalties rather than paying royalties, like, who else did they squash?

Renee: Oh, yeah. Like, tons of people, right? Like, do you think RCA's lab invented their radio? I'm going to go with,

Marc: Uh, no. Well, we know that it didn't, right? We know that it didn't.

Renee: Right. And still it wasn't enough because the war came. Commercial television was essentially shut down from 1942 to 1945. Farnsworth, yeah, that's true. Because whenever you think about, like, 1940s, everybody's huddled around a radio again listening to, like, no one saw images of the concentration camps. They heard people describing the images. Yeah.

Marc: Well, they had the short reels that played it at the theaters.

Renee: At the movie theaters, right. So Farnsworth's patents had a 17-year window from issuance. The war ate right through the middle of it. By the time the television became a mass market phenomenon in the late 1940s, his most important patents were expiring. You know, I love when it happens to drugs. Like, I love when drug companies lose their patents because then generics get to show up. I'm feeling bad right now for Farnsworth. Like, that's not fair. Like, the arc of human history is about to screw him. He never got to build the business his invention deserved.

Marc: And the name most Americans associated with television, if they associated any name at all, became Sarnoff or, you know, RCA. Sometimes it's work, and Farnsworth was largely written out of the story for decades. Poor dude.

Renee: I hate to admit it, but my stupid black and white TV that I watch Letterman on every night was an RCA. It was an RCA black and white. Yeah. I feel bad about that now. I was helping the man. He's been partially rehabilitated. There's a statue of him in the U.S. Capitol. His story's been told in documentaries, but for a long time, the official count of how television happened left the person most responsible for it out of the story.

Marc: I'm going to have to go through and edit all the RCA-ness out of here, right? Because they're going to come, like, you know, we're like. They're going to come after us with a crumb. Yeah.

Renee: Like they still matter.

Marc: Okay. So, I mean, how many times have we talked about this? Technology history is full of this kind of thing. The person who actually did the thing and the institution that ended up with the credit are different people.

Renee: So Philo Farnsworth invented television. I want that on the record every single time we have this conversation. Philo Taylor Farnsworth, you, sir, were a genius at 13. Good for you.

Marc: All right. So we have the invention, right? We have the legal drama. Now the commercial television is actually happening. The 1939 World's Fair in New York is where the American public gets its first serious collective look at television as a real thing that is going to be in their homes. RCA has a pavilion. Oh, the pavilions. I, you know, I wish.

Renee: You love the World Fair.

Marc: I know. I wish. Sarnoff gives a broadcast speech calling television a new art. And sets go on sale.

Renee: For $600. Which is somewhere around $10,000 to $12,000 in today's money. So extremely accessible to everyone. Very, it's a grassroots rollout. I'm being facetious if I ever saw one.

Marc: Holy cow, $600. Like, ouch. Ouch. Whatever. Yeah. See, they should like all that royalty money that they'd be paying, you know. Right. Yeah. Then the war happens and everything stops. Factories that would be making TV sets are making radar and military equipment. Commercial broadcasting scales back to almost nothing. And the future gets put in a drawer for four years.

Renee: And when the war ends, the pent-up demand for this is volcanic. 17,000 TV sets in the entire United States in 1946. Just 17,000. We have 4 million by 1950. 30 million by 1955. That growth rate had no precedence in consumer technology history. Like, not even the iPod pulled that one off.

Marc: Yeah. Yeah, it's a lot. Yeah. What drives it is not just the technology. It's the timing. Post-war economic expansion, suburban growth, rising middle-class incomes, and a housing boom producing living rooms that needed things in them.

Renee: And what I think people underestimate about that moment is how quickly everyone realized what they actually had. Advertisers understood within about five hot minutes that it was the most powerful sales device ever created. Because it wasn't like radio where you imagined the product. You didn't have to imagine Ovaltine in me more like you could see it you could watch it being used you could see a little kids you know swirling up the you know the Ovaltine in a glass you can watch smiling right filing up holding it up drinking it you'd felt something

Marc: Yeah that's I love those old commercials man they're so awesome, The human visual system is tuned to pay attention to moving images. That's an evolutionary response. Movement meant something was happening. Food or predator, television exploits that response just completely.

Renee: We spent millions of years developing finely calibrated survival instincts and then built a device that redirects them toward a soap dish, right? Or toward Ovaltine or toward, you know, cereal with a...

Marc: Cereal.

Renee: With a decoder ring in it. You know what? It really did make us soft. It's almost admirable, I think. You know?

Marc: The other thing that changed fast was the architecture. The furniture got rearranged. Room layouts and new housing construction started being designed around where the TV wall was going to be. For centuries, the focal point of the main room in a home was a fireplace. The hearth. The thing the family oriented toward.

Renee: And within a generation, the TV replaced it. Not metaphorically, but literally, the chair arrangement changed direction. Yeah, it's totally the way it is in our house. Like, there's a giant TV on a wall and all the furniture is pointing at it, for sure.

Marc: Yeah, the thing you gathered around changed what you gathered to do, which changed what felt normal.

Renee: Something about early television that doesn't get enough attention. Almost everything was live. Not live in the sense of a special event. Live in the sense that there was no other option. Videotape didn't exist as broadcast technology until 1956 when ampex introduced it before that if you wanted to air a show on the west coast three hours after it aired on the east coast you either performed the whole thing again in the studio live with the same cast and crew

Marc: Which some shows actually did to come to complete live performances one night.

Renee: Or you did something that sounds like a technical fever dream, which is that you pointed a film camera at a television monitor showing the broadcast, recorded that onto film, then developed the film real quick and shift it across the country. That recording was called a kinescope. It's why so much archival early television footage looks terrible. You're actually watching a film of a TV screen showing a live broadcast. Like, that's the West Coast, you know, simulcast. That's it right there. I'm going to use film to tape the live broadcast.

Marc: Isn't that nuts? That's just nuts.

Renee: That's crazy.

Marc: That's crazy. And then literally putting it on a plane and flying.

Renee: Right, right. That's like faxing something now. You'd be like, why? Why? Yeah.

Marc: Multiple generations of quality loss stacked on top of each other. Grain on top of Flickr, on top of contrast loss. Oh, man, some of that early kinescope stuff is so bad.

Renee: Yeah, it's really bad. And the consequences of all this is that early television was deeply, profoundly ephemeral. It happened and it was gone. And a lot of broadcasters decided there was no reason to preserve kinescopes. Storage costs money. The silver in the film could be reclaimed and stored. Whole series. Whole series. Like, we're probably lucky we still have some of these, you know, shows like The Twilight Zone, right? Whole series got destroyed.

Marc: Yeah. Entire genres of early television, live drama especially, which was considered some of the most sophisticated work being made in the 1950s, is mostly gone. Shows that ran for years exist now as two episodes and a fragment.

Renee: Which is heartbreaking because we think of television as the medium that preserved the 20th century. It's the archive. It's the record. And its earliest years left almost nothing.

Marc: Yeah. Early television was structurally more like theater than film. It performed, it concluded, and then it disappeared. And that shaped what kind of content thrived. Live variety shows, sketch comedy, drama that worked in real time without an editing safety net.

Renee: As a former actor, I got to tell you, that was the heyday. Like, that was television as theater, right? Like, any actor who loves their work would say, I would love to do live TV. That would be crazy. That's why Saturday Night Live is so fun. And then color arrives. And the color television story is one of my favorites because it's the perfect illustration of how corporate power can override a better technical answer just by having more lawyers.

Marc: More lawyers um yeah cbs had a working color system before rca, their approach was their approach used a spinning color wheel in front of the camera and and with receiver with segments of red green and blue synchronized to a specific broadcast signal, and it produced beautiful images vivid saturated color that looked impressive even by later standards okay i have seen some of this stuff. It's really cool. And it's, and it actually some of the technology made itself made its way into film, which is, Yeah, it's really cool stuff, but oh, well.

Renee: I hear my dad talk about it. He's like, you used to buy this filter and put it up in front of the TV and the top is blue. The middle was like yellow and the bottom was like red. And he's like, but, you know, when you weren't looking at a landscape, that meant the top of Walter Cronkite's head was blue. Yeah. Right. So, yeah, the FCC evaluated it in 1950s and approved the CBS system as the American color television standard. And then guess what happened? RCA sued them because they can't help themselves.

Marc: Yeah. RCA's argument was that CBS's system was incompatible with existing black and white sets because the signal format was different. And that's true. But RCA's objection was also very conveniently tied with the fact that they were finishing their own fully electronic color system that would be backward compatible with existing sets.

Renee: So they were simultaneously correct about the incompatibility problem and completely self-interested in raising it.

Marc: Yeah, both things were true at once. And RCA went to manufacturers, they went to Congress, they went to consumer groups, and they made the case that CBS Standard would make millions of existing sets obsolete overnight. And, like, that's true. Like, we just talked about the numbers. You're talking, what was it, 30 million sets or whatever?

Renee: Okay, but that's the whole point of Silicon Valley today. Like, disrupt and make everything else obsolete. Like, how did we change our mind there? I digress. Go ahead.

Marc: Yeah, yeah. It's not a great message for an industry that had just spent a decade convincing everyone to buy a television, though. That's the point.

Renee: And it worked. In 1953, the FCC reversed course, rejected the CBS system. Oh, my God. And adopted RCA's all-electronic standard instead, developed by the National Television System Committee. Yeah.

Marc: It's known as the NTSC. But OK, when you said that, I just I've been on lots of standards committees, you know, and you can tell which standards committees are stacked and which ones aren't. Right. Yeah.

Renee: Right. Yeah.

Marc: This one was stacked with RCA. So, yeah. Anyway, so NTSC, which lasted as the North American broadcast standard until the digital transition in the mid 2000s.

Renee: 50 years. One corporate fight locked in a color standard for 50 years. Yeah. It's crazy.

Marc: And it was not beloved by, you know, even the engineers who worked with it. NTSC stood for National Televents System Committee, but the running engineering joke was that it stood for never the same color because the color calibration was notoriously difficult to maintain and varied across receivers.

Renee: Yeah. Okay. Why? What was actually so hard about it?

Marc: So two problems at once, right? The first is the hardware side and the second signal side. So the hardware side is the color CRT itself. The color picture tube has three electron guns instead of one, each aimed at its own color phosphor of the screen, red, green, and blue. And between the guns and the screen is a piece of, like, perforated metal called a shadow mask, with hundreds of thousands of tiny holes in it, machined to align exactly with the phosphor pattern. Each gun's beam only reaches its own color because the shadow mask blocks it from reaching the others. You get the alignment wrong by a fraction of a millimeter, and the whole image goes fuzzy. Manufacturing that, at consumer scale, millions of sets a year, is one of the great forgotten industrial achievements of the 20th century.

Renee: Three guns, three colors, all landing in the right place.

Marc: Yeah, so that's the hardware side. The signal side is where NTSC gets, you know, kind of clever. RCA needed color, but they needed it to work on, you know, the 90 million black and white sets already sitting in American homes. Broadcasting a signal, a black and white set couldn't decode, would have obsoleted their entire installed base overnight. So they kept the black and white signal exactly as it was. a signal called luminance, which carries brightness. Then they hid the color information on top of that signal as a modulated subcarrier at a specific high frequency. A black and white set doesn't know what the subcarrier is and just ignores it. A color set has a decoder that pulls it out and reconstructs the color.

Renee: Okay, so they fight that it's not backwards compatible, and then it's not backwards compatible. So one broadcast— It is backwards compatible.

Marc: It is, yeah.

Renee: Oh, come on. So you're just ignoring the color. Like, you know what? So one broadcast, I guess both TV sets are happy?

Marc: Yeah. Yeah. They were smart about the encoding itself. The signal separates brightness from color, called YIQ. It's the brightness. The I and the Q are color. So broadcast Y at full bandwidth and INQ at reduced bandwidth because the human eye is far more sensitive to differences in brightness than to differences in color. You crush the color resolution and nobody notices. You do the same to brightness and the picture falls apart. So they gave brightness the bandwidth and squeezed color into whatever was left.

Renee: Yeah, we just don't see color that precisely, right? I always say, like, when my husband buys a TV, he's like, look at that picture. I'm like, you know what? The lowest common denominator in this entire experience is my eyeballs. So I'm not sure why we did this. Like, honest to God, like, I don't know why we do it.

Marc: Yeah, so the trouble with this process here is that the color subcarrier used a phase reference to figure out which color was which. Any phase drift shifted the colors. So green trees become blue, if you've seen that before, right? Skin turned orange, right? And the phase reference was easy to disturb. Long cable runs, mistuned equipment, weather affected the broadcast path. Any of it can shift the phase and shift the color palette. But that's why every television had a tint knob. You sit there and you turn the dial until faces look human again. Or you just bang on it, you know, hoping that makes sense.

Renee: Yeah, you smack on the side of the TV. So good.

Marc: Yeah. Every set's slightly different. Every broadcast is slightly different. And hence, never the same color.

Renee: Meanwhile, the Europeans watching the whole NTSC mess unfold from a comfortable distance developed their own standard called PAL PAL. Of course they did, which addressed several of the technology weaknesses. Let me just say, after somebody else figures it all out, they're like, we can build a better mousetrap. Oh, I hate that too. The PAL engineers who had clearly been waiting for their moment referred to PAL as perfect at last.

Marc: Yeah. Yeah. International television standards drama, right? It's surprisingly deep.

Renee: You know what? Everything runs surprisingly deep. I want you to look at it long enough. That's all I'm going to say. So here's what I keep coming back to when I think about television's actual legacy. The television did not arrive in a neutral way into a neutral world. Every decision that shaped it, who owned the patents, what the broadcast standard was, what got funded and what got made and who got shown on the screen was made by specific people with specific interests. And those decisions shaped what an entire civilization understood to be real.

Marc: I don't even, like, that's, you can't understate it, right?

Renee: Right.

Marc: Yeah, the power of setting the default. Whatever appears on television becomes the normal. The range of things shown defines the range of things that exist in the public imagination.

Renee: The Kennedy and Nixon debate of 1960 is the example historians reach for because it's documented and it's measurable. People who heard it on the radio totally thought Nixon won. People who watched on television definitely thought Kennedy won. The difference was that Kennedy looked at ease. He was tan, relaxed, made direct eye contact with the camera. Nixon refused to wear makeup. He was visibly uncomfortable and looked unwell under the studio lights. To this day, people will say, don't go all Nixon on this. Like, don't sweat and don't look shifty, right? Like, politicians today think they have the Nixon debate in their own head when they're doing that.

Marc: He had, like, the five o'clock shadow going on. And it was, yeah, he looked shifty. He looked shifty.

Renee: He looked shifty.

Marc: Yeah. A presidential election, in part, decided by whether someone looks sweaty on camera. That's how powerful this is.

Renee: That's how powerful. And before anyone feels superior about that, I'd note that every political consultant and media strategist since 1960 has built an entire profession around the implications of that one night. That one night we understood what we were dealing with and we leaned into it completely instead of calling it out like it was like, yeah, OK, some people just looks better on TV. And the other thing is, like, you know, the bigger your head is, the better you look on television. Like, if you have a giant head, and I say this to you as an actor, if you have a giant head, and I do not, I wear child-sized hats. Like, I have the perfect head for radio. But, like, if you, like, a giant head, like, makes you look good on TV. I bet if you saw Barack Obama in person, you'd be like, my God, that man's head. Like, I'm just, Ben Siller has a huge head. All right? So instead of saying this is ridiculous, why are we doing this? Like people are people and who cares? Nope, nope, nope, nope. We said you got to look good on TV and we're not going to vote for you. That is crazy.

Marc: I wish we had the same sort of rigor around social media and, you know, how impactful it is. Right? So, yeah. Anyways. All right.

Renee: So those influencers don't have giant heads. Well, they do have big heads, but not in the way that's helpful.

Marc: All right. So the other event, the moon landing, the other moment that I think most clearly shows what television was actually capable of at the highest register. July 20th, 1969, an estimated 600 million people around the world watched Neil Armstrong step onto the lunar surface in real time. Well, you know, the delay from the moon and there and everything.

Renee: Right, right, right.

Marc: A live broadcast from another world, grainy and strange, barely legible footage, but real and shared.

Renee: That's probably one of those things where they were taking a picture of a picture, too. That's why it's so grainy, right? Like, we're going to broadcast this. They held it up to a monitor at NASA, right? There's no precedence for that. Singular events happened throughout human, you know, history, battles, discoveries, moments that changed everything. But they were experienced locally. Like, Farnsworth's teacher experienced an earth-shattering moment that no one else got, right? It's only the people physically present. The moon landing was experienced simultaneously by more than half a billion people on Earth.

Marc: Television created a shared human moment at a scale that had simply never existed before. And to be honest, like that level, that kind of magnitude, I'm not sure it's been, you know, shared since.

Renee: We've done it since. Yeah. And Philo Farnsworth watched it. He sat in his home in 1969 and watched the thing he had imagined at 14 in an Idaho potato field transmitted to the surface of the moon through the electronic television system he had built. He reportedly turned to his wife and said, well, this made it all worthwhile.

Marc: Oh, yeah. And then he died two years later.

Renee: Oh, for Pete's sake, he's got he got to see where it went. He got to see the full distance from that field to the moon. And I find that almost too much to think about just directly, right? Like seeing your baby, you know, a half a billion people, you know, watching that.

Marc: That's quite the achievement. There's another side to the legacy that I think is equally important to name, though. Television also brought Vietnam into the living rooms in a way that no previous. War had been experienced at home. It made the civil rights violence visible to people who might have otherwise looked away or remained unconvinced. It carried the assassinations of the 1960s into people's homes as they happened and made national grief into something that was experienced in real time, together by everyone with a set.

Renee: I'm going to say royal weddings probably do the same thing, right? Everybody all over the world will get up in all hours of the day and night to watch royal people get married. I don't know what that's about, but we do it. Television didn't just go. And I just want to know, Kate and William, I got up in the middle of the night.

Marc: I did not, though.

Renee: She looked stunning. Like, of course I wanted to see that dress. Taylor didn't let me. So thanks a lot, Dave. Television didn't just cover the events that shaped the 20th century. In a very real sense, it determined which events mattered, how people processed them, and what they demanded in response. The history of the civil rights movement is inseparable from the history of what television chose to show.

Marc: And what it chose not to show, right, for a long time in terms of whose lives were treated as real and worth portraying.

Renee: Which brings me to fragmentation. Because the other major chapter in television's legacy is what happens when it stops being a shared experience. One set per household, three channels, must-see TV, Thursday nights on NBC. Like, come on now, everybody watching the same thing at the same time. And that was the early model cable changed it cheaper sets meant more sets per household and in one of the and one in the bedroom for you know a 13 year old named renee and suddenly the communal viewing experience started to crack because i'll tell you something my dad thought david letterman was an idiot like like like like my like i'm sure if he was watching stupid human tricks he'd be like this man's an idiot like so yeah like like i fractured from my family with my weird sense of humor. And then it just got spoon-fed to me every night, you know, by David Letterman, right?

Marc: The shared moment where the whole country had watched the same show and could talk about it because everyone had seen it started to dissolve as audiences fragmented across hundreds of channels. And then streaming finished the job because now you could be completely outside the cultural conversation if you chose different content on a different service.

Renee: That is me all the time. I don't watch like scripted TV anymore. So here's the thing for me, when the three-camera format and the live audience went out of favor for sitcoms, Renee's attention to sitcoms kind of went with it. Because that was the fun thing about a sitcom. Like Friends recorded in front of a live studio audience, right? Like there was something about that, even though it was edited, even though they did 150 takes, didn't really matter. That audience still laughed every single time, which is crazy, right? So yeah, there was something missing from that. New Heart. Remember the show New Heart? I don't know if you remember it. But, like, yeah, so we go through, like, years of this show with Bob Newhart running a bed and breakfast in Maine or whatever it was. So we go through that over and over and over. And at the end, the very last moment of the very last episode, he wakes up in bed and turns to his wife from the original Bob Newhart show in the 70s and says, I just had the weirdest dream. Like that, that right there. A whole country sat and watched that. And the next day we all went to work and said, oh, my God, did you see that? it was just a dream. It was seven seasons of a dream, right? So my Christmas TV was the beginning of that. I thought it was freedom. And you know what? And it was, but it was also the start of something that ends with everyone consuming totally different content in separate rooms, and the shared reference point and the shared reality, those are both disappearing. Yeah.

Marc: That pattern, a shared communal experience becoming personal experience, becoming solitary experience, that's the arc every screen technology follows. Television did it first and most dramatically, but it was the preview of every subsequent chapter.

Renee: And the fireplace became the family TV, became my bedroom TV, became the laptop, became the phone, right? Yeah. Each version more personal, more tailored, more solitary. And at some point, we stopped gathering together around any of it. Okay, time out. So, yeah. The Apprentice was one of those things where people would watch it and the next day would come to work and say, did you see who Trump fired? So when anybody's wondering why that man fits the zeitgeist or the brain space of Americans, it was literally 15 years of to see who Trump fired. Like, and it was crazy, right? Like, that really was a cultural moment we would all sit around. Again, you know, like must-see TV. We all watched Seinfeld. You know, we did all that stuff, right? And I think, you know what, you can look at Game of Thrones and say, that was another one where people, you met it where it was. A lot of people, not, I mean, not everybody has HBO. Me neither. And I know Dothraki. Can I just put that out there? Like, I know Dothraki and I've never seen an episode. I just learned it to be a jerk. Yeah.

Marc: Okay.

Renee: Anyway, at some point, go ahead.

Marc: But, you know, and this isn't really on the tech side, but, you know, the way broadcast worked changed, right? The pricing models changed, advertising revenue changed. All of that drove a different type of programming. So, you know, The Apprentice was one of those TV shows that was cheaper than three-camera, sitcom, you know, that had been running for several years, right? So it changed the whole reality TV thing.

Renee: Yeah, that changed it, right? Because now I don't have to pay actors. Lines, but, you know, it's improv and we're just going to film people doing it. You know, Survivor's one of those too. Like, what season are we in? 25? 26? Who knows? Like, Survivor's one of those things where, yeah, it kicks off this idea that I don't need real actors, I just need real people, which I don't know.

Marc: I will say that television at its best, though, was doing something that none of those other technologies have kind of fully replicated. There were moments of shared cultural experience, shared witnessing and feeling that the media made possible in ways nothing else could.

Renee: Television at its best was a mirror and a window at the same time. You saw yourself reflected, and you saw out into lives and places you would never otherwise have access to. And the story of who got to be on that screen, whose lives were treated as worth showing, is the story of how culture slowly expanded its idea of who counts.

Marc: It's a long story with a lot of steps backward for every step forward but it's a real story the medium had real power to change minds and it used it sometimes badly and sometimes beautifully.

Renee: It all started with a spinning disc with holes in it and a kid looking at parallel lines he plowed in a field and a corporation shame on you RCA that tried its hardest to make sure the world forgot his name Philophonesworth I will never forget you And fortunately,

Marc: Renee, the world didn't forget.

Renee: The world did not forget There's a statue of him I don't see a statue of the RCA, like, dog anywhere in Washington, D.C. Or maybe I'm not looking hard enough Probably not

Marc: I don't know I don't know I'm sure there's Well, there's probably a statue of the RCA dog At the RCA radio music whatever in New York There you go.

Renee: Yeah There you go

Marc: Yeah All right Okay, so what does television mean to you, actually? Not historically, just, you know, to you.

Renee: Yeah, honestly, my answer is embarrassingly specific, right? It's the feeling of being 13 years old in my bedroom at 12.30 in the morning, you know, fully dressed for school and under the covers with the TV turned down low. So I, you know, practically had to lip read, right? Watching something I was absolutely not supposed to be watching because that man was an idiot and feeling like I was getting away with it. I was like, I'm getting away with something. Like, I'm like, this is covert crazy stuff going on in my room. Like, the world had a secret layer, and I found it by accident. And the television, like, that was the door, man. That was the door that gave me my sense of humor, my, you know, my, my, like, I'm a, I wrote for Forrester Research for 10 and a half years. Like, if you ever saw my first draft, you'd think I was a comedy writer. It all got edited out every time, but I did not stop putting jokes in because it was just I'm a comedy writer, I think. All of that kind of influenced me in an extreme way. It's extreme way.

Marc: That's a very specific kind of joy.

Renee: Right? It's the joy of unauthorized access to a larger world. And I think that is exactly what television gave a lot of people, right? Especially people who lived in places where not much was happening. Especially kids who didn't have the resources to go anywhere. You could turn it on and suddenly you were somewhere else. You were on Sesame Street, right? Like that stuff where you were watching someone else's life or you were watching the moon, you had access to things that would otherwise have been completely out of reach.

Marc: Yeah, for me, for me, it's more, I don't know, Saturday morning cartoons.

Renee: Skull House Rock.

Marc: It's a special time in history, right? When, you know, Reagan deregulates some of the ways that, you know, television works. And then all of a sudden, kids become the targeted, you know, target audience advertisers. So, yeah, it's not.

Renee: You know, it's a perfect answer, though. Okay, so TV gets deregulated, but in the 1970s, it was regulated into this idea that you could show Saturday morning cartoons to Marc if that's what you wanted to do, but you had to balance that. The FCC required every television station to balance that with educational television. Now, there is no chance a kid would sit there and watch educational television. We weren't suckers, right? Like, we weren't, right?

Marc: I like educational television.

Renee: I know you do, but most kids didn't. And so they tried to like, so the, so the advertising, it's the advertising council, the ad council. They, all these different advertisers reach out to the ad council and say, you do this. And the ad council thought, all right, maybe we'll do cartoons. And with that, we had, you know, announce a special kind of word. It's the greatest thing that you ever heard. You know, it's quite interesting. Announce a person, place, sort of thing. So like we got Schoolhouse Rock and Schoolhouse Rock is why I know American history. It's why I know grammar. It's why I know like Interplanet Janet is a galaxy girl, like all of that stuff. And you know what? Your answer is it is sophisticated, right? Like in the 1970s, they tried to target kids for advertising. The government said, I don't think so. You're going to target them for education if you're going to do anything. And then here comes Reagan, the free market champion, saying you don't have to target anything any way you want. It doesn't matter. I'm not going to be the nanny state. And then we lost our nanny. Yeah. And it became a really weird thing. It's a perfect answer, Marc.

Marc: I mean, for me, it's like... I was, you know, I was right in that age range, 7, 8, 9, 10, whatever, you know, at the beginning of the 80s. And, the content that just started showing up en masse, you know, it was a completely different set of content than it was, you know, just a few short years before that. Today, I was literally wearing a Dungeons & Dragons t-shirt from the 80s cartoon that showed on CBS or whatever.

Renee: Yeah, that's way too nerdy for me. I remember Laugh Olympics, Hanna-Barbera Laugh Olympics, where they took all the characters from all the different cartoons and made them compete in an Olympic.

Marc: See, I remember that, but, that was old.

Renee: Yeah, we watched that for real.

Marc: I was like, oh, that's old. And, like, I like Schoolhouse Rock, but Schoolhouse Rock was old already. You know, it was dated by the time I was, you know, watching Saturday morning cartoons on ABC or whatever. So, anyways.

Renee: That just shows you that Marc's quite a bit younger than me. There you go. If you guys were ever wondering.

Marc: I don't think so. Like, yeah, okay, well, there's some difference, right, in age, but it's just enough. There's this, like, there's this narrow window. And if you fall on one side or the other, your experience with television is different.

Renee: Yeah, that's true. I mean, you have kids now that don't know anything about broadcast TV. They only know streaming.

Marc: Nothing. They don't know nothing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So anyways, but that was for me, that was television, kind of that total freedom, right? Saturday morning before anybody woke up.

Renee: Television gave you a space that was just yours. Yeah.

Marc: And it was made possible by, you know, that kid from Idaho looked at furrows on a field and imagined that you could send the whole world through a wire.

Renee: And he built a window and put it in everybody's house. And the fact that he barely got credit for it is one of the ongoing injustices of, you know, technology history. It's like Steve Jobs inventing something and then, you know, Jeff Bezos taking credit for it and we're all good with that. Like, that's terrible. But the window exists. It's been transmitting light into living rooms and bedrooms and hospital waiting rooms and bars and airports and places of grief and places of joy for a hundred years. And that is real. And it's regardless of who got credit for it.

Marc: Philo Farnsworth built a window out of Potato Field.

Renee: And we've been looking through it ever since. All right, you guys, that's our episode. If you learned something today, if you laughed at something, if you're going to go directly home and look up Philo Farnsworth, it's P-H-I-L-O if you're interested, on your television, because we do that now, which is the correct and extremely ironic thing to do. We want to hear about it.

Marc: Yeah, find us wherever you listen to podcasts. You leave a review. If you're enjoying the show, tell someone who'd be into this and actually look up Farnsworth. He deserves the attention.

Renee: And tell us your television memory. The first thing you remember watching, the show you watched until the tape wore out. Okay, so talking about tape. Like for us, it was the stuntman. Like it was the first videotape we ever rented and we must have watched it 550,000 times. Like right now, Chuck said the stunt pay $1,000. Like forget, we still have all the lines, right? So anyway, the TV that was in your room when your parents either trusted you or needed a break. Like I want to hear it. I want to know all of it. Reach out.

Marc: And if anyone else had a bootleg VHS of a Disney film before it was legally available for home viewing, Renee has been waiting 20-something years to find out if she was alone in that.

Renee: It was for sure. Like, if you had two VCRs that you could hook together with a cable.

Marc: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Renee: And you know what? I was not alone. I refuse to believe I was alone. It was just a precursor to stealing HBO at the poll. Like, it was just...

Marc: Yeah, definitely not alone statistically.

Renee: And we should all be friends, right? I'm Renee.

Marc: And I'm Marc.

Renee: And this has been the Nostalgic Nerd Podcast. Go watch something.

Marc: Yeah, just maybe not, you know, keep it.