Earliest Known US Television Recordings

[LizzieMaine]

A detailed, scholarly article on this topic can be found *here.* As far as I know, this is the first real attempt to document what survives of 1940s American television programming.

Note especially the documentation of *sound* recordings of a number of pre-war NBC telecasts that exist at the Library of Congress, including audio recordings of most of the first night of American commercial television, July 1, 1941. No particular notice has ever been taken of these recordings by anyone until recently, and I was amazed years ago to discover them in the LOC database with no notation of their significance. They are all listed in this article.

 

[Fletch]

Not only that, I had no idea of any kinescopes existing from 1947. These things probably used to be all but secret, kept even from scholars.

How much risk was this Chain fella taking packing his car trunk with reels of old film every night as he left 30 Rock? More likely yet, he was one of those dull gray little men no one even notices, and who's quite happy keeping it that way - even when making a donation to the Library of Congress.

Then too, consider the LOC's mission - it's to preserve things, not to make it possible to use them. It is history's Roach Motel.

 

[Undertow]

Wow, very interesting. Thanks for the post! I'm reading through this right now.

 

[Fletch]

There are some things man was not meant to know.
The early history of radio, and especially TV, seems to contain an awful lot of them.

 

[LizzieMaine]

As fiddly as the LOC can be to deal with, they're very cooperative if you're working on a research project, and I've donated things to them myself, so I can't be too hard on them. It's important to realize that they're hamstrung as far as access is concerned by restrictions and caveats imposed by donors more than anything else.

They also fill a very important role in that the average collector/enthusiast would be way, way out of his or her element when it comes to mass storage of irreplaceable materials. It might be neat to own a reel of vintage kinescope film, but what would an individual do with it? Shoot it with a camcorder and upload it to The Internet Archive without any meaningful documentation of what it is or where it came from? Store it wrapped in butcher paper in his freezer so it can be thrown away by his heirs when he dies? ("Boy, that chicken pot pie or whatever it was was *real* stale!") Now multiply that by 200,000 and you see quickly that a facility like the LOC or UCLA or any of the other big institutional archives does far far more for the actual preservation of the material than any individual could, even if he wanted to.

Material does eventually come out of facilitites like this. Not everything ever will, but much does eventually -- and the increasing availablilty of DVD-R burn-on-demand programs is going to mean more of this stuff, in better quality than you'd get from any bootlegger.

(I'm still waiting for the full eleven minutes of "Streets Of New York" to be released somehow. The Paley Center for Media and Pompous Wine And Cheese Parties put about five minutes online some years ago, but they're still sitting on the rest.)

 

[Fletch]

Best not to even think about such things.

You have far more experience than I with such material (I have some), so I have to agree with you in point of fact. But I always love a conspiracy. Especially a subconscious conspiracy, the kind no one starts or even thinks much about. It comes about wherever people are ashamed or cautious or just uneasy about knowledge, so nothing comes to light for no good reason.

Whenever I see a gap in history, I imagine people thinking not just "I don't know" or even "I don't care," but "It's nobody's business." Experimental TV really was "nobody's business." The industry never knew what might reveal a trade secret or inflate public expectations for a product no one knew how to deliver. It was the first use of the public airwaves that was so totally, determinedly, private.

Going from those ideas - the conspiracy of time and silence and secrecy - it's possible to imagine an almost metaphysical taboo around such knowledge. One could even picture a kind of Lovecraftian cosmic horror narrative - warp-speed-traveling aliens who pick up our first telecasts and get here 70-odd years later, bringing DVD burns with them that somehow, mystically, create violent upheavals in the media-habituated hivemind of humanity. lol Too bad NaNoWriMo is over or I'd get right on a plot outline.