TV History

Original NBC Promos for ‘Late Night With David Letterman’ 1982 It’s been thirty years since these promos aired. From a tape recorded in 1982. Commercials pulled from a VHS found while working at the Sound Chamber in Roch… Source

Honey, I’m Home! Here’s the ‘Rosanne’ set at CBS Studio Center on Radford Avenue in Los Angeles with Grass Valley LDK cameras. Source

RCA TK45: 1960 Version Built for the medical industry, this color camera was usually ceiling mounted and looked down at the operating table via a 45 degree mirror. I guess the TK11 type body with handles was needed to support it and that’s why it has a different configuration than the TK41. Here it…

CBS Television City Studio 36 and 46 are over 15,500 square feet each. Studio 41 and 43 are around 12,000 square feet each. That’s the kind of room it takes to do what they do. In the background, the RCA TK41s are out of the way as a giant piece of scenery is carefully…

Ann Palmer: CBS Color Girl At Television City, ‘Lady Ann’ spent as much time in front of their color cameras than most of the CBS stars. Very little color was done from CBS NY, and at TVC, color programs were on a rolling basis. Regularly scheduled shows would be done in color perhaps monthly…

In The Beginning… In 1953 when the first RCA TK40 color cameras were arriving at NBC in New York, there was almost around the clock closed circuit testing with signals being sent from The Colonial Theater in NYC to RCA Labs in Princeton, NJ and Rockefeller Center. With no color patterns available, flower arrangements,…

Sid Caesar: A True Icon Of Television This photo is from Caesar’s Hour, taken in 1956 at the Century Theater in New York. Sid Caesar began his television career when he made an appearance on Milton Berle’s Texaco Star Theater in 1948. In early 1949, Sid and Max Lieberman met with Pat Weaver, president…

This Is The CBS Evening News With Walter Cronkite… Out all of the 893 Norelco PC 60s and 70s ever made, this and it’s twin are probably the most famous. This PC60 and one just like it are the ‘Cronkite Cameras’ on display at The Newseum in Washington. They were saved, only by the…

Meet Pat Weaver, First President of NBC Television I could go on and on about Mr Weaver, but here’s the short version. I own the RCA TK30 (maybe the one in this photo) that NBC gave him as a token of appreciation from all of NBC’s employees in January of 1955. It was on…

Another One Bites The Dust… From Television’s POV, baseball is a much more violent sport than football. I wonder how many box lenses get smashed each season? i dont own this Source

A Teaching Moment: Setting The Record Straight Few know that ‘I Love Lucy’ Producer-Director Jess Oppenheimer holds the patent for the “in the lens” teleprompter. This is the same reflector/mirror system we use today, but first used on television by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, for a filmed Philip Morris cigarette commercial which aired…

Network TV’s First Late Night Comedy: Broadway Open House Broadway Open House was network television’s first late-night comedy-variety series and was telecast live on NBC from May 29, 1950 to August 24, 1951, airing weeknights from 11pm to midnight. One of the pioneering TV creations of NBC president Pat Weaver, it demonstrated the potential…

Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade: 1964 Santa’s in Town ‘Munsters’ Escort Kris In Parade Source

Early Dumont Cameras: Configuration 1 This 1947 photo was probably taken in New York at WABD. The pedestals are made by Dumont and have custom housing for the on-board power supply and camera control unit…notice the huge exhaust tube at the feet of the cameraman on the left. This had to be awkward, especially…

Early Dumont Cameras: Configuration 2 Unlike the RCA cameras, the Dumont Iconoscope cameras had electronic viewfinders which were side mounted. This called for more equipment at the camera and this is one configuration of how that was done. I suspect the larger box is the camera control unit and the smaller one, the power…