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WBKB, Chicago Camera Mystery #1

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Eyes Of A Generation.com

WBKB, Chicago Camera Mystery #1

The photo on the left was sent by Gary Walters who wanted to know what kind of camera this is. The picture (and the others) are from Chicago’s WBKB around 1943. My first thought was…this is a very early Dumont mounted on a barber chair base. The more I looked at it, the more I began to think this is may be a homemade copy of a Dumont Iconoscope camera.

In the center is another photo of this camera which is part of a larger photo that also shows the camera on the right, which is a real Dumont. On close comparison to many other early Dumont cameras, I’m pretty sure this is a homemade copy.

To establish the station, they hired television pioneer William C. (Bill) Eddy away from RCA’s experimental station W2XBS in New York City. I’ve read somewhere that Eddy was quite proud of his ability to build equipment of all kinds and suspect this is some of his handi work. By the way, this was one of the few experimental TV stations to operate during WW II and used a lot of women in key jobs. in 1953, WBKB became WBBM when it was bought by CBS.



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5 responses to “WBKB, Chicago Camera Mystery #1”

  1. Dave Dillman

    There was a guy named, and I’m not sure of the spelling, Sanabria who I think was around Chicago and involved in early TV. May have made cameras and I know he was running a TV school right after the war. That’s where Cliff Braun, later a director at ABC then program director for WFLD, got his start.

  2. Neil Rattigan

    Didn’t Paramount own WBKB? And didn’t it also own part of Allen B DuMont Labs?

  3. Val Ginter

    I think those barber chairs were donated to Columbia College. When I visited Thaine Lyman’s production class in 1953, he told me the pedestals were old barber chairs.

  4. Gary Walters

    I’m a troublemaker, see what I started? 🙂

  5. Albert J. McGilvray

    DuMont cranked up in 1944-ish. Because so many men were serving in the military in World War II, many of the early production crew for DuMont were women.

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