The Golden Spike

May 10, 1869 -- Promontory Summit, Utah. The chief engineer of the Union Pacific Railroad drives the final spike connecting his line to the Central Pacific Railroad. While not yet qualifying the westward pioneers for Amtrak Guest Rewards, it does reduce their treacherous six–month journey to a six–day train ride. The United States becomes a little bit “smaller” as the coasts are connected by rail.

Eighty years later, another event connecting east and west occurred, but it’s rarely (if ever) mentioned in the history books: the first television broadcast seen simultaneously on both coasts of the United States, as chronicled in the book The Press and America: An Interpretive History of the Mass Media (370).

Coast-to-coast broadcasting was made possible with the development of coaxial cable. The first lines had been laid by 1946 between New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, and by 1947 to Boston. By 1948 the Midwest was included so that network shows were received simultaneously in the middle and eastern parts of the nation. Finally, in 1951, AT&T completed a microwave relay system to the West Coast, in time for President Truman to address the San Francisco peace conference that ended the Pacific war in September. That speech was carried by 94 stations. Regular network broadcasting followed, and one of the first shows to be aired was Edward R. Murrow’s See It Now.

It’s a shame that this “golden spike” is so neglected in our cultural literacy. In my opinion, the development of broadcasting technology has at the very least had as much of an effect on the social change and development of this country as the transcontinental railroad.

I think that this event is quite often overlooked because the general public doesn’t understand the intricacies of television technology, and that people have forgotten to what extent the presentation of the medium has improved over the years.

In television news, electronic technology and the gathering and the presentation of the news are forever intertwined. In my previous paper, TV News: Its Birth and Infancy, I wrote about television’s first regular news broadcast: CBS TV News, a rather pedestrian affair that seemed to consist entirely of Douglas Edwards sitting at a desk smoking a cigarette. The visual design would occasionally kick into overdrive with the addition of -- now, sit down for this -- a map or a globe.

From a twenty–first century perspective, CBS TV News, Camel News Caravan, and the other early attempts at the news aren’t very riveting television. Archival rebroadcasts beg the modern viewer to ask, “Didn’t they know how to ‘do’ television back then?”

There are some good arguments to be made:

Why have Doug Edwards read excerpts from the State of the Union instead of just playing footage of President Truman outlining his “fair deal?”

How about a live report from China about the end of its bloody civil war?

What about a split–screen live debate between egghead sociologists in different cities about the impact apartheid would have on South Africa?

The truth of the matter is that the technology necessary to produce any of the aforementioned scenarios simply didn’t exist in the forties and early fifties. Just as Johann Gutenberg wasn’t cranking out four–color offset printed Bibles on glossy paper in 1455, the advent of television broadcasting didn’t bring with it color, magnetic sound, microwave relays, satellite uplinks and downlinks, digital switchers, and videotape.

That’s to say nothing of the human resources necessary to make a visually–impacting broadcast –- in television’s earliest days the industry didn’t even have its own film cameramen, relying instead on newsreel companies for actualities, and even then only events of a long duration.

Pioneer TV journalists were hampered in their presentation of the news by the scant technological resources of their time.

Just read what it took to spruce up a newscast with some film footage:

It was a terrible thing to get film on the air. Let’s say an airplane crashed in Dallas, Texas... We had to figure out airline schedules. Then, we had motorcycle couriers at the airports to get the film from the stewardess or the pilot.

You got the lab to turn down all other business and stand by with the machines all threaded up and ready to go. They’d slap the film on there and edit it quickly...

We would then write the script, put it in the can, and start a mad dash down Park Avenue in a Red Jeepster. We’d get to the RCA Building, and they’d be holding an elevator. ‘Here it comes through!’ It was like gangbusters every night of the week. Sometimes we wouldn’t make it. (Kisseloff 365)

With ulcer-creating scenarios like this being played out by television producers on a daily basis, no wonder the first great advancement of television news was the ability to transmit stories across a network of coaxial cable! But all joking aside, for the television industry to fulfill the public’s expectation of being the “window on the world,” it would had to create a more reliable and instantaneous way of delivering news actualities from around the country.

As previously mentioned, coaxial cable and microwave relays expanded the network’s capabilities. Journalistic icon Edward R. Murrow utilized the technology to startling effect on his first edition of See It Now by showing live pictures of New York and San Francisco simultaneously. (Emery 372) While not part of a news story per se, Murrow demonstrated the possibility of the new electronic tools.

The technology also helped bring down a threat to the American way of life. At the height of Joe McCarthy’s witch hunt, many newspapers and reporters were so fearful of being labeled communist sympathizers that they were basically running his press releases verbatim. (Streitmatter 157-8) What might have happened to America if television hadn’t stepped in?

ABC [provided] gavel–to–gavel coverage of the most explosive congressional hearings in American history. For more than a month, ABC held eighty million viewers riveted to their televisions as the unforgiving camera revealed McCarthy to be a rude and sadistic bully. By the time the hearings ended, McCarthyism had been relegated to the history books. (Streitmatter, 154)

A modern-day monster brought down by a fourth-rate TV network. ABC wouldn’t have been able to get away with a critical analysis of McCarthy -- it just didn’t have the clout back then. But by utilizing the technology to run a live and unfiltered feed into people’s homes, the tide of public opinion was turned.

Within a decade, the coaxial network was superseded by a system of satellites, adding a global as well as national perspective into the news. But the impact and result remained the same. Television now communicated to viewers through images, sometimes brutal images of current events. It made people aware of the brutal reality of black oppression (Streitmatter 171) and the senseless conflict in Vietnam (Streitmatter 187) in a way that an announcer behind a desk reading a script never could.

Just like the transcontinental railroad brought the country closer together, the United States -- and the world -- became a little bit “smaller” as communities were connected by television.

WORKS CITED

Bleazard, G.B. Introducing Satellite Communications.
Manchester: NCC Publications, 1985.

Emery, Michael C., Edwin Emery with Nancy L. Roberts. The Press and America: An Interpretive History of the Mass Media.
Needham Heights: Simon & Schuster, 1996.

Kisseloff, Jeff. The Box: An Oral History of Television, 1920-1961.
New York: Penguin Books, 1995.

Streitmatter, Rodger. Mightier than the Sword: How the News Media Have Shaped American History.
Boulder: Westview Press, 1997.