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The first over-the-air television transmission, made 75 years ago today, starred a vaudeville comedian and a singer performing live from an AT&T experimental station in Hanover.

The images were not refined enough to be shown on a big TV, but could be made out clearly on a 2-inch screen in a New York City auditorium. It would be another 12 years before television was shown off at the New York World’s Fair. It would be decades before TVs began showing up in suburban living rooms.

But this was one of the first steps along the way to the televised Nixon-Kennedy debates, live coverage of men landing on the Moon, images from Vietnam that helped end a war, and "Gilligan’s Island."

Media experts say television has changed the way Americans think about the world and the way the world thinks about America. It has been praised as a unifying force during times of crisis, national celebrations and sporting events. It has been blamed for numbing minds, increasing youth violence and isolating people, especially children, from their families.

"It has been blamed as a seed of cultural ills, why Johnny can’t read, and it brought people together during the Kennedy assassination and on Sept. 11," said Thom Gencarelli, an associate professor in Montclair State University’s broadcasting department. "During a national tragedy, everybody shares it in a direct way."
More than a half-dozen people can take credit for some aspect of the development of television. At the time of AT&T’s demonstration in 1927, Philo T. Farnsworth and Vladimir Zworykin already were working elsewhere on better ways of generating and receiving signals. A year before the AT&T demonstration, a TV signal was transmitted to a receiver in the same room.

AT&T officials say that it was their scientist, Herbert Ives, who demonstrated that TV signals could be sent a long distance.

On April 27, 1927, Ives sent a signal from Washington, D.C., to New York by telephone line, starring then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover. That was immediately followed by a TV signal transmitted over radio waves from an experimental station in Hanover to New York City.

The idea of the first demonstration over phone wires was to show that television could become part of telephone service, said Sheldon Hochheiser, an AT&T corporate historian. That never happened, he said, because it cost too much, copper wires weren’t the best way to send high-definition video and people weren’t all that interested in the concept.

The second demonstration, using radio waves to send TV signals, was a first step toward broadcast TV, Hochheiser said. Ives used an electromechanical contraption that included a spinning disk to paint points of light that created an illusion of movement. Farnsworth and Zworykin later perfected cathode tube televisions that had no moving parts.

Hochheiser said AT&T officials were not clear about the commercial possibilities of television in 1927. They certainly had no idea that they were helping to unleash an invention that would change the world — and not always for the best.
Seventy-five years later, a Columbia University study released just last week claims that teenagers who watch more than an hour of TV per day are more likely to become violent adults.

Pamela Eakes, founder of the Seattle-based Mothers Against Violence In America, said too much television and not enough conversation helps lead to children feeling disconnected from their families.

"That contributes to violent, uncivilized behavior later on," Eakes said. "Our children lack empathy."

Gencarelli said there’s no proof that TV leads to increased youth violence, adding that "too much of anything is a bad thing." He also said TV has, for better more than worse, changed our culture. It showed us the Moon landing and helped change public sentiments about the Vietnam War. It changed the way politics are covered, starting with the presidential debates between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon.

Kennedy won the election because he came off as more charismatic than Nixon, experts have said, even though people who listened to the debates on radio thought that Nixon had a better grasp of the issues.

Television has led to greater scrutiny of politicians, Gencarelli said, and also to an emphasis on sound bites over dialogue and the proliferation of negative political ads. It provides more information to people, he said, and overwhelms them. And it has given the keys of the American culture to people whose main goal is to sell something, from automobiles to toothpaste.

"All that we pay attention to is offered simply because it’s a vehicle to hold our attention," Gencarelli said.

Michael Zey of Morris Township, a noted futurist who has written books about the effects of technology on culture, said that at first it looked like television was going to bring people together because crowds gathered in living rooms of those who purchased the first sets. It was supposed to keep children at home in the evening.

"It didn’t quite work out that way," Zey said.

At first, families sat together watching TV variety shows such as "The Ed Sullivan Show."

"Even if they weren’t interacting, they might feel like they’re together," Gencarelli said.
But that kind of programming disappeared when children began having televisions in their rooms, Gencarelli said, with TV shows aimed at increasingly narrow audiences. But while television produces some isolation, Gencarelli and other experts said, it also has the exact opposite effect.

Steve Miller, a professor of broadcast journalism at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, said the world is a better place because of television. Television allayed people’s fears of a potential Russian attack when Kennedy was assassinated, he said. It has introduced us to other cultures. It has introduced American culture to the rest of the world.

"We’re a more diverse culture because of it," Miller said.
So television, along with the Internet, has helped to create what media expert Marshall McLuhan once called the global village, Miller said, bringing people together.

And experts said television and the Internet will become more and more integrated with services that are expected to allow people to watch television shows or movies by downloading them from the Internet.

"Everyone could become a programmer," Zey said. "A million of us could put on political talk shows. Most of them would be pretty banal. But a small group will start to create a whole new realm of programming. It will be the democratization of culture in the best sense. It would be just like independent filmmakers, but with the potential to reach a wider audience. The question is, how would they market themselves?"

Zey said it’s impossible to predict what kind of programming will develop.

Seventy-five years ago, Hochheiser said, AT&T officials were not sure what would become of television. They certainly could not have known that decades later people would be debating the impact of television on American culture, saying that it had been corrupting, or uplifting, or both.