Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round they all laughed when Edison recorded sound.
[00:00:10] Speaker B: They.
[00:00:11] Speaker A: All laughed at Wilbur and his brother when they said that man could fly they told Marconi wireless was a phony it's the same old cry.
[00:00:21] Speaker B: Welcome back to 100 Years of Television. This is episode number 22, Countdown 85 From Town to Country for 100 weeks that started in October 2025. This podcast is going to recall the top 100 milestones in the first 100 years of television and video.
The countdown is pegged to culminate on September 7, 2027, the 100th anniversary of of the day television as we know it was invented.
I'm Paul Shadskin, author of the Boy who Invented Television, the definitive biography of Philo T. Farnsworth, who invented the world's first all electronic television system.
In the last episode, TV met the press.
Today we're going over the river and through the woods to take television to audiences well beyond the major metropolitan areas.
Leroy E. Parsons, Ed to his friends, began his professional life as a radio and refrigeration Engineer in Fairbanks, Alaska in the late 1930s.
During World War II, Ed worked at a naval electronics facility in Portland, Oregon, and also worked part time at KGW, one of the oldest radio stations in the Northwest edge. After the war, Ed and his wife Grace acquired KAST, a struggling radio station in Astoria, Oregon, and made it profitable within a month.
In 1947, the Parsons attended the national association of Broadcasters convention in Chicago. It was Grace who first saw a television at the convention and insisted that they get one.
The only problem was when they got their new TV back to Astoria, the it was too far away from any television stations to get a decent signal.
Radio station KRSC in Seattle was 125 miles away.
When Parsons learned the station would begin telecasting in the fall, he obtained permission to mount a large antenna on the roof of the Astoria Hotel, the tallest building in town.
Then he ran a cable across the street to his third floor apartment.
When KRSC TV started broadcasting on Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 1948, Ed and Grace Parsons were the only people in the Astoria area who could tune in.
When KGW TV began broadcasting out of Portland, also 125 miles away, on December 15, 1948, Parsons upgraded his system with video amplifiers and other electronics to carry the additional signals.
In 1948, television was still in its chicken and egg phase, especially in areas far from the major urban centers.
Consumers had no reason to buy TVs if there was nothing to watch. So there were only a handful of receivers in the Portland area when KRSC and KGW went on the air in remote Astoria. The Parsons home soon became the community center for the novel and entertaining experience of watching television.
As interest swelled, Ed added connections to the hotel lobby and a local music store. In the months that followed, he expanded the service to dozens of homes and businesses. He charged $125 for the installation and $3 a month for the continuing service. After that, by July 1949, more than 100 homes were connected to his hotel rooftop antenna.
Thanks to Grace Parsons enthusiasm for the new medium and Ed's engineering prowess, a new way of distributing television signals was born.
At first it was called Community Antenna Television, or catv.
Over the decades that followed, his Jury Rig system became the prototype for what we now call simply cable.
It is duly noted that Parsons System was not the very first to redistribute television broadcasts by wire.
That honor is more properly bestowed on John Walson, who set up a similar system in Mahoney City, Pennsylvania.
Another pioneering system is attributed to James F. Reynolds in Mapledale, Pennsylvania. But these systems retransmitted their broadcast by twin lead or ladder lead cable.
What distinguishes Parsons System is his use of coaxial cable, an innovation first introduced by AT&T in the 1930s.
Coax was invented by Lloyd Espenscheid and Herman affel at AT&T's Bell Labs in 1929.
Unlike conventional twin lead or parallel wires, COAX carries high frequency signals with far less loss.
It is essentially a wire within a wire. A central conductor is suspended inside a tube of insulation, which is then encased in a flexible cylinder of braided copper shielding.
This concentric structure minimizes interference and preserves signal strength and quality over long distances, making it ideal for redistributing television signals, especially in the mountainous or urban areas where conventional antennas are not up to the task.
With COAX at the heart of its humble beginnings in places like Astoria, Oregon, CatV was instrumental in expanding the reach of television to mountainous and rural areas throughout the 1950s and 60s.
By 1962 there were nearly 1,000 CATV systems around the country, serving an estimated 1 million subscribers.
Although the business that Ed Parsons and others pioneered started as a passive distribution model, entrepreneurs soon began experimenting with original content, news, weather, and other local services.
By the end of the 1970s, CATV was no longer just a way to fix bad reception. Cable had become an indispensable utility in urban areas, too, and ultimately a new medium in its own right. And a flourishing source of innovation.
Besides building his CATV business, Ed Parsons sold televisions and other electronics from a store on Commercial street in Astoria.
In 1953, he sold the fledgling business and he and Grace returned to Alaska, where Ed worked as a bush pilot on the frontier.
By the time of his death in 1989, the business Ed Parsons started so he and Grace could just watch TV on the Oregon coast had grown into a cornerstone of the global communications industry.
This brings us to the end of number 85 in the countdown of the top 100 milestones in the first 100 years of television.
Stay tuned for the next episode when we meet Mr. Television, Milton Berle.
Thanks for listening to 100 Years of Television, a two year countdown to the centennial of television on September 7th, 2027.
For more, aim your gizmo to 100yearstv.com this podcast was written, recorded, edited, engineered and uploaded by me, Paul Shatzkin and is a production of Farnovision.com if television was invented by somebody named Farnsworth, why don't we call it Farnovision?
[00:08:18] Speaker A: They all said we never would be happy. They laughed at us and how but how we got to laugh right now.
