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.
They 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 25, countdown number 82 Happy New Year.
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 the day television as we know it was invented.
I'm Paul Schatzkin, 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, we witnessed the dawn of reality tv. With smile you are on Candid Camera.
Today we're going to witness one of the oldest traditions of television history.
In 1904, New York Times publisher Adolph Ochs moved the newspaper's headquarters into the newly constructed Times Tower at the intersection of Broadway, 7th Avenue and 42nd street in Manhattan.
To mark the occasion, Ochs successfully petitioned the city to rename the area Times Square.
To celebrate the move and the new name, the Times sponsored a lavish New Year's celebration on the square.
Some 200,000 New Yorkers packed the surrounding streets for music and festivities that were topped off with a brilliant fireworks display. Red, white and blue rockets and flares illuminated Oakes New Building. Starting at precisely midnight.
When the city banned fireworks in 1907, Ochs devised a new centerpiece for the celebration.
He commissioned a large, electrically illuminated ball that would be lowered from a specially constructed pole on the roof of the Times Tower to mark the final seconds of the outgoing year.
Starting at precisely 11:59pm on December 31, 1907, workers lowered the 700 pound wood and iron ball festooned with 125 watt light bulbs from the top of the pole.
One minute later, the ball went dark and another large electrical sign reading 1908 lit up above Times Square.
In the 1920s and 30s, Times Square became synonymous with New Year's Eve. The square and surrounding streets drew first 10 tens, then hundreds of thousands of revelers packed shoulder to shoulder in the cold, waiting for the glowing orb to descend.
Newsreel cameras film the event for movie theaters and radio stations broadcast the countdown live.
With the exception of two years during World War II, the Times Square Ball drop has continued every year since.
Starting in 1948, the tradition found its way to television.
NBC's first telecast from Times Square was part of a larger New Year's Eve program hosted by Ben Grauer.
After years of covering events like presidential inaugurations and political conventions, Grauer's was one of the several voices that lent continuity to television's migration from radio, along with such other familiar voices as the Lowell Thomas, Ed Sullivan and Arthur Godfrey.
That first 1948 telecast from Times Square was certainly modest by today's standards.
Cameras were stationary and coverage was largely confined to a rooftop vantage point and street level crowd shots.
For the still relatively small number of viewers with access to a television set, the broadcast provided what felt like direct participation in a massive public celebration without the inconvenience of being stuffed into the crowded square.
That first New Year's telecast marked the beginning of a new annual staple in American culture.
As television penetration increased throughout the 1950s, more stations picked up the coverage. NBC continued broadcasting the festivities into the early 1950s, and CBS joined the spectacle with its own New Year's specials.
The defining figure in televised New Year's Entertainment arrived in 1972 when Dick Clark launched New Year's Rockin Eve on ABC.
Clark's innovation was targeting a younger audience with pop music performances and slicker, state of the art production values.
Dick Clark hosted the annual ritual for 30 years. Until suffering a stroke in 2004, Clark was the de facto master of ceremonies for America's year end festivities.
Other networks and hosts added their own imprint to the Times Square coverage. Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians were a fixture on CBS for decades, providing a more traditional ballroom style version of the event that appealed to older viewers.
Lombardo's association with New Year's Eve began on radio in 1929 with his orchestra playing Auld Lang Syne at the stroke of midnight.
He took his act to television in 1956-57, starting what amounted to a generational split in New Year's viewing.
Younger audiences gravitated to Clark, while older audiences stayed with CBS until Lombardo's death in 1977.
In the decade since 1948-49, television has been instrumental in turning the Times Square ball drop into a national ritual.
Over the years, the original ball has been replaced several times.
The current version was introduced in 2008. The 12 foot geodesic square, made of Waterford crystal and LED lights, capable of displaying over 16 million colors and billions of patterns, is a far cry from the 125 watt bulbs used in 1907 08.
The coverage now includes aerial drone shots, roaming Steadicams, real time countdown animations, and satellite feeds that beam the moment to millions of homes and screens around the globe.
Still, the essential image remains unchanged. A glowing ball on descent, a crowd cheering against the cold, and a moment of collective passage from one year into the next.
This brings us to the end of number 82 in the countdown of the top 100 milestones in the first 100 years of television.
Stay tuned for the next episode when the nascent television industry begins to recognize its own outstanding achievements.
Thanks for listening to 100 Years of Television, a two year countdown to the centennial of television on September 7, 2020 27. 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?
[00:08:09] Speaker A: They all said we we never would be happy. They laughed at us and how but how we got the laughs out now.
