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 26, countdown number 81 Emmy Meet Emmy 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.
That's the 100th anniversary of the day television as we know it first appeared on Earth. Paul I'm Paul Schatzkin, author of the Boy who Invented Television, the definitive biography of Philo T. Farnsworth, who breathed life into all of our living room dreams when he invented the world's first all electronic television system.
In the last episode we covered the time honored tradition of broadcasting New Year's Eve from Times Square in New York that began on Television in 1948.
Today we're going to start handing out the Emmy Awards.
Though he remains largely forgotten in the public imagination, it is genuinely intriguing how often the legacy of Philo T. Farnsworth drifts in and out of the history of television.
Reminders of his inventions can be found lingering on the periphery of the industry. And if you know where to look, television's annual Emmy Awards is a good example.
Fittingly, the story begins with another relative unknown.
During World War II, Sidney Kassid worked with the U.S. army Signal Corps, writing and directing training films and learning the logistics of production.
After the war, he worked in development at Paramount Pictures during the period when the film industry was trying to sort out how television was going to fit into its business.
Sid Kasid was neither a celebrity nor a mogul. He was a networker, driven by the firm conviction that television could serve civic and educational purposes in addition to its obvious potential for entertainment and diversion.
In this regard, he shared the vision that had partially motivated Philo Farnsworth that TV could elevate public discourse and human understanding.
Cassid's background in film and working out of Los Angeles rather than the broadcast corridors of New York gave him a different perspective on the industry's promise when he observed how little in the way of community structure existed around the new medium. Cassid began inviting writers, producers, engineers and executives to informal meetings to talk about television's potential and the need for industry wide goals, education and recognition.
In 1940, 6. These informal gatherings led to the formation of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
The name was an echo of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organization that began awarding the trophies known as Oscars in 1929.
As the titular founder of the new TV Academy, Cid Cassid at first resisted the idea of creating an award like the Oscars.
He did not want the Academy to become a self congratulatory trade group.
He hoped instead to foster a forum for education and other scholarly pursuits.
And he disliked the idea of competition in the arts, especially for a new medium that was still finding its creative footing.
Despite his reservations, it didn't take long for Sid Kasid to realize that awards could help legitimize television and elevate its reputation. In 1948, the Academy set out to create an award for outstanding Achievement in television.
All they needed was an actual trophy and a name for it.
In 1948, the Academy established a nationwide competition to find a design that would reflect both the traditions of art and the new technology that defined the medium.
From 47 submissions, the winning design came from Lewis McManus, a television engineer and art director who had worked on early broadcast graphics.
McManus submitted a sketch of a winged woman holding aloft an atom.
The wings represented the muse of art. The atom symbolized the electron and the scientific breakthroughs that made television possible.
McManus used his wife Dorothy as the model for his design, which stood out for its elegant reflection of the Academy's mission to promote both creative excellence and technical innovation.
Once the design for the trophy was settled on, it still needed a name.
The first idea was to call the new award Ike, after the iconoscope, the camera tube that RCA introduced in the 1930s. There is no direct evidence that RCA or David Sarnoff advocated for the name, but RCA still had a huge influence on the technical vocabulary of the industry, so maybe the reference seemed a natural fit for some Academy engineers.
The idea was quickly rejected, though, if for no other reason than because Ike was already widely associated with General Dwight D. Eisenhower, a national icon, even before seeking the presidency in 1952.
Nor did it seem like a good idea to burden the statuette of a winged female with an ostensibly male sounding name.
The gentle push for a less masculine but still technically grounded name came from a source within the Academy's membership who whose roots go back to the earliest days of the medium.
In 1929, Harry Lubke was a student of electrical engineering at UC Berkeley.
He wasn't necessarily looking to be a pioneer in television but he got a job at a small laboratory at 202 Green street in San Francisco, where he found himself working on the most novel electrical project of the day alongside none other than Philo T. Farnsworth, who had demonstrated electronic video for the first time two years earlier.
Under Farnsworth's encouraging eye, Lupke built scanning and synchronizing circuits for the first electronic television systems.
In 1930, he co authored a pioneering technical paper with Farnsworth, the Transmission of Television Images, which was published in the February issue of San Francisco Engineers.
Harry Lubke was intimately involved in the technology that brought television to the point where in 1948, the industry he'd helped create was ready to hand out awards.
So it comes as no surprise that it was Harry Lubke who first suggested that rather than the outdated iconoscope, the trophy be named for the dominant camera tube of the day, the Image orthicon.
And the Image Orthicon, as you'll recall from Countdown number 89, was named in part for Philo Farnsworth's original camera tube, the image Dissector, the breakthrough device he first conceived as a teenager in 1921 and delivered on his workbench in 1927.
Recall, too, that the Image Orthicon was in fact based on a 1935 Farnsworth patent.
Lupke's first suggestion was to call the TV Academy's new trophy Emmy, and that was easily feminized to Emmy.
The first Emmy Awards were presented on January 25, 1949, at the Hollywood Athletic Club.
The ceremony was largely a local affair, recognizing achievement only in the Los Angeles area.
It was Hosted by Walter O'. Keefe. Tickets cost just $5, and a total of six categories were awarded.
Among the honorees that night were Shirley Dinsdale, a child ventriloquist who won for outstanding personality.
The game show Pantomime Quiz Time won most popular programming, and pioneering Los Angeles TV station KTLA was recognized for overall achievement in television broadcasting.
And a special award was given to Lewis McManus for designing the Emmy statuette.
Ironically, the first Emmy award ceremony was not telecast anywhere.
Televising the event did not begin until 1953.
By then, there were actually two television academies, the original Academy in Los Angeles and the sister National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in New York.
On January 23, 1953, Los Angeles station KTTV was the first to carry any Emmy award ceremony on the air, though it was still a local affair.
On March 7, 1955, the two branches joined forces with the seventh annual Emmy Awards, the first to be televised nationally on NBC.
That broadcast ceremony marked the Emmys transition to a national primetime focused event, aligning with the explosion of coast to coast network broadcasting in the early 1950s.
In 2003, the Television Academy finally recognized Farnsworth himself with the creation of the Philo T. Farnsworth Award for Corporate Achievement in Science and Technology.
That year, the first Farnsworth Award was presented to the Sony Corporation in recognition of its long history of novel contributions to television technology, including advances in broadcast equipment, cameras, recording formats and consumer video technologies.
Assuming the tradition continues, the Television Academy will present its 79th Emmy Awards in the fall of 2027, just as electronic television itself observes its centennial.
In the meantime, it seems important to remember that every one of the thousands of local and national Emmy statuettes that have been awarded for every aspect of the art and science of television since 1949 bears, however faintly, the unmistakable imprint of the medium's inventor.
This brings us to the end of number 81 in the countdown of the top 100 milestones in the first 100 years of television.
Stay tuned for the next episode when TV starts selling soap.
Thanks for listening to 100 Years of Television, a two year countdown to the centennial of television on September 7th, 2027.
For more aim a gizmo to 100 Years tv.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?
[00:12:30] Speaker A: They all said we never would be happy. They laughed at us and how but how good got the laughs out Now.
