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, where for 100 weeks that started in October 2025, we're going to recall the top 100 mil milestones in the first 100 years of television and video.
The countdown will culminate on September 7, 2027, the 100th anniversary of the day television was invented.
I'm Paul Schatzkin, author of the Boy who Invented, the definitive biography of Philo T. Farnsworth, who invented the world's first all electronic television system.
In the last episode, we recounted television's coverage of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963.
Today is countdown number 51. Play it again.
In the years before the first Super bowl in 1966, the annual Face off between the army and Navy's military academies, West Point and Annapolis was as close as the US Came to an annual football game that generated as much interest as baseball's World Series.
During his tenure as the commander in chief, John F. Kennedy, a veteran of the Navy whose exploits in the Pacific had been deeply woven into the mythology of his presidential campaign, had embraced the pageantry of the game.
Kennedy attended the Army Navy Games in 1961 and 1962, bringing a unifying and glamorous presence to the stands. With his youthful countenance and dark glasses, Kennedy was scheduled to attend the game again on November 30, 1963.
The events in Dallas the previous weekend precluded that from happening.
With the country still recovering from the shock of the assassination, the 1963 Army Navy Game was postponed until December 7, the 22nd anniversary of the attack on Pearl harbor that drew the U.S. into World War II.
That Army Navy game was one of the first events in a country that was only beginning to find its footing after the trauma that the nation had experienced mostly through the medium of television.
So it is fitting that the 1963 Army Navy game is remembered for another pivotal milestone in television history.
At Philadelphia's Municipal Stadium, both academies dedicated the game to Kennedy's memory. There were moments of silence, and military ceremony already central to the event carried additional emotional weight, and the game was broadcast on CBS a week after the network's continuous coverage of the assassination and funeral had etched the face of Walter Cronkite into the national consciousness.
The featured players in that day's game were the two quarterbacks, Navy's Roger Staubach and Army's Raleigh Stickway.
And in the broadcast booth, a third star, a young TV sports director named Tony Verna, waited for his chance in the spotlight.
Navy was leading 70 in the second quarter when Roger Staubach took the snap from center and backed away from the line of scrimmage after a few seconds. Dodging defenders, Staubach threw a pass that found receiver Ron Beagle in the end zone to put Navy up 13 0.
Navy kicked the extra point to make the score 14 0.
And then an estimated 30 million viewers watched. The most astounding thing.
There was Staubach taking the snap again.
There he was dodging defenders again and then throwing the pass to Ron Beagle in the end zone and scoring again.
And that's why director Tony verna was the third star of the 1963 Army Navy Game. He had just demonstrated television's latest invention, the instant replay.
Just 29 years old, Tony Verna was a rising star among CBS sports directors and part of a new generation that had started in television. Rather than migrating from radio, Vernick cut his teeth directing boxing and football telecasts for CBS Sports, earning a reputation for a steady hand in the control room and a willingness to experiment with new technology.
By 1963, CBS thought enough of Tony Verna to entrust him with one of its most prestigious sports telecasts.
Verna had long been pondering one of the challenges of live sports broadcasting.
Television viewers could only see what the cameras chose to focus on, and as soon as a play was over, it was time to huddle up for the next one.
Viewers could see what happened, but Verna's narrative instinct wanted to show the audience why things were happening.
For the Army Navy game, CBS lined up a pair of Ampex videotape recorders.
The first of the two machines was used to record the game for a tape delayed broadcast to the West Coast.
Verna's masterstroke was realizing that addition to recording, the second Ampex machine could be rewound to play back.
The moment was not without its risks.
The machines were the size of Frigidaires, Verna recalled later. And the tape came with an episode of I Love Lucy previously recorded on it. If the tape didn't record properly, you would get Lucy in the middle of the football game. And if you fool with the Army Navy game and mess that up, that was the end of your career.
Accounts vary, but it appears that replays were shown several times during the broadcast.
The Final replay came in the fourth quarter. A dramatic one yard touchdown dash by Rolly Stickway brought Army within one point of tying the score before losing the game 21:20 after failing to score a two point conversion.
Each attempt at the instant replay required close coordination between the director and the tape operator, who had to manually stop and rewind the tape. Each replay was its own unique experiment. Or as Werner recounted later, each attempt was like jumping off a cliff.
The first replay in 1963 was just one in a long string of innovations that started with Philo Farnsworth's first electronic video transmission back in 1927.
Although separated by decades, the two moments had one aspect that isn't common to all invention.
Both were crude to the point of showing how much more would have to be done to make it truly practical.
Farnsworth's 1927 demonstration was a simple straight line rendered in low resolution on an unstable display. But it proved for the first time that electrons could be scanned to convey an image over the air.
That was enough to propel decades of innovation that refined the pictures that cathode ray tubes could display.
Even in 1963, after decades of signal refinement and engineering, coaxial cables, microwave relays, and countless other improvements, invention was still messy. And the challenges of instant replay were immediately obvious.
It was difficult to manually rewind to the point where you wanted the replay to begin and you could rejoin the live action after having missed some important development on the field.
But as in 1927, once the principle was proven, further innovation quickly followed.
The first thing that Tony Verna and his engineers came up with was the addition of an inaudible cue tone recorded onto the tape.
At the start of a play, the tape operator pressed a button that added the tone to the tape. When the director called for a replay, the operator could easily return to the moment by isolating the cue tone.
As the technology matured, more advances added to the viewing experience.
Slow motion replays were added in the late 1960s. In the 1970s, more cameras meant more replay options from multiple angles.
In the 1980s, graphic overlays expanded the visual vocabulary.
And then in the 1990s, the replay itself became part of the game with the addition of the coach's challenge, where each team was given a limited number of opportunities to demand that a play on the field be reviewed and often overturned.
The evolution of the replay has continued into the 21st century as television has gone high definition and digital.
Now plays are reviewed frame by frame in ultra slow motion, and the practice has expanded to include nearly every sporting event that gets televised.
The experience of the instant replay has become as much a part of the culture as the games themselves, demonstrating that television not only conquers space, it can also manipulate time.
This brings us to the end of number 51 in the countdown of the top 100 milestones in the first 100 years of television.
Brace yourself for episode 50 when America is overwhelmed by the first wave of the British invasion in February 1964.
Thanks for listening to 100 Years of Television, a two year countdown of the centennial of television on September 7, 2027.
For more, aim your gizmo to 100yearstv.com this podcast was written, recorded, edited, engineered and uploaded by me, Paul Schatzkin and is a production of Farnovision.com if television was invented by somebody named Farnsworth, why don't we call it Farnovision?
[00:10:38] Speaker A: They all said we never would be happy they laughed at us and how but how we got to laugh out now.
