Another historical note, within a locality it was almost always the case that only every other broadcast channel was used, e.g. 2-4-6-8... or 3-5-7-9... to reduce interference from adjacent channels.
That's why old VCRs, DVD players, home computers, and other devices that used an RF modulator to connect to a TV display could typically be set to transmit on channel 3 or channel 4, because one of those was almost always unused in a given area.
> Though I would not be surprised to learn that it has the same sort of biased reporting we see in other news media.
I remember it as not being very biased, just watered down, often with some kind of "teen" angle.
Channel 1 was basically a vehicle to deliver captive audiences of teenage schoolchildren directly to advertisers. They bribed schools with TVs and justified the programming with the minimum proportion of educational news content, so they could use school to force feed teenagers Clearasil ads. The news content was just the sugar coating on the pill to make it palatable to schools and teachers.
IIRC, Anderson Cooper (of CNN) got his start there in the 90s.
Yep, Anderson Cooper constantly talking about his flak jacket and Lisa Ling. And the force feeding worked. I still remember the damn Pepsi Clear commercials and some big vote for a new m&m's color. ugh.
You are probably right about the forced advertising but I have mostly positive memories of Channel 1. I actually think those programs/TVs probably help peak a lot of kid's interest in media. The school I went to had their own news broadcast that came on every Friday. It was entirely produced by the students and everyone really enjoyed it. A good friend of mine was a part of that program and went on to become a TV camera man. It wasn't all bad and we probably could have used some Clearasil.
Yeah. There were always a lot of commercials, but they were always enjoyable commercials. If you're going to eat up air time with commercials, at least make them entertaining. Middle school me loved most their selection - especially a specific soda's advertising campaign.
> If you're going to eat up air time with commercials
You mean education time, right? You're using up classroom time to watch commercials.
I don't understand how enjoyable they were is relevant. Of course a bunch of eight year olds getting sold sugary drinks to enjoyed them more than learning, that doesn't remotely address why it is wrong.
I'm not trying to address whether or not advertising belongs at all. I'm speaking from the viewpoint of a child aged 10-13.
Targeted advertising back then (can't speak for that same age group today) was largely boring. They may have moved units by showing us how fun their toys were or how deliciously awesome their products tasted, but they were still just filler between programming in our eyes. The commercials for Channel One were largely entertaining.
Yes, they pushed a product in hopes of us getting our parents to line their pockets during education time. I don't think that anyone can deny that that's pretty scummy. Point is that at least their scummy practices were entertaining. Silver lining and all that junk.
Advertising you're required to watch, woven into a "Daily News for Young People" program. The schools likely constrain how interesting the subject matter can be, so you probably get a lot of "Hey, kids are doing interesting things" mixed in with dry news.
Never saw it, but I can imagine it feeling like propaganda.
Sort of. Daily news lite, pronouncements from the principal, appeals to school spirit and patriotism, pledge of allegiance, school accomplishments, etc.
Not all the channels were usable in one area. Tuners were not very good at rejecting harmonics back then.
Today, we have phones with four or five radio receivers and three transmitters operating without interference. It's amazing that works. Receivers are far, far better than they were in the tube era.
Surprisingly, a lot of that improvement comes from miniaturization and from better capacitors. The tubes themselves weren't really bad but they were power hungry and physically large. The capacitors, however, in the 1960s were terrible.
It's not that modern receivers are more sensitive, but that they are more selective. Harmonic or "image" rejection can achieve 20 to 60 dB in commercial applications today. The first and last sections of this paper may help explain: http://www.plextekrfi.com/images/pdfs/RF_mixer_design.pdf
A long, long time ago when there were only 4 channels to watch on our B&W TV, I asked my dad this question. He said something about it interfering with radio traffic but his apocryphal speculation was that it was so that no one network would get to be "#1".
The FCC seemed extremely responsive and considerate back then. I wonder how long things would have taken now-a-days to get consensus and authorizations
Project idea: Make a television system from vacuum tubes that broadcasts in the unlicensed home bands (2.4GHz & 5GHz). It could be either digital or analog, but it needs to use vacuum tubes. I'd like to see if such technologies would have been possible back in the 40's. Bonus points if they could transmit hi-def signals (1+ megapixels)
Although I can't find it in his online bio former FCC commissioner James Quello was an early television pioneer at Michigan State University in the early thirties.
The campus ham station, W8SH, has pictures in their archives of Quello's setup which could only transmit pictures the length of the engineering lab.
I always wondered why cable networks couldn't have a Channel 1, even though it wasn't allowed on broadcast. After all, there's no other radio traffic in a coax cable to compete with.
I suppose it could have posed a problem if there was any RF leakage from the cable network.
They sometimes did. It just wasn't super-common because people expected the single digits to be populated by broadcast channels (in fact, they often moved UHF channels to single digits so they'd all be in a continuous block).
When I was little, the local cable company in Dallas used Channel 1 as a tutorial channel where they looped videos showing how to operate the cable box and its remote. They eventually killed that, though, and just left Channel 1 empty.
In other localities, they have actual programming on Channel 1. For example, NYC had the news channel NY1 on Channel 1 until 2010.
You didn't select cable channels with the tuner, though. My recollection is that you attached the cable box to the TV, tuned the TV to whatever channel was used to display hardline input, then selected channels on the cable box.
Eventually cable-ready TVs came out with the cable selector built-in, but they still weren't using the radio tuning mechanism to select hardline cable channels.
> You didn't select cable channels with the tuner,
That heavily depended upon what the CATV provider did in your area. In many areas, TV channels 2-13 were transmitted verbatim on the coax, and could be tuned by a NTSC TV just by hooking up the coax (usually via an impedance matching transformer) to the antenna inputs of the TV.
This, of course, did create a 'leakage' problem. If the coax leaked somewhere, people without cable got ghosting. But worse, if the TV picked up some of the over the air signal (quite common actually) that was on the identical frequency, you got ghosting even with CATV.
For the sort of "channels" discussed in the article, the UK hasn't used a channel 1[1] for TV since 1985, as VHF was only used for the older 405 line TV system. Newer 625 line analogue TV[2] was and digital terrestrial TV is UHF only in the UK, and UHF channels are numbered from 21.
For convenience most TVs mapped the channels onto buttons 1/2/3/4 for analogue but behind the scenes they would be something like channels 27/29/31/33. Modern DTT channel numbers are also completely separate from what radio channel each TV channel is actually being carried on.
Indeed, if you're in the UK and you set up a new analogue TV (a few years ago when the transmitters still ran) or a new digital TV (still possible now obviously), the first thing it does is scan the entire UHF and VHF bands detecting channels, assigning them channel numbers in the order it finds them (analogue) or by some other algorithm I don't know (digital - it's not as simple as just a fixed number).
1946-1948
Manufacturers quickly began producing television receivers, transmitters, antennas, etc. New television stations were built all over the United States. The FCC had identified the top 140 metropolitan cities and assigned each at least one channel; a total of 400 were to be allotted. The FCC received many more applications than it had available channels. In an effort to provide with as many channels as possible, the FCC routinely threw away the "safety factor" of mileage between licensed transmitters.
But problems began to appear. So, even with just 50 stations on the air, interference problems were beginning to appear. Meanwhile, the FCC had reduced the minimum distance between stations using the same channel to just 80 miles. An engineering study released by the FCC warned of interference problems if immediate action wasn't taken. That lead to an FCC report issued on may 5, 1949, that rules that television could no longer share its frequencies with fixed and mobile services, and that the 72 to 76 MHz band could be used for fixed radio services only.
But where could the mobile services be located if they could no longer share the television allocations, and could no longer be used for use the 72 to 76 MHz band? There was only one place to go -- the television industry would have to give up another television channel. But which channel would that be? The American Radio Relay League (an association of amateur radio operators) urged that Channel 2 be deleted so that the second harmonics of the 28-29.7 MHz amateur radio band would not interfere with television reception. The television industry, although not pleased about losing yet another television channel, agreed that 12 clear channels were preferable to 12 shared channels. If they had to lose a channel, they preferred that it be Channel 1, because its absence would have the least impact on commercial television.
The FCC went along with the television industry's position, and on June 14, 1948, Channel 1 was deleted from the allocation plan. Channel 1"s frequencies were assigned to the land and mobile services. At the same time, the FCC decided not to renumber the channels -- that is what happened to Channel 1.
tl;dr as more spectrum was used in the late 1940s a channel had to be freed up to deal with interference issues so they picked channel 1 and simply choose not to renumber.
You'd think the article would explore why they didn't renumber, but nope.
Legacy hardware and possible consumer confusion seem like the most likely speculation.
Probably because if you had an old set and were watching on Ch2 but your neighbor was watching the same thing on Ch1 on a new set, that could have been a bit confusing at the dawn of television.
Or, watch ABC news on Ch2 on old sets, but Ch1 on new sets...., wait, do I have an old set or a new set?
That's why old VCRs, DVD players, home computers, and other devices that used an RF modulator to connect to a TV display could typically be set to transmit on channel 3 or channel 4, because one of those was almost always unused in a given area.