1946: Radio’s Futures

I’ve been reading a forgotten radio industry newsletter-called TV Digest and FM Reports. I was surprised just how much of a postwar push there was towards rapidly making FM the main medium of all commercial broadcasting, much the same way that, sixty years later, HDTV would outright replace traditional analog TV.

The theory after the war was, everything would soon go to the higher quality, static-free FM, leaving behind only a remnant of existing, high-powered AM stations to continue to provide radio to rural areas. The AM band was already crowded, so more stations were welcome. The future lifeblood of radio advertising, “drive time” AM radio programming, barely existed back then in the way we would come to know it. In those days, plenty of cars didn’t even have radios, still an expensive accessory. Before the superhighway era, suburbs weren’t as extensive, so drives to work tended to be shorter.

The big dispute roiling the FM postwar rollout was “high band” vs “low band”. The FCC was forcing manufacturers and stations to shift all FM stations from 42—50 megacycles to 88-108, where it is today. The industry didn’t like it, and they were right. In 1946, the radio makers requested a reasonable compromise, dual-band sets for a transition period. Nothing doing, said the FCC; from now on, it’s high band or nothing. Disenfranchising what were already hundreds of thousands of prewar FM radio owners created so much bad will among the public that FM stumbled badly for decades thereafter. The public wouldn’t buy the new 88-108 megacycle FM radios, so there was no audience, and hence no advertisers. For the rest of the Forties and Fifties, an FM broadcast license was a license to lose money.

Facsimile printing direct to the living room, anywhere in the country, was something I’d read about, but not with this level of useful detail. I’d always liked the practical common sense of the pre-war radio fax business plan: use the little-utilized overnight time at existing radio stations to transmit morning newspapers directly to the home. The existing household console radio was connected to a fax printer in a separate cabinet.

Simple and neat—but by the time these broadcast fax systems were undergoing federal tests, the radio industry was quietly shifting to a more sophisticated but capable home system. It was all in one compact cabinet and much simpler to use—just set and forget, like a clock radio—and it was able to receive and print detailed pages much faster, because it was high bandwidth, in frequencies far above the AM band. Unfortunately, that negated the economic advantages that would have accrued by using existing stations, networks, and home radios. It would have been a better home fax standard to start with, also enabling the sale of more print ads, but it pushed the cost of a home radiofax receiver up to about half of what a TV set would cost. At that price it wouldn’t sell, so the radio industry quietly backed away from the idea.

As we’ve long known, TV history, at least in the US, could have been very different. For example, it’s clearer now that the simple reason TV didn’t get off the ground even faster after the war was a lack of TV sets. No viewers equaled no stations, and no advertisers. It was well into ’46 before they started rolling off production lines in any numbers.

By comparison, the reason the car industry got into postwar production so much more quickly was the fact that a huge national market was eagerly waiting. It was worth spending big to tool up as fast as possible and grab all the market share they could. In contrast, the radio manufacturers, who converted their early TV assembly lines to radar factories during the war, didn’t have a huge readymade market waiting for TV sets, not yet. There were still very large profits to be made in radios and radio parts.

In the early postwar years TV broadcasting had more quitters than joiners. Plenty of radio and newspaper publishing interests that had already made tentative prewar plans to go into television withdrew their postwar requests for TV broadcasting licenses, because it was much more expensive than predicted, the growth of the advertising market would probably be slow. Break-even on the investment would take longer than anticipated. From the standpoint of 1945-’47 it wasn’t crazy to doubt the near-future profits of TV, but most of them would come to rue the day they pulled their applications. Many companies would wait five years for another chance at getting a license.

We think of those times as being technologically backwards, but the newsletter’s knowledgeable discussion of TV’s immediate future was surprisingly accurate. A lot of potential investors in the industry were holding back until it got resolved. The low band vs high band description of the conflict within FM broadcasting was mirrored in television, where the prevailing prewar black and white TV standard was now called low band. Screen resolution was still open to question, with some high band color TV interests holding out for what we’d now call HDTV standards, right from the beginning.

We know who won that battle—low band black and white. Those are the TV sets we grew up with, and once color was added to that medium-definition picture, most people would be satisfied with TV pictures for the next half century. Until screens got much larger, there were few if any complaints.

At this point I jumped ahead, pushing the time lever forward, Rod Taylor-style, to the fall of 1951. A lot had changed; a lot of up-in-the-air issues had been resolved over the previous five years.

Late ’51 was a dramatic moment in the TV business. By then, regular black and white television was booming, making money almost beyond 1946’s most optimistic predictions. Night time radio audiences were starting a plunge that wouldn’t bottom out for a decade.

Right after the war, the broadcasting and advertising industries expected the size of the TV audience to equal the size of the national radio audience by about 1956 or so, but that point was reached in only half the predicted time. What we think of as old time radio still filled the evening airwaves in 1951, just as it had for nearly thirty years, but it wouldn’t for much longer.

The CBS color TV system that was a major attraction, and a major stumbling block to decision making in 1946, had just been tried on a national scale. It succeeded technically and failed financially. I’d gotten the impression that it took some time for those lessons to sink in, but TV Digest corrects that impression: nope, everybody knew right away. There was little doubt that color would be back someday soon, in a no-doubt better form.

By then, publisher Martin Godel had quietly taken “FM” out of the newsletter’s title, now calling it TV Digest and Electronic Reports. It was one more sign that FM radio, inadvertently almost killed off by Federal action, had entered its two decades of financial purgatory. FM was eventually saved by stereophonic broadcasting, first for instrumental “beautiful music”, then by rock.

In 1951, the idea of radio facsimile direct to the home wasn’t dead yet, but there was barely a trace left of postwar optimism about it either. Over decades, business-oriented fax over phone lines came into limited use, so rare that in 1967, Bullitt spent a precious minute of action-movie screen time on showing how fingerprints were faxed between police departments. Faxes became much more popular in the Eighties and Nineties.

One 1946 enthusiasm for the future was still unresolved in the early Fifties: lavish, live television events in movie theaters. This ambitious plan, backed by Paramount and other studios, went well beyond what theater TV would be used for: boxing matches and rare special events. Entertainment spectaculars delivered via theatrical TV was regarded as a promising new hybrid art form that could enrich Hollywood and revitalize America’s downtowns. It could and probably should have happened, and it would have changed American popular history if it had. Yet, in one of those intriguing what-ifs, it never really got off the ground. That will be the subject of another post, The TV Curfew.