Finding TV's Pioneering Audiences
Douglas GomeryAudiences, reception studies, and fan culture have properly begun to claim an increasingly prominent place in film and television studies. Specifically, we presently know a great deal about the audiences for early cinema, but who were the audiences for early television in the United States? Before one can approach effects, reception, and cultivation theories, one needs to know who early TV audiences were.
Sadly, most scholars have followed Erik Barnouw's lead and start television history sometime in the 1950s. William Boddy treats FCC station allocation and color controversies, but for audiences he starts this portion of his history in the mid-1950s when critics began to attack TV. Two classic sociological studies of television audiences, first by Gary Steiner and later by his successor William Bower, start in the late 1950s when television had saturated the United States. These studies were based on the assumption that, because Nielsen did not start issuing TV ratings until 1950, only sketchy data existed on which to base any earlier analysis (Barnouw 5-11, Boddy 28-64, Bower, Steiner).
The most sophisticated study of TV's audiences in the late 1940s can be found in Richard Butsch's The Making of American Audiences. Still, frustrated by a seeming lack of data, Butsch labels his chapter "Fifties Television," as if no one owned a set before 1950. Only in a note do we find a hint that "[t]elevision broadcasting blossomed in 1948, much like radio in 1922" (Butsch 373). Butsch then, from a smattering of magazine articles, finds that early television set buyers were rich because sets were expensive; the working class thus turned to communal sites in what Leo Bogart and Anna McCarthy call the "tavern era" (Bogart 65-93, McCarthy 31-49). The bulk of Butsch's fascinating chapter then concentrates on early TV programming practices inherited from radio and TV's effect on other media (Butsch 235-51).
Yet good macrodata do exist for the years before 1950 (Sterling 18-19, 212):
* 1946--Six stations telecasting to approximately 20,000 sets,
* 1947--Twelve stations telecasting to approximately 190,000 sets,
* 1948--Sixteen stations telecasting to approximately 1,000,000 sets,
* 1949--Fifty-one stations telecasting to approximately 3,000,000 sets,
* 1950--Ninety-eight stations telecasting to approximately 7,000,000 sets.
With 9 percent of U.S. households having TV sets by 1950, we need to try to learn who made up the pioneering TV audiences of the 1940s. I argue that by 1950 the socioeconomic characteristics of the TV audience can be established because of data found in the Library of Congress's NBC collection and the Library of American Broadcasting's pamphlet collection. The pioneering audience characteristics are quite similar to TV audiences in the broadcast era.
Stations, Sets, and Ratings
Before we can locate and describe a pioneering audience, three conditions must have been in place: (1) stations had to go on the air, (2) people must have acquired sets, and (3) agencies had to gather information about audiences.
In September 1945, a month after the bombing of Japan, the FCC proposed a plan for allocation of TV stations throughout the United States. As seen in the data above, this plan led to about only 100 stations because of a FCC freeze during the period 1948-52. Finally, on July 1, 1952--with the FCC's Sixth Report and Order--did hundreds more stations finally go on the air.
Early stations were centered in big cities. In 1946, for example, six stations existed-three in New York City and one each in Philadelphia, Chicago, and Schenectady, New York, the latter sponsored by General Electric, which was located there. Thereafter, stations came on line in major cities in the Northeast, upper Midwest, and along the West Coast. By 1950 stations were reaching one of five homes in the largest twenty-five cities.
Looking back, an article in the spring 1954 issue of Sponsor noted that "[e]stablishing a commercial television station in 1947, 1948, or 1949 wasn't so easy." The red ink was continuous, and with the FCC seemingly always changing course, a well-funded, risk-loving entrepreneur was required. Many businesses were allocated station construction permits; 10 percent turned them back in and never went on the air (Television Digest 1946, "TV Pioneers" 43-108).
From the beginning all stations looked to network connections. The first network broadcast aimed to capture the public's fancy came with the Army versus Navy football game held December 1, 1945, from Philadelphia. The game was broadcast live to viewers in New York City, Schenectady, and Washington, D.C. The audience saw the entire game--from the time President Truman entered the stands until the game's final whistle--from a camera at the 50-yard line. Two other cameras offered occasional close-ups (Broadcasting Nov. 19, 1945: 22; "Army-Navy Classic" 21).
Evidence shows that sports broadcasting sparked early viewership. Great interest was generated by the first World Series baseball network telecasts of the New York Yankees versus the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. The June 25, 1948, Joe Louis versus "Jersey Joe" Walcott heavyweight fight held at Yankee Stadium was telecast on a seven-station East Coast network to an estimated audience of six million. By October 1950 the World Series was televised live as far west as Omaha to an audience estimated in the tens of millions (NBC, Library of Congress, Folder 12).
A key event that proved that audiences existed for early television was when Joe Louis fought Billy Conn in New York City's Yankee Stadium on June 19, 1946. With Washington, D.C., connected to Philadelphia, New York City, and Schenectady, an estimated audience of 100,000 to 300,000 watched on the existing 10,000 or so television sets as Louis defeated Conn in eight rounds. Gillette hawked razors and blades, and male viewers surrounded sets in homes and public places. Gillette paid $125,000 to "target" male sports fans (NBC, Library of Congress, Folder 604; NBC, Library of Congress, Folder 498; Katz and Dichter).
The audience grew as the network coaxial cable spread north to Boston and south to Richmond. In 1948, AT&T began building a Midwestern network in Chicago, stretching from Buffalo to St. Louis. A key moment for national audience development came on January 11, 1949, as Northeastern and Midwestern nets were linked in what was headlined as the equivalent of railroad's "Golden Spike." Suddenly viewers in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Richmond, Pittsburgh, and Schenectady could see the same programs as set owners in Chicago, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Toledo, Cleveland, Detroit, and Buffalo. Daily Variety noted, "New hookup tonight was hailed by John Balaban, director of Paramount's station WBKB [in Chicago], as meaning to television what the advent of sound meant [a generation earlier] to motion pictures" (NBC, Library of Congress, Folder 12; Daily Variety Jan. 12, 1949: 1).
Still, coast-to-coast TV networking did not come until two-and-half years later, on September 4, 1951, when President Truman addressed the opening of the Japanese Peace Treaty Conference in San Francisco. Later that month NBC initiated the first true national TV season with variety shows starring Red Skelton and Eddie Cantor. Audiences were small in the 1940s, but they were constantly growing as the FCC allocated more stations and AT&T's wires reached them (Siepmann 326, Gomery 5-11).
At first those who wanted to see what all the fuss was about either paid dearly for their own set or streamed into bars, department and appliance stores, and even movie theater lobbies for a communal view. Because of lingering war restrictions and labor strikes for higher wages, manufacturers really did not get started turning out a substantial number of sets until early in 1947. With average $400 price tags, about a tenth of the average household's income, early purchases were few. But manufacturers saw a pent-up demand, and looked for ways to lower prices. So, in 1947, they made cheaper sets by installing circular screens; this brought the price down $100 on average (Bretz 545-53; NBC, Library of Congress, Folder 521; NBC, Library of Congress, Folder 612).
Manufacturers began to reap economies of scale and began producing rectangular screen sets that dealers could sell for $200. By 1948, sets sold as fast as they could be made--despite a recession that lasted from December 1948 through September 1949. Overnight, television was not the sole province of the well-off, but also of the middle class. Upper middle-class and working-class viewers alike embraced television. In city after city, they bought sets faster than the rich folks who lived across town. Because of a rapid price decline, only in a few cases--the ethnic cities of the Northeast and Midwest, in particular--was there a short-lived "tavern era." When prices dropped below $200 in 1948, sales shifted almost exclusively to homeowners and renters. Indeed, during the late 1940s the electronics industry represented one of the fastest growing industries in the United States (Hughes 540-53, Walker 33).
The impetus for such an expensive purchase by a working-class family came at first because males of all ages demanded to see telecast sports. They easily calculated the relative value of paying for live admission versus paying once up-front for a TV set. An early 1948 DuMont survey of New Yorkers found that two-thirds of "dads" purchased their first television set to see the World Series. The other third of the demand came from the females of the New York City area, who told surveyors they liked to watch TV's live dramas instead of paying to go to a Broadway show (Walker 51-52).
Although RCA has been labeled the most famous of this early lot of set manufacturers because of its long-time ownership of NBC, it had dozens of challengers. DuMont pioneered the first full line of sets, from expensive consoles to cheap table-top models. RCA, Zenith, GE, Motorola, Philco, and Admiral quickly followed. For example, Admiral sold more sets than RCA--one million alone in 1950. Moreover, buyers began to get more for their dollars. For example, the average screen size increased. By 1950, the ten-inch set had grown to twelve inches for table models and sixteen inches for consoles. In June 1949, Philco introduced the first built-in antenna. Motorola countered with easier to use volume and channel dials for its Christmas models in 1949.
In addition to income, the most important reason for growth in TV set sales was a willingness to spend savings bonds. During World War II, the personal savings rate had been a fifth of domestic personal income, an all-time high for the twentieth century. In 1946, the savings rate plunged, and Americans went on a buying spree with a TV set atop most "wish lists" (Gomery 5-11, Hughes 540-53, "Obituary" B10, Walker 47-48, 55-65).
TV stations--most often owned by radio stations and newspapers--spurred set sales through barrages of "free" publicity. For example, all of Chicago noticed in early April 1948 when the Chicago Tribune and its WGN-AM radio station devoted space and time to the opening of Tribune's new television station, WGN-TV. This second station in America's second city set off a buying frenzy and, as in nearly every city, was called "T-Day." Although much has been written about TV's effect on radio and newspapers, little notice has been made of the fact that the emerging medium conglomerates were making more profits from television than they lost through declining radio and newspaper circulation ("Television Moving" 10, Murray).
Still, skeptics of the new medium remained. They stressed relative prices and noted that, although a decent TV set could be acquired for $200, a "functional" radio cost less than $10 and a good one no more than $25. Indeed, only in September 1948 do NBC's internal records mention for the first time the actual monies coming in from advertisers. In late 1949 NBC's Pat Weaver warned his boss Charles Denny that NBC's five owned and operated stations were "mostly losing their shirts" (NBC, Library of Congress, Folder 603; NBC, Library of Congress, Folder 662; Rosen 145-46; Southwell 11-12).
But the mass media of the day were not ignorant of their new competitor. Signs arose as set sales took off in 1948 as best exemplified by Fortune's May article "Television Boom!" The first real East Coast and Midwestern network season began in September 1948; with the "Golden Spike" of January 1949, TV was as hot as the VCR was in the mid-1980s and the Internet was in the late 1990s. This is usually best symbolized by the Milton Berle phenomenon, which started in the summer of 1948 on NBC's nine-station network (FCC Annual Report 1948 37-39, Gardiner 30-51).
But audiences were found only in selected cities because station allocations proceeded slowly and networks were limited. In 1949 households around New York City led the way, owning more than 525,000 sets, a third of all sets in the United States! Citizens of metropolitan Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Boston, Detroit, and Washington, D.C., bought sets in smaller numbers, but all measured in the tens or hundreds of thousands. The audience for TV was there, not nationally, but concentrated in urban America (Seehafer 102-04).
There were scores of stations on the air, three networks, and millions of owners of TV sets in the late 1940s, but why does it seem to so many historians that no research on audiences was gathered? We have come to expect A. C. Nielsen to flood us with a wealth of audience data as a byproduct of services sold to advertisers and television companies. But the TV ratings industry has a history as well, and the era of the late 1940s proved one of flux as the radio rating companies, principally Hooper and Nielsen, sought to translate methods that worked for radio into ratings for television. Hooper, which dominated radio ratings, could not make the transition; Hooper's main competitor, A. C. Nielsen, did--with a meter attached to the TV set to record automatically when the set was on and to which channel it was tuned. The key turning point came in February 1950 when Hooper sold out to Nielsen. Only then did Nielsen begin streaming out continuous audience data that seem so common today (Beville 11-83; "Hooper Plan" 24; "Methods Sound" 28; "National Hooperatings" 27; NBC, Library of Congress, Folder 798; Nye 84-110; "Research Firms" 28, 41).
In the 1940s other companies entered the new market for TV ratings. Some, like Arbitron, had people keep diaries of what they watched; others, like Pulse, concentrated interviews only in the New York City market. Pulse did well for a short time because New York constituted more than half the TV market, but like a dozen more new competitors, only Arbitron survived. Mark Banks correctly concluded his comprehensive history of the ratings business, "For television in its early years, there was no [single] rating service." But that did not mean that no surveys were taken. Networks did their own. As early as 1945, NBC and CBS began seeking data to predict TV's effect on radio listening. Stations surveyed their local communities. Leading advertising agencies completed studies, as did a handful of academics. It is from these early surveys, I argue, that we can piece together a history of the changing audiences for television in the United States prior to 1950 (Banks 78, 89; Beville 11-23; "TV Hooper" 48, 69; Summers 147-60; "TV Diary" 50).
TV's Early Audiences
We can identify six fundamental characteristics of the pioneering TV audience from many studies and the 1950 census, which was the first to count television.
First, television's viewers were city dwellers and suburbanites. During the late 1940s, the approximately 100 stations sent out their signals in a 50-mile radius, spilling across city boundaries into the growing suburbs. Radio may have flowed by clear channels to those still on the farm, but TV started as an urban/suburban mass medium. The FCC underscored that by allocating the first stations to the largest cities in the United States, with a few notable exceptions (Smythe 256-57, 259).
This urbanization and suburbanization was not complete or continuous, however. Metropolitan areas like Denver, Tampa, and Portland, Oregon, had no TV because no entrepreneurs had applied for an FCC license before October 1948 or construction permit holders chose not to build a station. Mid-sized communities got TV before 1950, but only if they were within range of a big city station. Other rural and small-town Americans waited until July 1952 (U.S. Bureau of the Census).
Second, family size and extent of television coverage are the two best variables to explain set ownership. At that moment in history, the suburbs were growing as middle-class families fled city life in record numbers. New suburbanites, finding it costly and time consuming to drive to the city for entertainment, used television as a substitute for going to the movies, sporting events, and theater. Suburbanites with baby boom families embraced TV as soon as stations went on the air and dealers offered sets for sale at $200 or less. The great advantage of buying a TV set was obvious to all. Once the initial cost was met, the marginal cost of operation for many who wished to crowd around the set was zero (Dernberg 19-32, U.S. Bureau of the Census).
Income from both wages and savings proved a third defining variable in two ways. Although it seems that the very earliest adopters came from the upper range of the income distribution, by 1948 and 1949 the upper middle class and working class took the lead in purchasing sets. In May 1949, for example, CBS researchers, under network president Frank Stanton, found an inverse relationship between purchase of a set and income. As networks offered greater and greater entertainment value and set prices fell, only the very rich and poor did not acquire sets. The rich developed a snob reaction; the poor simply needed their resources for basic necessities. This middle-class takeover occurred well before 1950. New York City metropolitan residents reached this "tip point" during Christmas 1947, and TV's other pioneering cities thereafter. It was during the late 1950s, as a used TV set market developed, that the inner city poor embraced TV in the same numbers as the broad middle class who had moved to the suburbs.
Fourth, because education is highly correlated with income and wealth, those with advanced university degrees and those with only grade school educations were not a part of TV's pioneering audiences. With the broad middle class embracing television, it was the most educated and the least educated Americans who did not have sets (Bogart 13-14, Demberg 9-12, Siepmann 336-40, U.S. Bureau of the Census).
Fifth, the first TV audiences were largely younger than the population as a whole. Study after study indicated that those over age 50 stuck to radio far longer than early TV adopters. But those young early adopters of TV did not substitute TV for other cultural pursuits. They still went to the movies and purchased magazines, books, and newspapers--but at lower rates than had been the case prior to the innovation of television (Bogart 15, 65-66; NBC, Library of Congress, Pamphlet 404; Siepmann 336-40; Sagoe 143-54).
Finally, it seems everyone embraced TV: male and female, white collar and blue collar, black and white, married and single. All members of the potential audience took TV into their lives, and told surveyor after surveyor that they loved the new medium. With little to watch during the day prior to 1950, viewing began after the evening meal, and continued uninterrupted until the audience went to bed. Men loved the sports; women embraced live dramas. Within months of a station going on the air (enough time to learn about TV and buy a set), researchers found that during the late 1940s early adopters had their new sets on for more than four hours per day on average. John Balaban, owner of Chicago's pioneering station, was correct: The pioneering TV audience embraced no new medium change so rapidly, so passionately, and so completely since the coming of sound a generation earlier (Bogart 68-70, Siepmann 336-40).
Case Studies: Large and Small
New York City and New Brunswick, New Jersey
New York City led the United States into the TV era. What its audiences liked provided network executives with feedback to fashion early network programming. The New York audience before 1949 was vast compared to TV's second city--Philadelphia. In 1948, there were more households with televisions in the New York City metropolitan area than in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Chicago combined. As the 1950s began, CBS's research estimated that nearly three million New York City area households, fully two-thirds, had anted up for a TV set, still representing nearly one in five of all viewers ("The New York Television Picture," "Television Reaches Stage" 31-33).
A decade of "Videotown" surveys-- conducted in the suburban community of New Brunswick, New Jersey--provides a vivid and continuous portrait of the creation of this vast TV audience. Advertising agency Newell-Emmett started the "Videotown" study in April 1948; later another ad agency--Cunningham & Walsh-took it over. New Brunswick, with 40,000 people, provided a manageable laboratory 35-40 miles from Manhattan. At first "Videotown" surveyors questioned every TV set owner in the community, about 800 in number. Later they went to sampling as the number of set owners grew into the thousands (Library of American Broadcasting, Pamphlet 5705).
In 1948, researchers found such a tiny "out of home" audience that they discounted it. A "tavern era" may have occurred in New York City, but not in suburban New Brunswick. By 1949, when every ninth home had a set, only the rich, poor, and professors connected to Rutgers University were not rushing out to an appliance or department store. Like the rest of the country in 1949, the middle class (broadly defined) owned the bulk of sets (Library of American Broadcasting, Pamphlet 5705; "Television Reaches Stage" 31-33).
New Brunswick was typical in many other ways. Surveyors found the prices of sets ever falling. Ten-inch models were giving way to sets with larger screens. Family size of these early New Brunswick owners was 10 percent higher than the New York metropolitan average. The highest ratings came for college football games, with live drama next. The average set owner had graduated from high school, and in many cases attended college on the GI bill. And, like suburbanites everywhere, it was easy to tell where they lived because all had an outdoor antenna (Library of American Broadcasting, Pamphlet 158; Library of American Broadcasting, Pamphlet 5705; "Television as a Sales Medium"; "Television Reaches Stage" 31-33).
A New York City survey conducted in July 1948 by Harper's magazine provided a rare glimpse into the attitudes of well-educated, well-off early viewers. As income and wealth status would predict, they bought top-of-the-line sets from RCA, DuMont, GE, and Philco. But they indicated that they used their set selectively, tuning in for only a couple of hours per night and not every night. While men still preferred sports, all family members raved about TV's pioneering live drama. Since Harper's was subscribed to by network executives, one understands why David Sarnoff and William Paley invested so much in staging live drama on television. A Pulse study done that same month indicated the area's top-rated show was Kraft TV Theatre (Library of American Broadcasting, Pamphlet 3390; "Survey").
In 1948 NBC contracted with Hofstra College psychology professor Thomas Coffin to study attitudes of set owners in the New York television market. Coffin was surprised to learn how passionately the new audiences loved their TVs, with a remarkable 91 percent even praising TV's advertising! At the end of 1948, Sponsor labeled "Metropolitan New York. the bellwether for what's going to happen when 'everyone' has TV." In this case, Sponsor was right on the mark (Library of American Broadcasting, Pamphlet 3390; Library of American Broadcasting, Pamphlet 2983; Library of American Broadcasting, Pamphlet 3212; Library of American Broadcasting, Pamphlet 940).
By the middle of 1950, as prices fell to the $150-$200 range and the United States was emerging from a recession, "Videotown" interviewers first found that the poor began buying TV sets on the installment plan. Soon, as Butsch and others have found, 1950s family life was properly characterized as having the TV on every night of the week, embraced by a growing number of youngsters in baby boom families. As early as 1950, "Videotown" surveyors found that children were TV's most frequent viewers. Parents agreed to keep sets on for more than five hours per day in response to their children's demands. Metropolitan New Yorkers surely led the country into audience patterns that would within less than a decade alarm psychologists and policy makers to replace the movies with TV as mass media's top social menace (Library of American Broadcasting, Pamphlet 5706; Library of American Broadcasting, Pamphlet 5707).
Philadelphia
Philadelphia was the nation's third largest city, but first in the rate of TV sets sold per capita. From the beginning those living in the Philadelphia metropolitan area were connected to network programming, forming the "belt buckle" of the Eastern network in 1947. (This key location provided the motivation for both the Republicans and Democrats to hold their 1948 nominating conventions in the "City of Brotherly Love.") Surveys always noted that city dwellers and suburbanites within the Philadelphia metro market led the U.S. in TV set ownership per household, but could never explain why. Perhaps Philadelphia's lack of alternative entertainment, as compared with New York City, offers the explanation of why Philadelphia led the nation in TV set sales.
As 1949 turned into 1950 it was in Philadelphia where the relative size of TV's share of the broadening audience first passed radio. But in all other measures Philadelphians mirrored their northern neighbors in the New York City area. TV viewing started after supper, and peaked at 9 P.M. each evening. The average TV buyer earned from $40 to $100 per week, wages that placed the household firmly within the middle class. Most sets were on four to five hours per day. Homes in the viewing range of the three Philadelphia stations--from Allentown to the north to Newark, Delaware, south of Philadelphia, from Reading on the west to southern New Jersey in the east--seemed to have led the way out of primetime viewing, boasting top ratings for new afternoon and morning shows. Network fare, such as Today, and even locally created shows, such as American Bandstand, taught the TV industry that a properly targeted TV audience could expand beyond primetime.
Philadelphia, with only three stations, proved that more programs did not bring larger audience shares. Many at the time argued that New York and Los Angeles, with seven stations, and Chicago and Washington, D.C., with four, would lead the way. But Philadelphia's three stations, an affiliate for NBC, CBS, and ABC, offered a true portrait of the future of the TV nation within its three-network confines (Library of American Broadcasting, Facts in Focus; "A Survey of Philadelphia TV Families").
Milwaukee
Milwaukee was unlike New York or Philadelphia because until 1954 it had only one station. Many mid-sized metropolitan areas--for example, Albuquerque, Phoenix, Indianapolis, and Jacksonville--were similar to Milwaukee. Milwaukee's WTMJ-TV began in December 1947 and still had no competition in September 1953. WTMJ-TV was nominally an NBC affiliate, but in reality executives picked any network feed they desired.
Still alone and in a Midwestern industrial, working-class factory community, surveyors found that the Milwaukee audience mirrored those in New York and Philadelphia. As soon Milwaukee families bought a set, it glowed every evening of the week, with programs on Sunday nights topping the ratings. Sports programs also spiked afternoon ratings on Saturdays and Sundays. There seems to have been no "tavern era," as the typical audience consisted of three or four family members sitting in front of the set after supper and watching from about 6 P.M. until 10 P.M. Women in Milwaukee embraced live drama, while men chose sports. Variety shows seemed to unite family viewing. By 1950 sets were on an average of five hours a day. Early adopters loved their new TV sets at a level equal to their more "sophisticated" fellow viewers in New York and Philadelphia (Library of American Broadcasting, "What the WTMJ-TV Area Viewers"; Library of American Broadcasting, "Viewing Habits").
WTMJ-TV was also typical in its close ties to earlier local media, it had been underwritten by the city's leading newspaper, the Milwaukee Journal, with staff and space sharing the Journal's pioneering radio station, WTMJ-AM. Long-time radio president Waiter Damm had experimented with television in the 1930s, and pressed management to open WTMJ-TV making Milwaukee the seventh city in the U.S. with television. Few realized then that WTMJ-TV would become the first non-network-owned station to make a profit. In retrospect, once the "Golden Spike" opened Milwaukee to live network feeds, Milwaukee households embraced TV so that an astonishing 90 percent of families had a set by the early 1950s. Milwaukee showed the rest of the nation how powerful an influence a TV station could be in a community when it was linked with the leading newspaper and radio station. The Journal Company demonstrated how the early TV audience could be turned into the core of a local media conglomerate, and that newspaper sales and radio ad time would not have to fall if coordinated with TV advertising and programming ("WTMJ-TV" 74-75, 129-33).
Ames and Des Moines
Ames, Iowa, represents one of the rare exceptions to pioneering audiences living in and around major cities. The 100th station put on in the nation, WOI-TV was owned and operated by Iowa State College. In 1944 the president of Iowa State appointed a committee to study prospects for acquiring a station; in 1947 a license was granted. In 1950 the college obtained funding and went on the air on February 21. For four years, WOI-TV operated as the sole commercial station in the Des Moines market, and like WTMJ-TV picked the top-rated programs all four networks offered, particularly during primetime and sports weekend afternoons. WOI-TV used afternoons to telecast daily educational shows.
Set sales in Ames exploded during the spring of 1950, a couple hundred thousand sold within two years after WOI-TV signed on the air. Iowans living in and around Des Moines embraced TV with the same passion as their big city brethren. Rural Iowans proved harder to wean from radio, but by the middle 1950s, when WOI-TV celebrated its fifth anniversary, the TV set had clearly replaced the radio as the main portion of the mass entertainment. Typically the educated elite of Ames and the poor in small towns and on farms hesitated buying a typical sixteen-inch set, principally from an Admiral, Crosley, GE, Motorola, and RCA dealers, until Christmas 1950. Then they signed up almost as fast as dealers could stock sets (Murray and Godfrey 195-209).
In November 1951, after twenty months on the air, WOI-TV, with the cooperation of the college's statistical laboratory, conducted a massive survey of its audience in Ames, Des Moines, and the surrounding rural areas. The survey team found the average TV home turned to WOI-TV at 6 P.M. and turned off at 10 P.M. All ages, genders, educational levels, and occupations watched.
Ames also showed that not being directly hooked to the network did not matter. Kinescopes did not impede consistent viewing. Rural Americans, it seemed, embraced television faster and with more fervor than any other mass medium of the twentieth century--even radio. Iowa State statisticians ended their comprehensive report by noting with astonishment, "More than likely, adults in TV homes [served by WOI-TV] spent more time [in 1950] viewing TV than in any other daily activity except working and sleeping" ("WOI-TV," Whan).
Conclusions and Future Research
By the middle of 1949, Sponsor could properly declare, "A year ago [in the summer of 1948 TV] was too important in the future. The future is now" ("Who Is Sponsoring TV?" 84).
By late 1949 pioneering TV set owners lived principally in cities or their suburbs, were more likely to buy if neither very rich nor very poor, were relatively well educated, young, had two or three children in the household, and were quick to praise the new technology. That audience would change only marginally as the 1950s unfolded. It was in the late 1940s that the TV audience was established, not the 1950s as earlier researchers have led us to believe. This changes the way we must look at the history of the coming of television to the United States.
In the 1950s advertisers, who funded the programming, looked to manipulate the audience. They pushed live TV drama to reach more women, whom they reasoned made the key buying decisions in middle-class and working-class households. Corporate advertising dollars flooded into the new medium, and programming costs soared. Soon Hollywood's best was producing fare voted superior by its 1950s audiences. By the late 1950s the three-network Hollywood studio oligopoly was established. But all this was based on a TV audience already in place by 1950 ("Social Characteristics"; NBC, Library of Congress, Folder 498, Annual Report 1949, 15; NBC, Library of Congress, Pamphlet 404; NBC, Library of Congress, Pamphlet 506).
Nothing would change this pattern established in the late 1940s--not the Korean War, not the Cold War, not Joe McCarthy, not even the recurring recessions of the 1950s. The end of the FCC's freeze in July 1952 opened 400 more stations over the following three years, and altered the TV landscape by enabling all but isolated rural households to become part of the TV audience. Metropolitan areas with more than 500,000 people had nearly two-thirds of homes with sets, while towns with fewer than 2,500 had but 13 percent. Still the TV audience was what it had been in 1950, only larger ("Radio vs. TV" 126, "Report to Sponsors" 2, "What's New" 52).
The duration (and importance) of the communal "tavern phase" has been far exaggerated. It surely existed in 1947 in cities like Chicago, but what Business Week on September 13, 1947, called "Television's Audience Problem" quickly disappeared as set prices fell, networks were constructed, and more stations went on the air. NBC's founder David Sarnoff correctly predicted the end of "tavern phase" in an address to the NBC Convention in Atlantic City on September 13, 1947, when he told his audience, "Television is no longer around the corner. It is beyond the doorstep; it has pushed its way through the door into the home!" (McCarthy 31-49; "Models and Prices" 12-13; "Planning Guide" 11-15; "Television's Audience Problem" 70-72; NBC, Library of Congress, Pamphlet 19; "TV-A Market" 49).
I have argued in this article that we need to shift our research on TV's pioneering audience back to 1946, and accept that broad audience characteristics were established before the 1950s. But with that new conclusion accepted, many new questions arise. We now need reception studies, analysis of fan culture, and n deeper analysis of how early TV audiences came to understand what they saw on the screen. What was the appeal of sports and live drama? How did network and station owners seek to shape this audience?
DOUGLAS GOMERY is on the faculty of the University of Maryland and resident scholar at the Library of American Broadcasting. He is the author of a score of books and numerous articles on the history and economics of the mass media.
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Broadcasting Nov. 19, 1945: 22.
Butsch, Richard. The Making of American Audiences. New York: Cambridge UP, 2000.
Daily Variety 1946-53.
Dernberg, Thomas F. "Consumer Response to Innovation: Television." Studies in Household Economic Behavior. Ed. Thomas F. Dernberg, Richard N. Rosett, and Harold W. Watts New Haven: Yale UP, 1958. 1-50.
Federal Communications Commission. Annual Reports 1945-58.
Gardiner, John. "The Rich Rewards of Pioneering: How the 106 Pre-Freeze Stations Stand Now." Television 15.3 (March 1968): 30-51.
Gomery, Douglas "The Coming of Television and the 'Lost' Motion Picture Audience." Journal of Film and Video 37.3 (Summer 1985): 5-11.
"Hooper Plan." Broadcasting July 1951: 24. "Hooperrecording: New Devise Shown." Broadcasting Oct. 23, 1950: 25.
Hughes, Jonathan. American Economic History. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman, 1983.
Katz, Oscar, and Ernest Dichter. Television Audience Research. New York: CBS Television Audience Research Institute, July 1945.
Library of American Broadcasting, University of Maryland, College Park. Pamphlet 158, "Today's Television Audience." New York: NBC, May 1948.
-----. Pamphlet 940, "Television Research," Oscar Katz, Director of Research at CBS, Oct. 28, 1948.
-----. Pamphlet 2983, "Television's Effects on the Families Activities." Thomas E. Coffin, Television Research Bureau, Hofstra College, July 1948.
-----. Pamphlet 3212, "The Television Audience of Today," Advertest, September-October 1948.
-----. Pamphlet 3390, "A Brief Study of Current Television Facilities, Programs, and Audience," Lennen and Mitchell, July 15, 1948.
-----. Pamphlet 3686, "The Audience of Today," Advertest, Jan. 1950.
-----. Pamphlet 5705, "Videotown--One Year Later, 1948-1949," Newell-Emmett, 1949.
-----. Pamphlet 5706, "Videotown IV--1950," Cunningham and Walsh, 1950.
-----. Pamphlet 5707, "Videotown IV--1951," Cunningham and Walsh, 1951.
-----. Station Files, WTMJ, "What the WTMJ-TV Area Viewers Think of Television," Milwaukee Journal, Sept. 1949.
-----. Station Files, "Viewing Habits of Television Set Owners in the WTMJ-TV Area, Survey 2," Jan. 1950.
-----. Station Files, "Facts in Focus: A Qualitative Study," Sindlinger and Company, Feb. 1950.
-----. Station Files, "Survey of Philadelphia TV Families," Television Association of Philadelphia, April, 1950.
McCarthy, Anna. "'The Front Row Is Reserved for Scotch Drinkers': Early Television's Tavern Audience." Cinema Journal 34.4 (Summer 1995): 31-49.
"Methods Sound." Broadcasting Feb. 21, 1949: 28.
"Models and Prices of 29 Video Set Makers." The Televiser Sept.-Oct. 1947: 12-13.
Murray, Michael D., and Donald G. Godfrey. Television in America. Ames: Iowa State UP, 1997.
NBC History Files at the Library of Congress. Folder 12, Thirtieth Anniversary, 1956.
---. Folder 498, RCA Annual Reports, 1940-1949.
---. Folder 521, Receiving Sets Television in Offices, 1938-1942, Alfred H. Morton Memo, June 29, 1939.
---. Folder 603, Television 1946-1954, letter by Pat Weaver to Charles Denny, Oct. 3, 1949.
---. Folder 604, Television Commercial 1940-1946, "Report Number Two-Progress of Television," compiled for NBC by Leo Burnett Company, July 1946.
---. Folder 612, Television Broadcasters Association, 1947-1948, "Annual Report to Members of the Television Broadcasters Association, Inc." Dec. 10, 1947.
---. Folder 662, NBC Network Advertisers 1948.
---. Folder 798, NBC Management Committee Reports 1948.
---. Pamphlet 19, David Sarnoff, "Television's Progress," Sept. 13, 1947.
---. Pamphlet 404, "Television Profile," NBC, April 1950.
---. Pamphlet 506, Hugh M. Beville, Jr., "The True Dimensions of the Radio and Television Audience," Oct. 28, 1949.
"National Hooperatings Ratings Sold." Broadcasting Feb. 28, 1950: 27.
"The New York Television Picture." CBS Research Feb. 1952.
"Nielsen Issues First Pacific Ratings." Broadcasting Sept. 12, 1949: 40.
"Nielsen Reports." Broadcasting Sept. 6, 1948: 29, 34.
Nye, Frank W. "Hoop" of Hooperatings. Norwalk: Privately published, 1957.
"Obituary for Ross David Siagusa." New York Times April 3, 1996: B10.
"Planning Guide." The Televiser, Nov.-Dec. 1947: 11-15.
"Radio vs. TV Coverage in TV Cities." Sponsor July 14, 1952: 126.
"Report to Sponsors." Sponsor July 14, 1952: 2.
"Research Firms." Broadcasting July 4, 1949: 28, 41.
"The Research Services." Television March 1952: 90-91.
Rosen, George. "Ten Frantic Years of Television." Variety Jan. 4, 1956: 145-46.
Sagoe, May V. "Children's Television Habits and Preferences." The Quarterly of Film, Radio, and Television 6.2 (Winter 1951): 143-53.
Seehafer, E. F., and J. W. Laemmar. Successful Radio and Television Advertising. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951.
Siepmann, Charles A. Radio Television and Society. New York: Oxford UP, 1950.
Smythe, Dallas W. "Television in Relation to Other Media and Recreation in American Life." Hollywood Quarterly 4.3 (Spring 1950): 256-61.
"Social Characteristics of the U.S. Television Audience." NBC Research Oct. 26, 1949.
Southwell, John. Getting a Job in Television. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1947.
Steiner, Gary A. The People Look at Television. New York: Knopf, 1963.
Sterling, Christopher H. Electronic Media. New York: Praeger, 1984.
Summers, Harrison B. "Qualitative Information Concerning Audiences of Network Television Programs. Journal of Broadcasting 5.2 (Spring 1961): 147-60.
"Survey of Television Ownership and Buying Plans of Harper's Magazine Families." Harper's July 1948.
"Television as a Sales Medium." CBS Research March 1948.
Television Digest 1946-60.
"Television Moving from Side Show to Big Top." Motion Picture Herald April 10, 1948: 10.
"Television's Audience Problem" Business Week Sept. 13, 1947: 70-72.
"Television Boom!" Fortune May 1948: 79-83, 191-97.
"Television Reaches Stage of Big-Volume Business and Mass Entertainment." Business Week Jan. 10, 1948: 31-33.
"TV--A Market in New York Now." Sponsor March 1947: 49.
"TV Diary." Sponsor Nov. 1946: 50.
"TV Pioneers: The First 108 Stations." Sponsor April 19, 1954: 43-108.
"TV Hooper: First Network Report Released." Broadcasting July 4, 1949: 48, 69.
United States Bureau of the Census, Seventeenth Census of the United States: 1950 Population, vol. 3, Census Tract Statistics.
Variety (weekly) 1939-56.
Walker, Lance. "A History of Pricing in the Television Industry, with Theoretical Implications." Diss. The New School for Social Research, 1998.
Whan, Forest L. The 1952 Iowa Radio-Television Audience Survey. Wichita: U of Wichita, 1952.
"What's New in Research?" Sponsor Aug. 11, 1952: 52.
"Who Is Sponsoring TV?" Sponsor April 11, 1949: 84, 102-03.
WOI-TV. The WOI-TV Audience. Ames: Iowa State College, 1952.
"WTMJ-TV." Fortune Jan. 1952: 74-75, 129-33.
Time spent viewing television AT HOME-23% OF TOTAL SAMPLE AVERAGE VIEWER 3:24 HOUSEWIFE 3:34 MALE HEAD OF FAMILY. 3:14 "OTHER" MEMBER 3:22 Expressed in hours and minutes of listening. For example, 3:24 means 3 hours and 24 minutes. Families with TV sets were watching entire evenings of TV shows before 1950. Chart is from a major advertising agency, BBDO, report, "What's Happening to Leisure Time in Television Homes?" (pamphlet found at Library of American Broadcasting, University of Maryland).
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