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Science on American Television

The University of Chicago Press

Chapter One

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end. HENRY DAVID THOREAU, 1854

[Television] is an art which shines like a torch of hope in a troubled world. DAVID SARNOFF, 1939

We can reason out to a certain extent what the men and women of tomorrow will be free to do, but we cannot guess what they will decide to do. H. G. WELLS, 1939

"We are going to have television in a real big way the moment peace is declared," wrote inventor Allen B. Du Mont in early 1945. What emerged from the laboratory and eventually claimed a preeminent place in American lives was not, however, the ideal predicted by scientists and engineers like Du Mont. Television evolved into more of an "improved means to an unimproved end" than a dynamic tool for civic education. That outcome—its trajectory determined primarily by economic forces—had major consequences for how the medium would present, assimilate, and transform popular science in the United States.

Imagined television had enlivened novels and Hollywood movies throughout the early twentieth century, validated by news reports about the inventions of C. Francis Jenkins and Philo T. Farnsworth. Once the Federal Radio Commission authorized experimental broadcasts, Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and other companies arranged to promote consumer television at the 1939 New York World's Fair. As the fair designers incorporated the technology into art and exhibits about the "World of Tomorrow," they visualized television's emerging role within American culture as a window on that and other worlds.

During the NBC telecast of the fair's opening ceremonies, cameras panned slowly across the iconic Trylon and Perisphere, and showed the crowds and parade. At the time, only a few hundred receivers were operating in the New York City area; a thousand people, at most, watched President Franklin D. Roosevelt and other dignitaries via television. Within a few weeks, though, RCA was regularly broadcasting from its exhibition hall—jugglers, visitor interviews, historical reenactments, Fred Waring's orchestra, Walt Disney cartoons, beauty contests, and "actualities" (live broadcasts of events as they were occurring), all the content that would later become modern television's bread and butter. Broadcasters tried out production techniques; engineers calibrated lighting and sound standards; producers learned how to beguile viewers; and directors discovered that, without close-ups, events could appear "stripped of action and interest"—"Every ounce of interest and variety that can be packed into the frame is necessary to attract and hold the attention of an unseen audience."

Science's latest "brainchild," newspapers explained, could create magic from a distance: "You press a button, turn a dial, and watch a drama being acted miles away.... You are there; the illusion is complete." By exploiting that illusion, television rewrote the relationship between audiences and what they saw. The technology enabled and encouraged viewing from afar: "The camera with the telephoto lenses will poke closer than [World's Fair] visitors can hope to push, and ... television, with its reputation for intimacy, will reveal what advantages, if any, are promised for those nongregarious souls who sit comfortably at home looking through space with a length of antenna wire as a new sort of telescope."

Although national broadcasting and the manufacturing of sets were suspended during World War II, engineering research and business planning continued. Because early television sets emitted an unappealing greenish glow, engineers developed a rounded cathode-ray tube with a clearer, black-and-white image viewable from wider angles. CBS, NBC, and DuMont Laboratories began preparing for intercity connection via cable, and for remote telecasts of proven audience winners like football games and wrestling matches. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the industry resolved questions about engineering standards, broadcasting limitations, and spectrum assignments.

The networks' plans copied radio's model for success: the schedule would be centered on entertainment. News, information, inspiration, and education would be interspersed among comedy, drama, sports, and anything else likely to sustain a viewer's attention to commercial advertisements. Television would offer "the complete form of radio entertainment," combining "sight and sound," news "embellished" with pictures, merchandise demonstrated, and public figures on view. For those who dreamed of a medium dedicated to higher social purposes like informing citizens about science, television's ties to radio ("its lineal predecessor") hindered attempts to reach such goals. The same business interests that had shaped radio would own the television stations and networks; the federal regulations devised for radio during the 1920s and 1930s would be adapted to the new medium; and because radio income in 1945 alone topped $300,000,000, broadcasters had deep pockets and well-established business relationships with advertisers who were eager to buy television time.

Jack Gould, one of the first newspaper journalists to review television, observed in 1946 that little critical thinking was being applied to how this technology would be used for the public good. In contrast to the energetic political debate concerning control and application of atomic energy, no similar public discussions involved the future of television. Instead, television's "idealistic potential" was being confused with its "practical probability," and the "bulk of thinking ... [was] preoccupied with the marvel of sending pictures through the air and not with what kind of pictures would be sent." The networks, rather than public officials or citizens, were determining the direction this powerful technology would take. Because broadcasters had been convinced that more listeners would twist a radio dial to be entertained than to be educated or enlightened, they made identical assumptions about how television viewers would behave. And because television production was far more expensive than radio, opting for something other than entertainment contradicted both accepted wisdom and prudent business practice.

DANCING ILLUSIONS OF SCIENCE

When historians of technology write about the "Automobile Age," they refer not just to automotive engineering, assembly-line production, stoplights, and the Interstate Highway System but also to how automobiles affected society, culture, land-use patterns, and many other aspects of modern life. Historians of science likewise trace the "Atomic Age" through cultural and political change as well as increasing megatonnage and missile range. Within a decade after the World's Fair, Americans were experiencing the "Television Era." Television was shaping American culture and being shaped by it, ironically becoming simultaneously a "global village" (whenever tens of millions of people watched the same telecast) and a "vast wasteland" (whenever millions of viewers found nothing satisfying and switched channels). Television invited royalty and rioters, presidents and poets, to appear in front of the cameras, selectively revealing the backsides and backstreets, bloopers and banality. Television combined sight and sound, forced spontaneity to follow a script, and became the ultimate agent of illusion. Television gave viewers laughter, suspense, vicarious adventure, and useful information, interspersed with commercials. Via remote broadcasts from street corners, legislatures, state funerals, and eventually outer space, television brought the parade of life into view, all the while giving each viewer, even if she were sitting alone in her living room, a sense of shared context with others in the television audience. In 1945, the word television connoted a technology or perhaps a new piece of furniture; within a decade, the term encompassed context, culture, industry, content, experience, and validation of importance ("Have you been on television?").

For science, the visualization of researchers and their laboratories at first seemed a promising possibility. A number of scientists experimented with using television to lecture or teach, and the dynamic accomplishments of fields like physics, biology, astronomy, and chemistry attracted producers and dramatists in search of inspiration and content. Very quickly, universities, scientific associations, and other nonprofit organizations like the Smithsonian Institution began facing important choices: should they stick with traditional means for public outreach (such as print or public lectures), invest in producing ephemeral content for educational television channels where only a few knowledge seekers might turn, or cooperate with commercial broadcasters? Given that the second option required substantial financial and institutional resources, many organizations contemplated the third. Television executives, though, demanded concessions and claimed that the type of programming acceptable to scientists (such as a roundtable discussion among brilliant physicists) would not draw sufficient viewers to compete against comedies and game shows.

Despite such tensions (or possibly because of them), American television arranged throughout its first half century a varied but paradoxical banquet of factual and fictional images and information related to science. Mr. Wizard performed magical experiments with milk bottles, and Dr. Frank Baxter bantered with a sneering Mr. Sun. Television took everyone to the Moon and back. Carl Sagan journeyed through the Cosmos; Marlin Perkins and Jane Goodall traveled to the jungle; NOVA offered weekly tastes and tidbits of science mixed with engineering. Star Trek exploited fantastic scientific devices to peer into the future, just as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation later used DNA analysis to solve past crimes. Electrons and embryos, blood testing and blasting caps, chimpanzees and chemistry, fictional Frankensteins and charismatic Nobel laureates—television used them all to offer windows onto the world of science and beyond. The multibillion-dollar television industry transmuted science into entertainment, incorporated it into drama, dramatized science-related events, and muscled educational programs toward the edges of the daily schedule.

The science that eventually appeared on television resulted from contentious negotiations among scientific experts, institutional administrators, television executives and directors, and the foundations and corporations willing to underwrite production, with the television audience weighing in via remote control. Viewers gravitated toward science programs that were entertaining as well as relevant, preferring relevance within fictional entertainment and entertaining approaches to educational subjects. Television eventually established a level of expectation among viewers for which aspects of science really mattered. By the 1930s, radio had begun to privilege scientists over science, personalities over facts. Television slowly squeezed theories, processes, explanations, and conclusions into sound bites and accentuated the social problems, moral dilemmas, ethical challenges, and controversies related to science. The contrast between The Johns Hopkins Science Review in 1948 and NOVA in 1988 transcended technical innovations such as the shift from black-and-white to color transmission or the use of multiple cameras and special effects. Over those forty years, the focus of American television's science shifted toward politics and morality, toward the illusory and visually dynamic, toward social context and scientific celebrities. Fortunately, dozens of committed popularizers also persisted throughout the years, hosting, writing, and producing creative programs that were outstanding examples of how to bring technical content into the studio and make it sing.

The dance of popularization joins two partners, the scientific expert and the interpreter, who perform for audiences who either watch in fascination or change the channel. For centuries, lecture halls and print (magazines, newspapers, books) had offered comfortable venues allowing willing scientists to engage the public with minimal economic investment. The advent of mass broadcasting created bustling electronic marketplaces of the air, where the emphasis on profitability favored sophisticated, expensive entertainment over low-key education. It would be a mistake, as Robert T. Bower cautioned many years ago, to explain the impact of television in terms of the technology alone, without regard for adjacent influences, because social, economic, and historical forces (including those set in motion by the advances of science) affected public reception of the images displayed on the screen. Nevertheless, in the television era, by reconstructing science's own messages, the medium assembled a new creation suitable to the small screen—science at a distance, science for the millions, science transformed into an entertaining illusion.

Chapter Two

Play it honestly and factually and give the viewer credit for intelligence. LYNN POOLE, 1952

During World War II, the General Electric Company television station in Schenectady, New York, telecast a mix of experimental content to the few hundred receivers in the area. The didactic nature of the occasional science shows—such as describing the uses of synthetic materials—undoubtedly accounted for the fact that, between 1939 and 1944, "light opera music" drew twice as many viewers as science. The first regular science-related network series was not much more scintillating. Serving through Science, sponsored by U.S. Rubber Company on the DuMont Network from June 1946 to May 1947, featured a half hour of Encyclopaedia Britannica films and moderated discussions.

The creative force behind Serving through Science, broadcasting executive Miller McClintock, had begun his career not as a scientist but as a student of literature and public policy. After finishing a Ph.D. at Harvard in 1924, McClintock helped establish a bureau of street traffic research to tackle Boston's notoriously hazardous roads. An advocate of such innovations as one-way streets and elevated expressways, he is credited with convincing local Chicago officials to ban horse-drawn vehicles from city streets in 1926. As he worked on various public safety issues, McClintock became intrigued with the role that advertising plays in civic education. From 1933 to 1942, he worked for the Advertising Research Foundation and the Advertising Council Inc. and then, between 1943 and 1944, served as president of the Mutual Broadcasting Company. By the time McClintock hosted Serving through Science, he was a board member and consultant to Encyclopaedia Britannica Films, and was attempting to persuade the New York Film Council that television offered marketing opportunities for educational films. The first science series on television thus sprang from a confluence of circumstances that would mark similar successes for the next half century: a clever entrepreneur with the ability to draw from expert knowledge in a wide range of fields, in and out of science; awareness of advertising and public relations techniques; and the coordination of content with corporate sponsors or underwriters.

Serving through Science's relatively unsophisticated content probably seemed novel enough to the 100,000 or so people who then owned sets. In 1947, watching television represented an "exclusive hobby"—or something to experience with others in a New York bar. Within a year, the number of receivers in homes doubled; manufacturers began shipping thousands more to showrooms. Dozens of stations began operation throughout the country, and coast-to-coast broadcasting seemed possible. In major urban areas, programs could attract around 750,000 viewers, with a few special telecasts, like baseball's World Series, drawing a million or more. Because sets were still relatively rare, neighbors often watched with those who had already made the consumer leap. Americans, Philip Wylie observed, were spending "half [their] time swooning in the gloom and the rest sweating to pay installments on the sponsored merchandise." This dynamic growth created markets for better content as stations recognized that novelty (not reruns) drew the masses of viewers needed to sell advertising time. The sponsors themselves, though, were no more concerned with the public good or with why people enjoyed their programs than with "why people drive on the highway beside which [the same company] erects billboards." If a chemistry demonstration interested viewers, great. If something else interested more people, then all the better.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Science on American Television by MARCEL CHOTKOWSKI LAFOLLETTE Copyright © 2013 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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