Today most houses are filled with
televisions and devices that have access to all sorts of platforms that produce
and stream a mind-numbing amount of content, including the content you're
watching today on YouTube. Most that content today is produced digitally and
it comes into our house through cables or through the internet, but for a long
time most television was broadcast via an antenna and
picked up via the airwaves. Inventors like Philo T Farnsworth and Vladimir Zworykin had developed the technology to be able to do that in the 1920s , but
television didn't become popular, wasn't common in households, until after the
Second World War. But that doesn't mean that nothing happened in between. The big
networks that we recognize today ABC, NBC and CBS all formed as radio networks
during that period. But one of the lesser-known stories of early broadcast
television started in 1926 when a Cadillac dealer bought his first radio
station. He had a license to broadcast television in 1931- nearly a decade ahead
of the big three. It's history that deserves to be remembered. Don Lee was
born in Michigan and made his money by acquiring the exclusive distribution
rights for Cadillac cars in California. He used his large personal fortune to
purchase the radio station KFRC in San Francisco in 1926, and a year later KHJ
in Los Angeles. Lee expanded his radio network across the coast acquiring
stations in Oregon and Washington. A few years later the Columbia Broadcasting
System, or CBS, extended facilities to the coast and an extended an invitation to
Lee's network to broadcast Columbia programming. By 1931 Lee had turned KHJ
into the broadcasting hub for his first television station, which broadcast under
the call sign W6XS and a sister station W6XAO. He wasn't the very
first to start producing television content in America, but the big three
didn't start broadcasting television until the eve of the Second World War. He
appointed a young engineer named Harry Lubcke to run his experimental station
and Lubcke became the director of television for the Don Lee Broadcasting
System. One of the problems with the television broadcasting network in 1931
was that no one owned a television. It was something of a catch-22 -no one would buy a television unless there was something to watch on them, but it was
difficult for any with the produced content when there wasn't anyone to
watch. To mitigate this issue Lubcke distributed plans to amateur tinkerers
in L.A. for construction of mechanical receiving sets. In 1939 it was estimated
that something like a hundred people built televisions using Lubcke's plans.
The station became one of the first to offer regularly scheduled programming on
the west coast when they started broadcasting one hour every day except
Sundays. The content was mostly quote "filmed action" and close-ups of movie
stars and was broadcast between six and seven in the evening. And they were one
of very few stations to continue broadcasting throughout the war. It's
largely due to Harry Lubcke that the early network was able to transcend from
just being an early television network to one that made a mark in television
history. Though he would die almost completely unknown, Lubcke was a talented engineer and pioneered many television innovations. Like many inventors of the
time Lubcke did his own tinkering with the television set. In 1929 he was
working with Farnsworth in San Francisco to produce an all-electronic scanning
generator system which was probably one of the more important items in the
unprecedented settlement between Farnsworth and RCA in September 1939. RCA purchased a number of Lubcke's patents regarding synchronization in 1938. Lubcke
continued to do work on synchronization, electronic television, and the self
synchronized cathode ray tube. Though many of these patents have become
forgotten the value of his self-synchronizing cathode ray tube was
likely the most important. In 1932 Lubcke demonstrated television reception on
an airplane, largely thanks to his advances in synchronization. According to
the Spokane Daily Chronicle on May 23rd 1932, Lubcke planned to transmit a picture to an airplane cruising about five miles away at an altitude of approximately six
thousand feet. The test successfully transmitted a picture of a girl onto the
plane from W6XAO. His work led Don Lee to make Lubcke the face of West Coast
television and of W6XAO. W6XAO was one of just six experimental TV
stations that existed by 1939. In 1933, it broadcast possibly the earliest
television news coverage when they telecast news footage of a Long Beach
earthquake to L.A. only a few hours after the event.
The station managed to add another first on the very same day when it became the
first to broadcast a motion picture, "The Crooked Circle," which it broadcast on
March 10th 1933. It's believed that the movie was seen by perhaps five L.A. area
television receivers. The L.A. Times Sunday Magazine said in 1936 said W6XAO was
"The only station that releases regular television broadcasts and one of four
centers in the US where serious scientific work on television was being
done." But there were big changes on the horizon in 1934 Don Lee passed away from
a heart attack and left his Cadillac business in his broadcasting system to
his son Thomas Lee. The quality of the product that they were producing was
increasing over the period. For analog television, the quality of the resolution
that is, how good your picture is, depends upon the number of lines that
are broadcast. And in 1936 they moved from broadcasting in 80 lines to 300,
lines or a great improvement in the picture resolution. And that was up again
to 441 lines in 1938 and 30 frames per second, which was on par with the RCA
system. By the outset of the war they were broadcasting 525 lines. Around 1940
Lee moved the station from 7th and Bixel in L.A. to a new location behind the
famous Hollywood sign on top of the hill that is now called Mount Lee. Lubcke
called it the first structure in the world erected exclusively for
telecasting. In 1938 W6XAO broadcast the first American television soap opera when
it began airing "Vine Street," a 15-minute serial aired twice a week about the
difficulties of making it big in Tinseltown. By the next year four of six
nights a week were aired with live talent produced in-house. On January 1st
1940 the station became the first on the West Coast to transmit a remote
broadcast when they broadcast the Tournament of Roses Parade. In 1940 Lubcke said that the Lee's station was focusing on developing variety shows and that the
longest play they had run so far was a 40-minute presentation of Hamlet. By 1940
several different kinds of television were on sale commercially from companies
like GE and RCA and there were hundreds of sets in LA to watch the ten and a
half hours a week the station broadcast. Most of the time was occupied by films,
but they also covered newsreels and their own
programming. The broadcast could be picked up at least 22 miles away in Long Beach,
where one watcher said he had as many as 30 visitors in one evening to watch. In
1941 W6XAO operated 590 hours and broadcasts 67 remote programs. But
despite all their innovative television firsts it wouldn't be a surprise if
you've never heard of the Don Lee Broadcasting Network, because while they
were busy being pioneers of early television they were also setting the
stage for their own decline. The network wanted to remain an independent network
at the time when the larger networks were growing. The network was mostly made up of radio stations across California and Portland, Seattle, Tacoma, and Spokane. The network's relationship with Columbia fell apart shortly after Don Lee's
death. In 1934 friction had been growing between the networks as CBS began
demanding more control over its affiliates, especially over programming.
In 1936 CBS bought KNX in LA and another in San Francisco to replace the need for
the Lee Network. Fortunately for Tommy Lee, at the same time that CBS was
ridding itself of the Lee network the Mutual Broadcasting System was looking
to expand to the west coast. The switch was scheduled for December 29th, 1936 the same day that the CBS contract ended. Even under the new contract the Lee
network maintained a peculiar independence. Technically speaking
Mitchell had only a single affiliate west of the Rockies- the Don Lee network
itself. Mutual had no relationship with the individual stations and provided the
network with Mutual programs that could then be passed on. But in 1938 only 16 to
20 percent of the commercial programs on the radio stations originated with
Mutual. Most of them were still produced by the Lee's themselves. What the Lees
really wanted was to have an independent regional network that could leverage the
resources of a national network. And that worked for the Mutual Broadcasting
System, which had a vision of national reach but local flavor. But, unfortunately
that couldn't last. After the end of the war the consolidation of stations and
the growth of the big three would doom a small regional network. Tommy Lee had
inherited a nine million dollar fortune from his father consisting of the
network and his father's car dealerships. He piloted his own plane. He sponsored
race cars at Indianapolis. In 1936 he had a personal hotrod designed which he raced
on empty lake beds in Southern California. Shortly
before World War two though he was in a serious accident when he was t-boned by
a truck at an intersection. He lived the rest of his life in considerable pain. In
1948 his mental health deteriorated and the courts declared him mentally
incompetent two years later. The 44 year-old had a driver take him to the
dentist in LA. He went up 12 floors and jumped from the building, leaving his
estate to an uncle. Don Lee's radio network and Mutual were sold in 1951 to
General Teleradio, the broadcasting arm of the General Tire Company. While
it maintained the Don Lee logo, the spirit of Independence and innovation ended.
After a long series of sales where the company lost its logo and its name, the
constituent parts were sold to Westinghouse in 1996. Westinghouse owned CBS and merged the radio stations with CBS radio. It took a long time getting
there, but eventually CBS would get control over the Lee Network after all.
In 1948 W6XAO stopped being an experimental station and became a fully
commercial station under the new call sign KTSL-TV with the "TSL" standing for
Thomas Lee. And even then Lubcke and the station continued to innovate. They build
a huge antenna and dish that was dubbed "The Mountain Shooter" in order to
broadcast the 1948 Tournament of Roses Parade from Pasadena to Los Angeles. They built the antenna to offset the effects of a 200-foot mountain range which
blocked the transmission, in conjunction with a nine foot diameter dish in
Pasadena. But like the radio stations the Lee
television station wouldn't survive Tommy's death. It was acquired by CBS on
January 1st 1951, and the call letters were changed to KNXT to match the local
CBS radio station KNX -the same station CBS had bought to replace Lee's radio
station in 1936. Today it exists as KCBS Los Angeles. CBS moved the station off of
Mount Lee. The transmitter that remains is now owned and operated by the city of
Los Angeles. Harry Lubcke died in 1991 almost
completely unknown and largely unrecognized for his technical
innovations and his part is a television pioneer. When he died it was not noted
prominently even in local newspapers, and it seems his technical writings and
journals were thrown out. His legacy didn't end with his work at the Lee
Network however. He was president of the Television Academy,
and is credited with coining the name "Emmy Award" when he suggested "Immy" I M M Y, a term for the image orthicon camera. He co-founded the Society of television
engineers in 1940, and his later years became a patent lawyer. But, for the one
time face of West Coast television broadcasting, few people remember his
technical innovations. Today Lubcke and the Lees are largely forgotten- they're
relegated to obscure trivia of early television history. Their their
independent streak, while laudable, just didn't have a place in the
broadcasting world after the Second World War. And this year cultural weight
and the omnipresence of the large networks and in large developers like
RCA simply overshadowed the technical contributions of a small experimental
station that never had more than a few thousand viewers in the L.A. area. But
their independent streak and their technical innovation was important.
They took a small experimental station and turned it into a station of early
television firsts. And Lubcke's contribution to things like tube
synchronization materially impacted the future of television. They also had that
great commitment to original programming, which was really ahead of its time and
presaged the time when families would gather together in the living room
for "Prime Time." The Golden Age of broadcast television simply would not
have been the same were it not for the independent streak of the Lee
Broadcasting Network. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the history guy- short
snippets have forgotten history between 10 and 15 minutes long. And if you did
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