August 6, 1926 is the day the silent film era ended; that’s when the Warner Bros. movie Don Juan opened, using the new Vitaphone sound system. People had been used to getting their sound from radios and their visuals from movies, but those things were starting to merge.
Television was first demonstrated around the same time, and radio stations would occasionally broadcast a “television show” — but at the time television was a mechanical system using a spinning disk and a neon light. If you wanted to watch one of the broadcasts you pretty much had to build your own receiver. Even then it wasn’t much to look at; you had to look down a dark cylinder at a screen just an inch and a half high. Although there was one station in New York that tried broadcasting 28 hours of programming per week between 1931 and 1933, mechanical TV just wasn’t good enough to catch on.
DuMont Laboratories hoped that was going to change in 1938. Their new electronic television sets went on sale in advance of NBC starting to offer programming from their New York flagship station. DuMont was a small company, and at the time if you wanted an electronic TV receiver, they were the only source. Allen DuMont had founded the company with $1000 in his basement, and he was betting everything on TV getting popular.
At first, it didn’t look like TV was going to be very successful. Even though DuMont Labs had figured out how to make the cathode ray tubes last more than 24 hours (they’d gotten it up to 100 whole hours before the things died!), the sets were still expensive, and they weren’t selling very well.
The problem, DuMont decided, was the content. Even if you lived in New York City, there were only a couple of stations; one from NBC and one from CBS. If only, thought DuMont, there could be more choice.
Before long there was; the DuMont Television Network started broadcasting a third alternative to NBC and CBS television shows. It looked like they were going to make it big, too; Paramount bought a 40% stake in the network and made all of their production expertise available. The idea was that the Paramount stars, along with the Broadway stars the DuMont network signed up, would reduce the advantage NBC and CBS had with their radio stars and years’ worth of radio audience loyalty.
DuMont broadcast the first TV situation comedy (Mary Kay and Johnny), the first soap opera (Faraway Hill), the first TV game show (Cash and Carry), and a variety show (Cavalcade of Stars) hosted by Jackie Gleason. That show was where Gleason originated the characters from his later mega-success, The Honeymooners.
So why, you ask, doesn’t anybody talk about the DuMont Television Network? It’s because DuMont never managed to get enough stations to compete in all the media markets in the country, went bankrupt, and on August 6, 1956 aired their last broadcast. They’d recorded a huge number of their shows on “kinescope,” though. That was a method of recording television onto film before videotape, which only became available the same year DuMont went under. All the films (there were more than 20,000) were stored in a New York warehouse, but at some point in the early 1970s whoever it was that owned them realized that they represented tons of black-and-white 35mm film, and that stuff used silver, which was valuable. Nobody thought old TV shows were worth anything, so most of the archive was destroyed to recover the silver.
There was enough film left over to fill three trailer trucks, and since the EPA didn’t yet exist, they just dumped those into the East River. Other than the personal copies owned by the stars and hosts, none of the DuMont Network shows survived. So they never wound up on the rerun circuit (even though that would have eventually brought in a lot more cash than reclaiming the silver). So that’s why nobody remembers the DuMont Television Network.
It’s too bad, because they laid the groundwork for stars like Lucille Ball (whose birthday is today), and created a lot of the popular culture that became the subject of artists like Andy Warhol (whose birthday is also today). As for DuMont Laboratories, that organization is gone too, but their technology isn’t. Some of it’s still in modern computers — and Robert Noyce was a DuMont engineer before founding Intel. Some of their innovations even made it into the space program. So when you remember that today’s the anniversary of the Mars landingof the Curiosity Rover, remember to nod to DuMont.
If you’re interested in all that DuMont programming, it’s sometimes possible to restore films that have been underwater for a long time. Three truckloads of DuMont kinescopes are still somewhere at the bottom of the East River, just waiting for somebody to find them.
Of course, you’d have to dive into the East River to do it, so maybe it’s better to just make do with existing content. You know, like the stuff on the worldwide web — that thing that debuted to the public on August 6, 1991.
