The Dawn of Tape: Transmission Device as Preservation Medium

Introduction

In late April 1956, an anonymous columnist in the trade journal Television Digest made a plea especially resonant today. Noting the ephemeral nature of the medium he covered, the writer asked, "Why must a TV masterpiece die after a single performance?" He noted with approval a suggestion by a Philadelphia TV critic to create a "TV Hall of Fame," an institution that "would be along the lines of N.Y. Museum of Modern Art's collec-tion of historic movies—with the best TV programs preserved on electronic tape, if possible."¹

The author was writing at a particularly fortuitous moment. Just two weeks earlier, the Ampex Corporation had demonstrated the first practical video tape recording system—the two-inch reel-to-reel format known popularly as "quad" tape—at the National Association of Broadcasters show in Chicago. The new technology promised high-quality recordings of live broadcasts, with fidelity far surpassing that of kinescopes—film recordings made of a broadcast directly from a television screen.

Needless to say, that columnist's proposal did not come to fruition. As early as the first quarter of 1957, the networks were taping dozens of hours of material every week. Yet very few of those early tapes survive—nearly none from the first two years of tape's use. The reasons for this scarcity lie in the way broadcasters perceived videotape's purpose—perceptions that are directly at odds with those of archivists today.

The archivist's impulse, of course, is to retain—to keep the masterpieces for posterity and, in an ideal world, to keep everything. For this purpose, videotape would seem to be an ideal medium. Broadcasters of the 1950s, faced with the challenge of filling hour upon hour of airtime every day, thought of tape's virtues very differently. An examination of contemporary literature shows that, at the time of its introduction, videotape was considered within the industry to be not a permanent storage medium but a transmission medium—the last step in the process of bringing a program from a soundstage to the American living room. If it was not possible for a program to be beamed live, directly, via coaxial cable or radio relay, from broadcaster to home receiver, videotape could be used as the final link in the chain—carriers of the television signal to homes that were beyond the reach of the direct network or in distant time zones. This perception was an outgrowth of the ways in which tape's predecessor, the kinescope recording, was used—and is critical to an understanding of the realities of television's surviving legacy, rather than the idealism of what might have been.

Life before Tape

Attempts to record television programs are as old as television itself. British TV pioneer John Logie Baird developed a system he called "Phonovision" in the very late 1920s. It recorded thirty-line mechanical TV images on phonograph records.² Recording electronic television programming on film was tried in America in the late 1930s, but was plagued by distortion resulting from the different frame rates of television and film (twenty-four versus thirty frames per second.)³ An early attempt involved modifying a camera to run at fifteen frames per second, which allowed for the recording of every other frame of video—but the resulting film could not be viewed using a standard projector, and it could not be rebroadcast due to the flicker caused by the missing alternate frames.

An improved video-to-film process was introduced by DuMont Laboratories in 1947. The DuMont camera, which was put into commercial production by Kodak, used 16mm stock because of its lower cost and because fire laws at the time often restricted use of 35mm film to fireproof rooms, regardless of whether nitrate or safety stock was employed. DuMont engineers overcame the frame-rate differential by synchronizing the film camera so that it photographed twenty-four out...