On March 18th, Ted Turner, the founder of Cable News Network and Turner Network Television, spoke to the New Yorker writer Ken Auletta at a forum sponsored by the Newhouse School at Syracuse University.
Here’s a transcript of their conversation.
The Cable Center has historical data and interviews with pioneers like Ed Parsons.
| Ed invents cable, invites neighbors over |
 Cable television has come a long way since Ed Parsons invented it on Thanksgiving Day, 1948. That’s when he gathered the family around a TV set in Astoria, Oregon and watched a Seattle broadcast using an antenna amplifier of his own design. It worked! Others wanted it too, so he began wiring people up and selling TV sets from his radio shop. The FCC, surprised that television could travel so far, issued a “UHF freeze” to avoid “interference” in other communities. A plaque on the Astoria Column commemorates his achievement. Parson’s wrapped up his career installing satellite terminals for the Alaska telecommunications system. |
Satellite pioneer Roy Bliss may have been the original “War Flyer”:
“Billings, Montana, came on the air–one station–and Worland, the town where we were down in the Bighorn Basin in Wyoming, was about 125 airline miles from Billings, 165 miles by road. And so a friend of mine with some test equipment and a dipole antenna took off in my Cessna airplane to look for the Billings signal even though it was that far away and there were mountains in between. I had to climb up to 8,000 feet before we could even get a weak signal.So we more or less gave it up. But he left the equipment on. They were drilling an oil well–a wildcat–west of town so I said, “Well, we’ll just go down by that oil well.” So we went down and we were buzzing along this ridge just about 25 feet off the ground and all at once he said, “I’ve got a signal.” (Laughter)
Brian Lamb explains how the satellite monopoly nearly killed cable television.
“…Tom Whitehead is almost single-handedly responsible, as an individual, for reversing the Federal Communications Commission policy that they were headed toward, of having a single entity [AT&T] control the satellite system. It became an open skies policy, and that’s why you have the flowering of all kinds of communications today…”
In 1972, Chuck Dolan and Gerry Levin of Sterling Manhattan Cable launched the nations first pay-TV-network with “The Thrilla from Manilla” on Home Box Office over two cable systems.
Bill Bresnan built a motorized camera to pan across a thermometer and other instruments for the first weather channel and trained a camera on a Teletype machine for the first all-news channel. A news junkie, Bresnan later helped Brian Lamb and Ted Turner get C-SPAN and CNN, respectively, off the ground.
Ted Turner beamed up WTCG on RCA’s Satcom F1 satellite on December, 1978. He launched Cable News Network on June 1st 1980 amid much snickering.
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