For one hundred weeks that started in October, 2025 this podcast is going to recall the “Top 100 Milestones in the First 100 Years of Television and Video.”  The Countdown is pegged to culminate on September 7, 2027 – the 100th anniversary of the day television was invented. 

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When CBS broadcast the premiere of The Goldbergs On February 7, 1949, one of the comedy's's most enduring formats found its way to television 

The Goldbergs was created by Gertrude Berg, who had cut her teeth on the Borsch Belt stages in the Catskills in the 1920s.  Although she had no background in broadcasting, NBC began airing a radio series based on her formative years in the immigrant communities of New York's East Harlem in 1929.  By 1931 the program was a hit from coast to coast. 

When NBC was reluctant to bring her concept to television she joined forces with CBS.  

The Goldbergs was the first program on television centered on a Jewish-American family.  Gertrude Berg not only starred as Molly, she also wrote and produced every episode, becoming a trailblazing role model for generations of women to come. 

With The Goldbergs, Gertrude Berg created the family-based situation comedy or "sitcom."  She helped define the format that shows like I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, and All in the Family would refine and expand in the decades that followed. 

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Visit: https://100YearsTV.com 

Read: The Boy Who Invented Television: https://amz.run/6ag1

For one hundred weeks that started in October, 2025 this podcast is going to recall the “Top 100 Milestones in the First 100 Years of Television and Video.”  The Countdown is pegged to culminate on September 7, 2027 – the 100th anniversary of the day television was invented. 

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There are three reasons why the name of Philo T. Farnsworth is not more familiar, despite his having invented what is arguably the most transformative technology of the 20th Century, if not the entire millennium. 

He was not inclined to dwell on his own past achievements, preferring instead to ponder what he could come up with next;  There were plenty of pretenders to the crown, not the least among them RCA, David Sarnoff and Vladimir Zworykin in the U.S and John Logie Baird in the U.K. 

But mostly, he was not survived by a company that could write the history. 

Countdown #79 looks at the history of Farnsworth Television and Radio - the enterprise that  should have preserved his legacy.  

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Visit: https://100YearsTV.com 

Read: The Boy Who Invented Television: https://amz.run/6ag1

For one hundred weeks that started in October, 2025 this podcast is going to recall the “Top 100 Milestones in the First 100 Years of Television and Video.”  The Countdown is pegged to culminate on September 7, 2027 – the 100th anniversary of the day television was invented. 

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Irna Phillips was the youngest of ten children born into a large Jewish family in Chicago in 1901.  Her girlhood dreams of becoming an actress were dashed when acting schools rejected her.  Irna may have had a "face for radio," but she had a creative mind suitable for any medium she cared to work in.  

In 1930, Irna was freelancing at Chicago radio station WGN⁠ when she drew on her own family experience to create Painted Dreams, a 15-minute radio drama featuring an Irish-American widow and her multigenerational household.  

When WGN claimed all the rights to her creation, Irna retooled it for Chicago's NBC affiliate as Today's Children, which started airing in January 1937.  The program found a broad audience among homemakers. When household products manufacturer Proctor and Gamble signed on as the principle sponsor, daily serials aimed at a largely female audience became known as "soap operas." 

When NBC started looking for daytime programming for television, the network gave Phillips the green light on an entirely new program.  These Are My Children began airing daily, live, 15-minute episodes from NBC's flagship Chicago TV station WNBQ at 5PM EST on January 31, 1949. 

Though short-lived, These Are My Children was the first daytime serial created specifically for television,  and the die was cast for one of the medium's most enduring formats.

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Visit: https://100YearsTV.com 

Read: The Boy Who Invented Television: https://amz.run/6ag1

For one hundred weeks that started in October, 2025 this podcast is going to recall the “Top 100 Milestones in the First 100 Years of Television and Video.”  The Countdown is pegged to culminate on September 7, 2027 – the 100th anniversary of the day television was invented. 

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Though he is largely forgotten in the public imagination, it is genuinely intriguing how the legacy of Philo T. Farnsworth drifts in and out of the history of television.  Reminders of his inventions can often be found  lingering on the periphery of the industry if you know where to look. . 

Television's annual Emmy Awards is a good example.

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Visit: https://100YearsTV.com 

Read: The Boy Who Invented Television: https://amz.run/6ag1

For one hundred weeks that started in October, 2025 this podcast is going to recall the “Top 100 Milestones in the First 100 Years of Television and Video.”  The Countdown is pegged to culminate on September 7, 2027 – the 100th anniversary of the day television was invented.

____________

In 1904, New York Times publisher Adolph Ochs moved the newspaper's headquarters into the newly constructed Times Tower at the intersection of Broadway, Seventh Avenue and 42nd Street in Manhattan, which the city renamed "Times Square." 

To celebrate the move the Times sponsored a lavish New Year's celebration.  Some 200,000 New Yorkers packed the square and surrounding streets for music and festivities that were topped off with a brilliant fireworks display.  

When the city banned fireworks in 1907, Ochs commissioned a 700-pound wood-and-iron ball, festooned with one hundred 25-watt light bulbs. At precisely 11:59 PM on December 31, 1907, workers  started to lower the ball from the top of a pole. At midnight the ball went dark and another large electrical sign reading “1908” lit up above Times Square.

In the 1920s and ’30s, Times Square became synonymous with New Year’s Eve. Starting in 1948, the tradition found its way to television. 

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Visit: https://100YearsTV.com 

Read: The Boy Who Invented Television: https://amz.run/6ag1

For one hundred weeks that started in October, 2025 this podcast is going to recall the “Top 100 Milestones in the First 100 Years of Television and Video.”  The Countdown is pegged to culminate on September 7, 2027 – the 100th anniversary of the day television was invented. 

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Before Survivor, before The Real World, before all The Real Housewives and The Celebrity Apprentice, there was Allen Funt. 

Allen Funt's concept for a television show was deceptively simple: what would people do if they didn’t know they were being watched by a hidden camera?

From that simple premise On August 10, 1948, Allen Funt brought an entirely new kind of program to the ABC-TV network. Candid Camera was unscripted, unrehearsed, and genuinely real.  Decades later, the genre Funt pioneered would morph into the "everybody knows there are cameras" format now known as "reality" TV. 

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Visit: https://100YearsTV.com 

Read: The Boy Who Invented Television: https://amz.run/6ag1

When he was only 12 years old, an aspiring vaudeville performer named Mendel Berlinger decided he needed a more ethnically palatable stage name.  In 1920, he changed his name to Milton Berle and continued to refine his comic persona on radio. 

Milton Berle was a fairly well known when NBC started migrating much of its radio programming to television.  In the summer of 1948, when Texaco Star Theater began a trial run on television, audience response to Berle was so overwhelming the network made him the permanent emcee when the program started its regular run that fall. 

Berle’s elastic face, flamboyant costumes, and rapid-fire comedy were perfectly suited to the new medium. Television needed a breakout star, and it wasn't long before Milton Berle started calling himself "Mr. Television." 

Visit: https://100YearsTV.com 

Read: The Boy Who Invented Television: https://amz.run/6ag1

For one hundred weeks that started in October, 2025 this podcast is going to recall the “Top 100 Milestones in the First 100 Years of Television and Video.”  The Countdown is pegged to culminate on September 7, 2027 – the 100th anniversary of the day television was invented. 

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In 1947 Ed and Grace Parsons, the owners of a radio station in Astoria, Oregon, attended the convention of the National Association of Broadcasters in Chicago.  

It was Grace who saw her first television set there, and persuaded Ed to purchase one and bring it home to Astoria. 

The only problem was: Astoria is 125 miles from stations in either Seattle or Portland, that were beginning to broadcast TV. 

The solution? Put an antenna on the highest roof in town and distribute the signal via coaxial cable. 

Visit: https://100YearsTV.com 

Read: The Boy Who Invented Television: https://amz.run/6ag1

For one hundred weeks that started in October, 2025 this podcast is going to recall the “Top 100 Milestones in the First 100 Years of Television and Video.”  The Countdown is pegged to culminate on September 7, 2027 – the 100th anniversary of the day television was invented. 

In this week's episode, we meet Martha Rountree, the first woman to host a news and public affairs program on television and the creator of Meet The Press – the longest running program in broadcast history.

Visit: https://100YearsTV.com 

Read: The Boy Who Invented Television: https://amz.run/6ag1

For one hundred weeks that started in October, 2025 this podcast is going to recall the “Top 100 Milestones in the First 100 Years of Television and Video.”  The Countdown is pegged to culminate on September 7, 2027 – the 100th anniversary of the day television was invented. 

On December 27, 1947 a genial thirty-year-old man with wavy dark hair and a broad smile, wearing a fringed cowboy shirt and a bolo tie, looked into a television camera at WNBC Studio 3A in Rockefeller Center and called out,

"Say kids, what time is it?" 

Across the stage, about 40 children between the ages of 4 and 10 responded enthusiastically...

"It's Howdy Doody Time!" 

Children's programming had arrived on television. 

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Visit: 100 Years of Television 

Read: The Boy Who Invented Television