I know it's been a while since I've posted a blog - and I'm sorry. I have several that I've written, just never completed. So this is the first in a series that I hope to post within the next few weeks.
The Blab Off
Back in the dark ages of television, and you needed an antenna on your roof to receive a TV signal. In the 1950’s, in Los Angeles there were five channels that most of sets in the greater Los Angeles basin were
able to receive – broadcasted from Mount Wilson. KCBS, KNBC, KABC (the own and operated of the networks) and two independents, KTLA, and KTTV.
KTTV and KTLA were the first stations to receive a license from the Federal Communications Agency to broadcast a television signal into the L.A. basin. I won’t bore you with the details, other than to say that obtaining a broadcasting license from the FCC for a radio (first regulated) and a television station was more restricted then, than it is now.
Reception in the Los Angeles greater area was one of the best in the nation, being able to transmit from far above the San Fernando valley and Los Angeles.
A well adjusted antenna was a status symbol of the mid modern suburb. A perfect signal was to receive channels 2 through 13 without channel 2 having a lot of snow because if you did you couldn’t watch “Gunsmoke”.
As I recall, we could receive all of them.
I remember as a child, getting our first television. I couldn’t have been more than five or six at the time. It’s implanted in my mind so clearly that even to this day I remember my father placing it a corner of the living room so it could be viewed from anywhere you sat.
At some point we even bought a plastic screen covering that was tinted a light orange at the top which faded to a green at the bottom so we could watch “color” TV. It lasted all of 2 weeks before it ended up in some drawer never to be seen again.
All TV stations were required by the FCC to produce a certain amount of programming locally. And they also had to devote a certain amount of time to local and national/international news (that had to be operated very much like a non-profit), children’s programming and cultural/arts. It didn’t matter if you were a “owned and operated by” (o and o) or an independent who bought programming from and o and o or some other source.
Oh, and any one entity could only own seven radio and/or TV stations in the country. This law was passed to create a diversity in opinion and to prevent any one broadcaster from being able to sway public opinion. Too bad that law isn’t in place today, thank you Ronald Regan and George W. Bush.
But getting back to when I was a kid and there were only five TV stations in Los Angeles.
Before there were remote controls for your television, you had to manually get up and turn the dial to find the station you wanted to watch. As there were only a few, you could subscribe to the TV Guide that sent out a weekly listing of shows (also notating which were repeats and which were not), or simply refer to the listing in the L.A. Mirror, Times, or Daily paper. In our case, we even had a local paper, the Downey Livewire.
But that said, you could easily map out your TV evening that generally began after dinner and only have to get up a few times to change the channel.
And just as today, commercials interrupted the programming with annoying national commercials and even more annoying local commercials of “Cal Worthington and his dog Spot”.
I’m sure I wasn’t the first to come up with this idea, but I did capitalize on it. The Blab Off. This was a simple switch that had a 10 foot cord. It interrupted the signal going to the speaker of the TV set. So from your chair you could turn off the sound on your TV without getting up and turning off the volume.
I went into the business of making, selling and installing these Blab Off’s” to all our friends and neighbors. As I recall for all of $.50, maybe it was a dollar. My allowance was only twenty-five cents, so I considered that a fair amount of money at the ripe old age of 10.
Slowly TV manufactures caught up to the idea that people didn’t like to get out of their chairs to change the channel or adjust the volume, and developed a remote box tethered to the TV by a thick cable. Revolutionary!
It was cumbersome, people tripped over the cable disabling the TV, and overall it was more trouble than it was worth. As early as 1957 Zenith invented a remote control affectionately called “the clicker” – a remote control about the size of a pack of cigarettes that used ultrasonic sound produced by clicking 3 tonal rods to change channels and control volume. It added another $100 to the price of a TV so it’s not surprising that the technology did not become affordable until the 1960’s.
Of course the technology of today’s remote controls uses infrared red to communicate a vast selection of command choices at your finger tips.
And we have become ever so dependent on personal remote technology, from the wireless signal to our computers to opening our garage doors, and much more. But still the one that seems indispensable is the TV/Cable remote control that allows us to silence commercials and change channels at will.
Last night I dropped the remote control. It didn’t work. What was I going to do? I thought, ok, I’ll use the cable box to change the channels. But it was black, and I couldn’t see what controls were what. Using a flash light I realized there was no mute button, so I couldn’t mute the commercials. I couldn’t program in what stations I wanted to watch and I was so close to the flat screen I couldn’t see what was on TV. Settling on a program I wanted to watch, I sat back in my chair enjoying it until the first commercial, when I wished I’d installed a “Blab Off”!
Ain’t technology great!
Back in the dark ages of television, and you needed an antenna on your roof to receive a TV signal. In the 1950’s, in Los Angeles there were five channels that most of sets in the greater Los Angeles basin were
able to receive – broadcasted from Mount Wilson. KCBS, KNBC, KABC (the own and operated of the networks) and two independents, KTLA, and KTTV.KTTV and KTLA were the first stations to receive a license from the Federal Communications Agency to broadcast a television signal into the L.A. basin. I won’t bore you with the details, other than to say that obtaining a broadcasting license from the FCC for a radio (first regulated) and a television station was more restricted then, than it is now.
Reception in the Los Angeles greater area was one of the best in the nation, being able to transmit from far above the San Fernando valley and Los Angeles.
A well adjusted antenna was a status symbol of the mid modern suburb. A perfect signal was to receive channels 2 through 13 without channel 2 having a lot of snow because if you did you couldn’t watch “Gunsmoke”.
As I recall, we could receive all of them.
I remember as a child, getting our first television. I couldn’t have been more than five or six at the time. It’s implanted in my mind so clearly that even to this day I remember my father placing it a corner of the living room so it could be viewed from anywhere you sat.
At some point we even bought a plastic screen covering that was tinted a light orange at the top which faded to a green at the bottom so we could watch “color” TV. It lasted all of 2 weeks before it ended up in some drawer never to be seen again.
All TV stations were required by the FCC to produce a certain amount of programming locally. And they also had to devote a certain amount of time to local and national/international news (that had to be operated very much like a non-profit), children’s programming and cultural/arts. It didn’t matter if you were a “owned and operated by” (o and o) or an independent who bought programming from and o and o or some other source.
Oh, and any one entity could only own seven radio and/or TV stations in the country. This law was passed to create a diversity in opinion and to prevent any one broadcaster from being able to sway public opinion. Too bad that law isn’t in place today, thank you Ronald Regan and George W. Bush.
But getting back to when I was a kid and there were only five TV stations in Los Angeles.
Before there were remote controls for your television, you had to manually get up and turn the dial to find the station you wanted to watch. As there were only a few, you could subscribe to the TV Guide that sent out a weekly listing of shows (also notating which were repeats and which were not), or simply refer to the listing in the L.A. Mirror, Times, or Daily paper. In our case, we even had a local paper, the Downey Livewire.
But that said, you could easily map out your TV evening that generally began after dinner and only have to get up a few times to change the channel.
And just as today, commercials interrupted the programming with annoying national commercials and even more annoying local commercials of “Cal Worthington and his dog Spot”.
I’m sure I wasn’t the first to come up with this idea, but I did capitalize on it. The Blab Off. This was a simple switch that had a 10 foot cord. It interrupted the signal going to the speaker of the TV set. So from your chair you could turn off the sound on your TV without getting up and turning off the volume.
I went into the business of making, selling and installing these Blab Off’s” to all our friends and neighbors. As I recall for all of $.50, maybe it was a dollar. My allowance was only twenty-five cents, so I considered that a fair amount of money at the ripe old age of 10.
Slowly TV manufactures caught up to the idea that people didn’t like to get out of their chairs to change the channel or adjust the volume, and developed a remote box tethered to the TV by a thick cable. Revolutionary!
It was cumbersome, people tripped over the cable disabling the TV, and overall it was more trouble than it was worth. As early as 1957 Zenith invented a remote control affectionately called “the clicker” – a remote control about the size of a pack of cigarettes that used ultrasonic sound produced by clicking 3 tonal rods to change channels and control volume. It added another $100 to the price of a TV so it’s not surprising that the technology did not become affordable until the 1960’s.
Of course the technology of today’s remote controls uses infrared red to communicate a vast selection of command choices at your finger tips.
And we have become ever so dependent on personal remote technology, from the wireless signal to our computers to opening our garage doors, and much more. But still the one that seems indispensable is the TV/Cable remote control that allows us to silence commercials and change channels at will.
Last night I dropped the remote control. It didn’t work. What was I going to do? I thought, ok, I’ll use the cable box to change the channels. But it was black, and I couldn’t see what controls were what. Using a flash light I realized there was no mute button, so I couldn’t mute the commercials. I couldn’t program in what stations I wanted to watch and I was so close to the flat screen I couldn’t see what was on TV. Settling on a program I wanted to watch, I sat back in my chair enjoying it until the first commercial, when I wished I’d installed a “Blab Off”!
Ain’t technology great!
