Rewriting the History of Television: An Interview with Doron Galili (Part One)

What is television? Where does it come from? When does television begin? These are questions which are addressed by Doron Galili’s compelling new book, Seeing by Electricity: The Emergence of Television, 1878-1939. The answers may surprise many readers whose casual assumptions about the nature of this medium are disrupted by this deep historical dive into how television took shape as a concept in the late 19th century and the complex ways that television intercepts other communication systems, not just radio or cinema but also the telegraph and the telephone.

Right now, what we mean by television is in radical flux as more cord-cutters and streaming services alter how we access television content and what technologies we use to engage with it. This book suggests television (as a concept and a reality) has always been more unstable than we might have imagined and that there have always been multiple and conflicting ideas about what television is.

In this interview, Doron Galili gives us a glimpse into the rich content of this significant new contribution to media history. We even consider Zoom as a platform which comes close to the original conception of television.

Many American histories of television start with the public demonstrations at the 1939 New York World’s Fair but your subtitle, “The Emergence of Television, 1878-1939,” suggests your book ends where those books start. How would you sum up this earlier period? What does television mean in this context?

The 1939 World’s Fair has become an effective starting point for American television histories because as part of the event, NBC inaugurated their regular television broadcast services, introducing it for the first time to the general public.  To be sure, what people saw in 1939 was still not quite television broadcasting as we know it today – for example, the broadcasts were not yet commercial (that is, ad supported) and in the early years only viewers in the New York area could receive the transmissions. But that moment arguably marks the beginning of television as a mass medium in America.

What I explore in the book is rather the history of television prior to its deployment as a mass medium. I looked into the earliest stages of the history of television, starting in the late nineteenth century with the first ideas regarding electrical technologies of “seeing by electricity,” through the period of technological experimentation with television, and ending with the beginning of the first television broadcast services in the 1930s. In so doing, the book concerns a large variety of televisual media that existed – in speculative or experimental fashion – before the coming of what we typically identify as television.

Therefore, to answer your question, I would say that the initial meaning of television was in the broadest sense the electrical transmission of moving images at a distance. During the six decades the book covers, this idea of moving image transmission – an idea that predated electronic screens, network broadcasting, and even wireless transmission – acquired a myriad of meanings, which continuously altered between different historical moments and cultural contexts, until eventually the 1930s saw the formation of the medium-specific attributes that we came to recognize as television. 

Yet I do not consider the book to be a pre-history of television. I think it is vital to understand the speculative and experimental periods as integral parts of the history of television. Our present moment actually makes a strong case for this: in the recent decade, media scholars have been addressing yet another set of transformations in the medium-specific identity of television as we find ourselves in a post-broadcast / post-network era. These current media changes compel us to come to terms with what television means now – textually, culturally, technologically, ideologically – and it is crucial to recall that the stable meaning of broadcast-era television was not a natural state of things but itself a product of a of long period of transformations and negotiations.  

Marshall McLuhan has said “media are often put out before they are thought out.” Might we say the opposite is true in the case of television?

There was most certainly a lot of thought given to television before any TV program aired. 

In my research I found that not only did inventors, electrical engineers and broadcasters think through challenges of realizing the technology and planning programs, but also critics, filmmakers, novelists, and eventually academics and regulators engaged in speculations about possible uses of the medium and its social effects. For example, Edward Bellamy describes in his 1897 novel Equality (the sequel to his famed Looking Backwards) a medium for seeing at a distance dubbed the “electroscope.” In Bellamy’s utopia, the electroscope is not used for entertainment or for surveillance but rather for taking virtual trips around the world and for attending at a distance a lecture about life in socialist economy (yes, there was a time when distant learning was part of utopian thought…).

In a very different context, RCA’s David Sarnoff dedicated many popular articles during the 1930s to laying out his vision about the part broadcasting would play in America’s future. As Sarnoff saw it, television would promote the democratization of culture and allow societies to evolve, since it would make it possible for people of all classes to enjoy the finest operas.

During the same decade, in the United States and elsewhere, government regulation got into the picture. Regulators defined how broadcasting services should function and set formal protocols for transmission stations. Thus, by the time television services began, all the details about the operation of the medium were already in place, including the number of channels approved to air programs, their frequencies, picture resolution, technical specs for receiver sets, and of course rules regarding commercializing television services. 

            Hence the case of early television history fascinatingly problematizes the very idea of “putting out” a medium. It is easy for us (as I suspect it was for McLuhan back in the day, too) to think of new media inventions that took us by storm. Take for example the World Wide Web, which became part of so many aspects of our lives within just a few years, or the cinema, which one century beforehand became a global success within less than a decade from its invention.

The emergence of television is a much slower-moving narrative: almost half a century passed between the publication of the initial ideas about the electric transmission of images and the first demonstrations of working prototypes of television systems; even after that, it took more than a decade before the appropriate infrastructure, mass marketing of sets, and regulatory approval enabled the launch of broadcasting services. 

In what ways is the public anticipation of television linked to the telephone and the telegraph, with which it shares the same prefix?

The very idea of transmitting moving images by electricity can be traced back to responses to Bell’s invention of the telephone in 1876. Once Bell demonstrated that it is possible to send sound virtually instantaneously by wires, numerous commentators, authors, illustrators, and technicians began speculating on the prospects of doing the same with images. This is, by the way, not a historiographical interpretation or speculation (even if I’d have loved to own it as such) – we actually have quite a few documents from the nineteenth century where writers explicitly make this connection.

The telephone, thus, provided a model for both the first imaginary uses of televisual media and its technological design. Early depictions of moving image transmission devices were themselves multimedia constructs, as they often took the form of a visual supplement to point-to-point telephone communication (this way, they anticipated something more similar to facetime than to broadcast television). 

As early as the late 1870s, technicians attempted to create schemes for visual communication devices that emulated the manner in which the telephone captures sound and converts it to electrical signals that could be relayed and reconstituted on the other end of the line. This, of course, introduced a host of new problems, including finding a light-sensitive substance and dissecting images to pixels that could be sent linearly, but the technologies that eventually materialized do follow this model. Many of the early names given to the still-inexistent medium were based on the “tele-״prefix, and so before 1900 one could encounter accounts of the telectroscope, telephonoscope, telephote etc.

            But the telephone analogy is important for the history of television for another reason. While television was conceived as a visual extension of telephony, the telephone itself was invented as an extension of yet another “tele” medium, the telegraph network, to which Bell added the ability to carry audible communications. What we see, then, is a trajectory that starts way back in the 1830s with the invention of the electric telegraph, continues in the 1870s with the telephone, and soon after points towards the introduction of televisual transmission of images. That is not to say that we should be simplistic in tracing the emergence of television and imagine a linear trajectory of improvement that moves towards multimedia perfection; but this notion is definitely valuable for shedding light on the terms in which the emergent medium was understood in real time. That is, the telegraph network was viewed in the nineteenth century as allowing the “annihilation of space and time” and creating what McLuhan later termed “the global village” and these notions to a great extent also informed the popular anticipation of television. 

 Doron Galili is Researcher in the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University. He is the author of Seeing by Electricity: The Emergence of Television, 1878-1939 (Duke University Press, 2020) and coeditor of Corporeality in Early Cinema: Viscera, Skin, and Physical Form (Indiana University Press, 2018). He holds a PhD in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Chicago andpreviously taught at the Cinema Studies Program at Oberlin College.