A century on the small screen: the oldest TV channel in the world
There were already far too many TV channels to choose from before streaming came along and offered even more ways to consume the latest episodic goings-on, but it’s difficult to believe that many of them will still be around almost a century from now.
Stations pop up to capitalise on trends and fade into the ether with increasing regularity when it becomes clear they’ve no point in even existing anymore. However, there’s one channel that remains in operation after broadcasting its first images in the 1920s. Because this is how the industry tends to work, it’s long since been subsumed by a major corporation.
Anyone who tunes into New York City’s WNBC might be aware that they’re watching the flagship station of the NBC network, one of the many heads of the Comcast multimedia hydra, but what may be less known is that they’re getting their daily fix of news and current events from the oldest TV channel on the planet.
Initially founded as an experiment by the Radio Corporation of America, W2XBS was used as a means to test the latest developments in the nascent technology. Headquartered at the General Electric factory in the Schenectady area of the ‘Big Apple’, the multifaceted conglomerate owned both the RCA and NBC, with the broadcast network and future media powerhouse first being established in 1926.
After running reception and interference tests, the transmitters were upgraded in 1929. By then, Felix the Cat had already become one of the first images shown on television after it was decided that a doll based on the cartoon character was the perfect conduit for figuring out just how capable the technology was.
Thanks to its monochromatic nature, it easily withstood the blinding lights required by the earliest TV tech to slowly rotate on a turntable for hours at a time, like a baked potato being reheated in the microwave. Those behind the scenes worked diligently to fine-tune and smooth out any issues in beaming the images to sets across the country.
That was almost 100 years ago, and yet, after being rebranded several times during the intervening decades, it remains on the air to this day. Carrying on what would eventually become the tradition of a lifetime, the channel continued breaking new ground and setting historic firsts for the small screen.
In 1938, it aired the first televised Broadway drama and the first live news coverage captured on the ground by a crew, while the following year, it played host to the first-ever live showing of a presidential speech when Franklin D. Roosevelt opened the 1939 World’s Far. It called dibs on debuting college and professional-level baseball alongside the NFL and the NHL by the end of 1940 before being anointed as the first commercial television station in the United States in June 1941 alongside CBS’s WCBW.
