The Kisseloff Collection

The picture below was cut from my book, The Box (actually all the pictures were omitted, but, hell, that’s great for this blog). I’m not quite sure I understand the perspective of the shot, but let me tell you the story of the man who gave it to me. Ted Smith (for more on him, click his tag at the right) and his friend, Loren Jones were two of RCA’s earliest employees and most brilliant engineers. In 1990, I had started working on my TV book and the interviews, frankly, weren’t going that well. Then one day, I drove down to Philadelphia to meet Ted and Loren. Both men were then in their late 80s, but they were still so full of merriment and their stories about their work so vivid and exciting that as I drove home, I knew for the first time that I was going to have a book and that it would be a good one.

One of the stories they told me was that when RCA put it up its first antenna atop the Empire State Building in the early 1930s, the engineers formed a club called the Top Notchers. To be a member, you had to crawl through the trap door under the antenna, stand out there and fly a paper airplane to either Brooklyn or New Jersey. The paper airplane was the easy part. Getting the courage to stand out there wasn’t so easy. This is how Ted described it, “It was quite a feeling to go through that trapdoor and find yourself on top of the world. You couldn’t see the rest of the building because the sides sloped down. You were suspended in space on a six-foot-diameter surface of slippery stainless steel metal with four rickety iron posts and a chain around the kept you from going down.

This drawing of the Top Notchers’s first president will give you an idea of what it looked like:

Ok, here’s a real shot of it from below:

“There was a metal circle about six feet in diameter on the top. Going through it was a rod about half an inch in diameter with a cross on top. The Top Notchers had to cimb that rod and touch the weather vane atop that cross, which was about twelve feet up. I didn’t have the nerve.

“Joe Chambers was the engineer at WNW in Cincinnati. He had done a number of rash things as a flier and he wanted to try it. When he got to the top, he made one dive for the thin metal pole in the center, grabbed it and was too scared to even look around. He said later, ” ‘If you ever get back there, you’ll find my fingerprints in the iron.’ ”

Take a look at this great picture (click on it for the larger version), looking down from the antenna, and you’ll know why:

Ted Smith was an RCA engineer who was in charge of keeping the NBC exhibit running at the 1939 World’s Fair. That exhibit was really NBC’s coming out party. It not only sold a lot of TV sets, but it also marked the beginning of a regular broadcasting schedule (more about that another time) for the network. The exhibit also exposed thousands of people to television for the first time when  the company set up a camera and a special see-through TV set and people lined up for hours to stand in front of the camera as their friends got to watch them be “televised” on the closed-circuit system.

Those who did so even got a card attesting to that fact. Here’s one of them:

And here’s Ted, photographed through the TV as he stood before the camera:

Ted had such great stories. I remember one, about what certainly had to be television’s first wardrobe malfunction:

“Philco had a camera at the University of Pennsylvania swimming pool. They would just keep the camera running to test their transmission. Our people would tune in occasionally to test their own equipment. Merril Trainor called them one day and said, ‘You know your camera at the swimming pool? Do you know some men are swimming without bathing suits?’ ”

He told another one which has a great picture to go along with it. I’ll leave that for another post. But I don’t want you to think this is only about television, so tomorrow I’ll move on to something different.