Today most houses are filled with televisions and devices that have access
to all sorts of platforms that produce and stream a mind-numbing amount of
content, including the content you're watching today on YouTube. Most that
content today is produced digitally and it comes into our house through cables
or through the internet, but for a long time most television was broadcast via
an antenna and picked up via the airwaves. Inventors
like Philo T Farnsworth and Vladimir Zworykin had developed the technology to
be able to do that in the 1920s , but television didn't become popular, wasn't
common in households, until after the Second World War. But that doesn't mean
that nothing happened in between. The big networks that we recognize today ABC, NBC
and CBS all formed as radio networks during that period. But one of the
lesser-known stories of early broadcast television started in 1926 when a
Cadillac dealer bought his first radio station. He had a license to broadcast
television in 1931- nearly a decade ahead of the big three. It's history that
deserves to be remembered. Don Lee was born in Michigan and made his money by
acquiring the exclusive distribution rights for Cadillac cars in California.
He used his large personal fortune to purchase the radio station KFRC in San
Francisco in 1926, and a year later KHJ in Los Angeles. Lee expanded his radio
network across the coast acquiring stations in Oregon and Washington. A few
years later the Columbia Broadcasting System, or CBS, extended facilities to the
coast and an extended an invitation to Lee's network to broadcast Columbia
programming. By 1931 Lee had turned KHJ into the broadcasting hub for his first
television station, which broadcast under the call sign W6XS and a sister
station W6XAO. He wasn't the very first to start producing television
content in America, but the big three didn't start broadcasting television
until the eve of the Second World War. He appointed a young engineer named Harry
Lubcke to run his experimental station and Lubcke became the director of
television for the Don Lee Broadcasting System. One of the problems with the
television broadcasting network in 1931 was that no one owned a television. It
was something of a catch-22 -no one would buy a television unless there was
something to watch on them, but it was difficult for any with the produced
content when there wasn't anyone to watch. To mitigate this issue Lubcke
distributed plans to amateur tinkerers in L.A. for construction of mechanical
receiving sets. In 1939 it was estimated that something like a hundred people
built televisions using Lubcke's plans. The station became one of the first to
offer regularly scheduled programming on the west coast when they started
broadcasting one hour every day except Sundays. The content was mostly quote
"filmed action" and close-ups of movie stars and was broadcast between six and
seven in the evening. And they were one of very few stations to continue
broadcasting throughout the war. It's largely due to Harry Lubcke that the
early network was able to transcend from just being an early television network
to one that made a mark in television history. Though he would die almost
completely unknown, Lubcke was a talented engineer and pioneered many television
innovations. Like many inventors of the time Lubcke did his own tinkering with
the television set. In 1929 he was working with Farnsworth in San Francisco
to produce an all-electronic scanning generator system which was probably one
of the more important items in the unprecedented settlement between
Farnsworth and RCA in September 1939. RCA purchased a number of Lubcke's patents
regarding synchronization in 1938. Lubcke continued to do work on synchronization,
electronic television, and the self synchronized cathode ray tube. Though
many of these patents have become forgotten the value of his
self-synchronizing cathode ray tube was likely the most important. In 1932 Lubcke
demonstrated television reception on an airplane, largely thanks to his
advances in synchronization. According to the Spokane Daily Chronicle on May 23rd
1932, Lubcke planned to transmit a picture to an airplane cruising about five miles
away at an altitude of approximately six thousand feet. The test successfully
transmitted a picture of a girl onto the plane from W6XAO. His work led Don Lee
to make Lubcke the face of West Coast television and of W6XAO. W6XAO
was one of just six experimental TV stations that existed by 1939. In 1933, it
broadcast possibly the earliest television news coverage when they
telecast news footage of a Long Beach earthquake to
L.A. only a few hours after the event. The station managed to add another first
on the very same day when it became the first to broadcast a motion picture, "The
Crooked Circle," which it broadcast on March 10th 1933. It's believed that the
movie was seen by perhaps five L.A. area television receivers. The L.A. Times Sunday
Magazine said in 1936 said W6XAO was "The only station that releases regular
television broadcasts and one of four centers in the US where serious
scientific work on television was being done." But there were big changes on the
horizon in 1934 Don Lee passed away from a heart attack and left his Cadillac
business in his broadcasting system to his son Thomas Lee. The quality of the
product that they were producing was increasing over the period. For analog
television, the quality of the resolution that is, how good your picture is,
depends upon the number of lines that are broadcast. And in 1936 they moved
from broadcasting in 80 lines to 300, lines or a great improvement in the
picture resolution. And that was up again to 441 lines in 1938 and 30 frames per
second, which was on par with the RCA system. By the outset of the war they
were broadcasting 525 lines. Around 1940 Lee moved the station from 7th and Bixel
in L.A. to a new location behind the famous Hollywood sign on top of the hill
that is now called Mount Lee. Lubcke called it the first structure in the
world erected exclusively for telecasting. In 1938 W6XAO broadcast the
first American television soap opera when it began airing "Vine Street," a 15-minute
serial aired twice a week about the difficulties of making it big in
Tinseltown. By the next year four of six nights a week were aired with live
talent produced in-house. On January 1st 1940 the station became the first on the
West Coast to transmit a remote broadcast when they broadcast the
Tournament of Roses Parade. In 1940 Lubcke said that the Lee's station was focusing
on developing variety shows and that the longest play they had run so far was a
40-minute presentation of Hamlet. By 1940 several different kinds of television
were on sale commercially from companies like GE and RCA and there were hundreds
of sets in LA to watch the ten and a half hours a week the station broadcast.
Most of the time was occupied by films, but they
also covered newsreels and their own programming. The broadcast could be picked
up at least 22 miles away in Long Beach, where one watcher said he had as many as
30 visitors in one evening to watch. In 1941 W6XAO operated 590 hours and
broadcasts 67 remote programs. But despite all their innovative television
firsts it wouldn't be a surprise if you've never heard of the Don Lee
Broadcasting Network, because while they were busy being pioneers of early
television they were also setting the stage for their own decline. The network
wanted to remain an independent network at the time when the larger networks
were growing. The network was mostly made up of radio stations across California
and Portland, Seattle, Tacoma, and Spokane. The network's relationship with Columbia
fell apart shortly after Don Lee's death. In 1934 friction had been growing
between the networks as CBS began demanding more control over its
affiliates, especially over programming. In 1936 CBS bought KNX in LA and another
in San Francisco to replace the need for the Lee Network. Fortunately for Tommy
Lee, at the same time that CBS was ridding itself of the Lee network the
Mutual Broadcasting System was looking to expand to the west coast. The switch
was scheduled for December 29th, 1936 the same day that the CBS contract ended.
Even under the new contract the Lee network maintained a peculiar
independence. Technically speaking Mitchell had only a single affiliate
west of the Rockies- the Don Lee network itself. Mutual had no relationship with
the individual stations and provided the network with Mutual programs that could
then be passed on. But in 1938 only 16 to 20 percent of the commercial programs on
the radio stations originated with Mutual. Most of them were still produced
by the Lee's themselves. What the Lees really wanted was to have an independent
regional network that could leverage the resources of a national network. And that
worked for the Mutual Broadcasting System, which had a vision of national
reach but local flavor. But, unfortunately that couldn't last. After the end of the
war the consolidation of stations and the growth of the big three would doom a
small regional network. Tommy Lee had inherited a nine million dollar fortune
from his father consisting of the network and his father's car dealerships.
He piloted his own plane. He sponsored race cars at Indianapolis. In 1936 he had
a personal hotrod designed which he raced on empty lake beds in Southern
California. Shortly before World War two though he was in a
serious accident when he was t-boned by a truck at an intersection. He lived the
rest of his life in considerable pain. In 1948 his mental health deteriorated and
the courts declared him mentally incompetent two years later. The 44
year-old had a driver take him to the dentist in LA. He went up 12 floors and
jumped from the building, leaving his estate to an uncle. Don Lee's radio
network and Mutual were sold in 1951 to General Teleradio, the broadcasting
arm of the General Tire Company. While it maintained the Don Lee logo, the spirit
of Independence and innovation ended. After a long series of sales where the
company lost its logo and its name, the constituent parts were sold to
Westinghouse in 1996. Westinghouse owned CBS and merged the radio stations with
CBS radio. It took a long time getting there, but eventually CBS would get
control over the Lee Network after all. In 1948 W6XAO stopped being an
experimental station and became a fully commercial station under the new call
sign KTSL-TV with the "TSL" standing for Thomas Lee. And even then Lubcke and the
station continued to innovate. They build a huge antenna and dish that was dubbed
"The Mountain Shooter" in order to broadcast the 1948 Tournament of Roses
Parade from Pasadena to Los Angeles. They built the antenna to offset the effects
of a 200-foot mountain range which blocked the transmission, in conjunction
with a nine foot diameter dish in Pasadena.
But like the radio stations the Lee television station wouldn't survive
Tommy's death. It was acquired by CBS on January 1st 1951, and the call letters
were changed to KNXT to match the local CBS radio station KNX -the same station
CBS had bought to replace Lee's radio station in 1936. Today it exists as KCBS Los
Angeles. CBS moved the station off of Mount Lee. The transmitter that remains is
now owned and operated by the city of Los Angeles.
Harry Lubcke died in 1991 almost completely unknown and largely
unrecognized for his technical innovations and his part is a television
pioneer. When he died it was not noted prominently even in local newspapers, and
it seems his technical writings and journals were thrown out. His legacy
didn't end with his work at the Lee Network however. He was president of the
Television Academy, and is credited with coining the name
"Emmy Award" when he suggested "Immy" I M M Y, a term for the image orthicon camera. He
co-founded the Society of television engineers in 1940, and his later years
became a patent lawyer. But, for the one time face of West Coast television
broadcasting, few people remember his technical innovations. Today Lubcke and
the Lees are largely forgotten- they're relegated to obscure trivia of early
television history. Their their independent streak, while laudable,
just didn't have a place in the broadcasting world after the Second
World War. And this year cultural weight and the omnipresence of the large
networks and in large developers like RCA simply overshadowed the technical
contributions of a small experimental station that never had more than a few
thousand viewers in the L.A. area. But their independent streak and their
technical innovation was important. They took a small experimental station
and turned it into a station of early television firsts. And Lubcke's
contribution to things like tube synchronization materially impacted the
future of television. They also had that great commitment to original programming,
which was really ahead of its time and presaged the time when families
would gather together in the living room for "Prime Time." The Golden Age of
broadcast television simply would not have been the same were it not for the
independent streak of the Lee Broadcasting Network. I hope you enjoyed
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