Television's First Puppets

Over the years, television has brought countless hours of entertainment from characters manipulated by humans. There were the Muppets. Shari Lewis had Lambchop and others. Bob Clampett provided a West Coast audience with Beany and Cecil. There was Buffalo Bob and Howdy Doody in New York, and Kukla Fran and Ollie in Chicago, and popular show in the late ‘40s with a Lou Bunin puppet called Lucky Pup.

But televised puppets go back to 1928.

Granted, there are a few asterisks here. This doesn’t involve a regularly scheduled TV show. It was almost like a closed circuit broadcast. But it was heard over a well-established New York-area radio station.

Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer had opened in theatres a year earlier. Portions combined sight and synchronised sound. But both were recorded. The question was raised: can live pictures and a soundtrack be combined and sent over the air?

The directing engineer at Daven Radio Laboratories, Dr. Paul Alexander Kober (1883-1949), decided to find out. He set up a temporary studio on the sixth floor of a department store and used its Newark-based radio station to broadcast the sound; the picture would not be directly over the air.

To the right you can see the New York Times’ listings for WOR for August 21, 1928, which show the broadcast began at 4 p.m. The Plainfield Courier-News reported on what happened in its paper the following day.

First Television Drama Enacted At Bamberger Store In Newark; Action and Sound Synchronized
Newark, Aug. 22—The first television drama, two minutes in length, was enacted yesterday at the L. Bamberger & Co. Department Store, Newark, for representatives of the press. Employing puppets to suit the limitations of the television transmitter, the presentation of mingled action, speech and music was effected and synchronized to combine all the elements of a potential art.
Seated before a receiver, guests on a screen approximately three inches square and heard simultaneously through headphones a specially adapted atmospheric score broadcast through WOR. Reception was effected by wire from a transmitter on the same floor. The music was synchronized in every detail to the action and an explanatory reading was superimposed on the music by the prologuist.
The production, although elemental in aspect, immediately summoned to the imagination a vast estate to be shortly created by television. It murmured of the day when English drama or Russian ballet might be an institution of every American home. The theme itself was of an allegorical nature. An orchestral overture was followed by curtain rising from a stage representing the stage of life.
A puppet character, symbolizing Earth’s creative genius, was shown putting the finishing touches to a delicate instrument. The last screw was placed, a switch thrown and a winged spirit emerged, holding a globe. She was the spirit of television.
The television apparatus used was developed at the Daven Laboratories.
An image approximately 15 inches by 15 inches is sent by the transmitter and is received on a screen 3 inches by 3 inches. The transmitting instrument consists essentially of a strong light source projected on a revolving disc having spirally drilled holes. The objective lens images these holes as they pass by and projects a strong spot of light on the object to be transmitted. The spot which is transversing the object reflects its light in proportion to the highlights, shadows and halftones of the subject. This reflected light thus produced is picked up by the photo-electric cells which translate the varying light into the corresponding varying current. This is then amplified and relayed to the transmitter.
Laboratory representatives and guests pronounced the demonstration as the most comprehensive to date in the field of television and a notable contribution to the art.

The November 1928 issue of Radio News magazine explained the performance lasted two hours and was repeated every two minutes.

The whole experiment seems rather quaint given two other television events which happened around the same time. WRNY announced a regular schedule of TV broadcasts on its radio frequency, and General Electric intended to televise New York governor Al Smith’s speech over WGY, the company’s station in Schenectady.

The WOR broadcast was an anomaly, though Kober conducted an experiment at Bamberger's Department Store involving television and ultra-violet rays, outlined in Science and Invention magazine of November 1929. WOR showed little interest in television until World War Two, when it produced programmes aired on the DuMont and General Electric stations, then applied for licenses in New York and Washington. The company finally began televising on Channel 9 in the nation’s capital on January 16, 1949. One of its first regular weekday shows was “Lucky Pup.”