1946 in Television - Events

Events

• February 4 – RCA demonstrates an all-electronic color television system.
• February 18 – The first Washington, D.C. – New York City telecast through AT&T coaxial cable, in which General Dwight Eisenhower placed a wreath at the base of the statue in the Lincoln Memorial and others made brief speeches, is termed a success by engineers and viewers, although Time magazine calls it "as blurred as an early Chaplin movie."
• February 25 – The prewar U.S. 18-channel VHF allocation is officially dropped in favor of a new 13-channel VHF allocation due to the appropriation of some frequencies by the military and the relocation of FM radio. Only five of the old channels are the same as new channels in frequency and none have the same number as before.
• April 22 – CBS transmits a Technicolor movie short and color slides over coaxial cable from Manhattan to Washington (332 kilometers) and return.
• June 7 – The BBC Television Service begins broadcasting again. The first words heard are "Good afternoon everybody. How are you? Do you remember me, Jasmine Bligh?". Twenty minutes later, the Mickey Mouse cartoon Mickey's Gala Premiere, last programme transmitted seven years earlier at the start of World War II, is reshown.
• June 19 – The first televised heavyweight boxing title fight between Joe Louis and Billy Conn is broadcast from Yankee Stadium. The fight was seen by 141,000 people, the largest television audience to see a fight to that date.
• July 7 – The BBC's children's programme For The Children returns, one of the few pre-war programmes to resume after the reintroduction of the service.
• August 4 – Children's puppet "Muffin the Mule" debuts in an episode of For the Children. He is so popular he is given his own show later in that same year.
• September 6 - Chicago's WBKB-TV (now WBBM-TV) commences broadcasting as the first U.S. television station outside the Eastern Time Zone.
• October 2 – The first television network soap opera, Faraway Hill, airs on the DuMont Network.
• October 22 – Telecrime, the first television crime series from the 1930s, returns for the final run on the BBC, retitled Telecrimes.
• December 24 – The first church service is telecast, Grace Episcopal Church in New York, on WABD.
• Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo founded, which would later become Sony.
• Zoomar introduces the first professional zoom lens for television cameras.
• In the United States, only the DuMont Network and NBC were broadcasting in the evening in 1946. DuMont ran a Western movie on Sunday night for an hour, other programming for an hour on Tuesday, and half hours on Wednesday and Thursday nights. NBC ran an hour of programming on Sunday, two hours on Thursday, and the Gillette Cavalcade of Sports on Monday and Friday nights, with an additional hour on Fridays.
• The first postwar television sets are released by RCA, DuMont, Crosley, and Belmont