1947 in Television - Events

Events

• January 3 – Proceedings of the U.S. Congress are televised for the first time.
• January 22 – The first commercial television station west of the Mississippi River, KTLA, begins operation in Hollywood.
• January 29 – RCA demonstrates an all-electronic color television system using live images, to the Federal Communications Commission.
• January 30 – The FCC rejects CBS' color television system.
• February 10 to March 11 – BBC television service in the UK is temporarily suspended due to a national fuel crisis.
• March 11 – The first successful American children's television series, Movies for Small Fry debuts on the DuMont Network.
• July 16 – RCA demonstrates the world's first all-electronic color camera to the Federal Communications Commission. (Only television receivers were present at the demonstration on January 29; the camera was at a remote studio.)
• September 30 – The opening game of the World Series is the first World Series game to be telecast. The 1947 World Series brought in an estimated 3.9 million people, becoming television's first mass audience.
• October 5 – The first presidential address from the White House is telecast. President Truman speaks about the world food crisis. It is preceded by a Jell-O commercial, and features the president discussing his program for food rationing. The address was televised by WTVW-TV (today's WJLA-TV Channel 7 in Washington DC) on its inaugural broadcast. It was also simulcast on radio. It was long believed that no copy of this broadcast existed, but segments are preserved on kinescope in the Library of Congress. (For the record, President Franklin Roosevelt's address on experimental TV at the 1939 New York World's Fair preceded the 1947 Truman broadcast.)
• October 13 – The puppet show Junior Jamboree, later known as Kukla, Fran and Ollie, premieres on WBKB in Chicago, Illinois.
• November 6 – Meet the Press first appears as a local program in Washington.
• November 8 – Memorial service broadcast from the Cenotaph by the BBC, using tele-recording for the first time.
• The first Hollywood film production for TV, The Public Prosecutor.
• There are 14,000 television sets in use in the United States.