David W. Dunlap is a Metro reporter and writes the Building Blocks column. He has worked at The Times for 40 years.

The impending departure of Jon Stewart and the temporary ouster of Brian Williams were reminders this week — as if any more were needed — of television’s enduring power and reach, even in the Internet era.



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The Times understood the extraordinary quality of the medium early on. Very early on. On April 8, 1927, when radio itself was still in relative infancy, The Times published a two-column headline at the top of the front page: “Far-Off Speakers Seen as Well as Heard Here in a Test of Television.”

The lede was simplicity itself. “Herbert Hoover made a speech in Washington yesterday afternoon. An audience in New York heard him and saw him.”

Mr. Hoover, who was then secretary of commerce, might be called the first television personality. But history does not suggest that his groundbreaking TV appearance necessarily helped his successful presidential campaign a year later.



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He was telegenic enough, however. “It was as if a photograph had suddenly come to life and begun to talk, smile, nod its head and look this way and that,” The Times account said, using the simplest possible analogy to convey an idea that would have been foreign to almost every one of its readers.

Not everything about the demonstration, which occurred in the Bell Telephone Laboratories at 55 Bethune Street, did honor to the participants. Secretary Hoover was followed, from Whippany, N.J., by a vaudeville comedian who affected an Irish brogue, then changed into blackface “with a new line of quips in negro dialect.”

The Times article ran the depth of Page 1 and jumped to almost a full page of coverage inside. (Both pages can be viewed here.) That was a lot of real estate for an engineering experiment. But The Times was enamored of science, and the anonymous author(s) of the articles clearly grasped the transformational possibilities of the embryonic medium.

At least some of the possibilities.

“Commercial Use in Doubt,” declared one of the crosslines in the bank of the front-page headline. This sounds like the kind of goofy, ironic anti-prediction that accompanies truly disruptive inventions. “Why would anyone care for aeroplane travel who had resort to a Pullman Palace Car?” That kind of thing.

As it turned out, deep in the story, it was the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, parent of Bell Laboratories, that was doubtful about television’s moneymaking potential.

The Times was a bit more farsighted: “The commercial future of television, if it has one, is thought to be largely in public entertainment — super-news reels flashed before audiences at the moment of occurrence, together with dramatic and musical acts shot on the ether waves in sound and picture at the instant they are taking place in the studio.”