DuMont Television Network

• 1. Introduction

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  The DuMont Television Network ended its run in 1956, and within two decades most of what it had produced was gone. Actress Edie Adams testified before a Library of Congress panel in 1996 about what happened to the recordings. The kinescopes had been loaded into three trucks and dumped into Upper New York Bay. More than 20,000 television episodes went that way. TV historian David Weinstein later called DuMont the "forgotten network." But DuMont was no minor broadcaster. It was one of only four major commercial television networks in the United States. It ran from 1946 to 1956 and competed with NBC and CBS for the future of American television. Why it collapsed while the others survived is a story that required decades to piece together.

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• 2. A Thousand-Hour Tube

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  Allen B. DuMont founded his laboratory in 1931 with $1,000, working out of his own basement. His team produced the first consumer electronic television receiver in 1938. The achievement that made everything else possible came down to one technical problem. Early cathode ray tubes, the components that formed pictures on television screens, burned out after roughly 24 hours of use. DuMont's engineers extended that lifespan to 1,000 hours. Without that improvement, consumer television sets would have been impractically fragile. The company's receivers became the industry standard.

  When the United States entered World War II, DuMont shifted to radar development for the U.S. Army. That contract generated $5 million for the company by 1942.

  Early sales of DuMont television receivers were hampered by the near-absence of regularly scheduled programming. A few months after selling his first receiver in 1938, DuMont opened a station in Passaic, New Jersey, designated W2XVT. In 1940, the station moved to Manhattan as W2XWV on channel 4, beginning broadcasts on the 13th of April, 1940. While CBS and NBC scaled back television activity during the war, DuMont continued experimental and commercial broadcasts throughout.

  In 1944, the station received its commercial license as WABD, call letters drawn from Allen B. DuMont's own initials. The following year, a coaxial cable hookup between DuMont's facilities reportedly carried the news of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Japan, on the 9th of August, 1945. Thomas T. Goldsmith, the network's chief engineer and DuMont's closest friend, considered that moment the unofficial birth of the DuMont Network. Regular network service launched on the 15th of August, 1946. In November of that year, DuMont's Washington station received its commercial license as WTTG, named for Goldsmith himself.

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• 3. Television Reimagined

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  On the 11th of January, 1949, WDTV signed on in Pittsburgh as DuMont's third owned-and-operated station. Its arrival completed a coaxial cable chain that linked the East Coast to the Midwest. Before that, the major networks maintained separate regional feeds for each time zone. The West Coast received East Coast programs only from kinescope film recordings, not live. DuMont and WDTV hosted the connection ceremony, carried on all four networks. Television professionals called the link the "Golden Spike," after the spike that completed the First Transcontinental Railroad.

  DuMont's programming philosophy set it apart from the other networks. The standard model of 1950s television gave a single advertiser full sponsorship of a show, along with veto power over its content. DuMont instead sold commercial time to multiple advertisers, freeing producers from sponsor interference. That arrangement eventually became the universal standard for American television.

  DuMont's producers had no established radio stars to recruit, so they forged connections with Broadway for talent instead. The network leased the Adelphi Theatre on 54th Street and the Ambassador Theatre on West 49th Street for variety programming. DuMont was also the first network to broadcast a film made specifically for television: Talk Fast, Mister, produced by RKO in 1944. It aired the first American sitcom, Mary Kay and Johnny. It introduced the first network soap opera, Faraway Hill, and the first network game show, Cash and Carry.

  Anna May Wong, a film actress, starred in The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong on DuMont. That series was the first American television program with an Asian American lead. The Hazel Scott Show made Scott the first Black woman to host an American network television series. Both programs aired at a time when the other networks ran almost nothing aimed at non-white audiences. In 1954, DuMont opened the DuMont Tele-Centre in the former Jacob Ruppert's Central Opera House at 205 East 67th Street. That address today houses Fox Television Center.

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• 4. The Stars DuMont Made

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  Jackie Gleason first developed the characters that became The Honeymooners on Cavalcade of Stars, DuMont's flagship variety show. Gleason moved his show to CBS in 1952. In 1955-56, he returned to DuMont's Adelphi Theater studio to record 39 half-hour episodes. Those became known as the "Classic 39" and were made using DuMont's Electronicam process. Two seasons after The Original Amateur Hour topped the Hooper ratings, Variety ranked Cavalcade of Stars 10th among all American television series.

  Roman Catholic Bishop Fulton J. Sheen brought a different kind of program to DuMont. Life Is Worth Living was a one-man show in which Sheen discussed philosophy, psychology, and other fields of thought from a Christian perspective. The program reached 169 local television stations and drew Nielsen ratings as high as 11.1, representing an audience of more than 10 million viewers. For three years it ran directly against NBC's Milton Berle Show, then the most popular program on American television, and held its ground. The ABC and CBS programs that aired in the same timeslot were canceled. In the 1952-53 television season, Sheen won the Emmy Award for Most Outstanding Personality. He defeated three CBS nominees: Arthur Godfrey, Edward R. Murrow, and Lucille Ball. Sheen was also nominated for Public Service Emmys in 1952, 1953, and 1954.

  In 1952, Time magazine reported that Down You Go had attracted an estimated 16 million viewers. The Original Amateur Hour had held the top spot in the Hooper ratings during the 1947-48 season. The Johns Hopkins Science Review received a Peabody Award in the Education category in 1952. Sheen's Emmy and the Science Review Peabody were the only national awards the DuMont Network ever received. In 1953, DuMont programs aired live on 16 stations. Only seven of those carried DuMont as their primary affiliation.

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• 5. The Paramount Trap

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  Paramount Pictures paid $400,000 in 1939 for a 40% stake in Allen DuMont's company. Allen DuMont maintained that a 1937 agreement required Paramount to pursue any television interests through DuMont. Paramount's representative Paul Raibourn sat on DuMont's board of directors. He denied that any such restriction had ever been discussed. A 1953 examination of the original draft document proved Allen DuMont correct.

  The FCC's ruling that Paramount effectively controlled DuMont applied the five-station ownership cap to both companies combined. Paramount's two stations, KTLA in Los Angeles and WBKB in Chicago, counted against DuMont's total. KTLA carried DuMont programming for just one year, from 1947 to 1948. Both stations generally competed against DuMont's affiliates rather than supporting them. Despite this, the FCC treated Paramount's stake as equivalent to control. DuMont's applications for stations in Cincinnati and Cleveland, filed in 1947, were blocked. Expansion was frozen.

  Paramount had stopped financially supporting DuMont in 1941. Its executives indicated they would produce programs for the network but never delivered them. In 1949, Paramount launched the Paramount Television Network, a service that distributed filmed programs to local stations. It directly undercut the company it had invested in. During the 1953 FCC hearings on the ABC-United Paramount Theaters merger, Raibourn publicly disparaged the quality of DuMont television sets in open court.

  ABC's president Leonard Goldenson brokered a merger offer with DuMont's managing director Ted Bergmann. The combined network was to have been called ABC-DuMont. DuMont would have received $5 million in cash, guaranteed advertising time for its television sets, and secure employment for its staff. The merged entity would have held stations in five of the six largest U.S. television markets. Paramount vetoed the plan, citing antitrust concerns. In late 1954, DuMont sold WDTV in Pittsburgh to Westinghouse for $9.75 million. That sale eliminated the one bargaining chip DuMont held in every other market.

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• 6. The UHF Ceiling

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  The FCC froze all new television station applications in 1948. The freeze was intended as a six-month pause to work through a backlog of thousands of applications. The freeze lasted until 1952. During those four years, NBC and CBS consolidated their affiliate relationships across the country. DuMont was left with the three stations it had.

  When the FCC lifted the freeze, it opened the UHF spectrum for new stations. But it did not require television set manufacturers to include UHF tuners. Viewers who wanted UHF channels had to purchase expensive external converters, and even then the picture quality was often unreliable. Television sets were not required to carry all-channel tuning until Congress passed the All-Channel Receiver Act in 1964. DuMont was forced to use UHF to expand, and one UHF station after another went dark from poor ratings. The network bought a distressed UHF outlet, KCTY on channel 25 in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1954. It ran for three months before DuMont shut it down, unable to compete with three established VHF stations. FCC official Hyman H. Goldin said in 1960 that if four VHF outlets had existed in the top markets, DuMont would have turned profitable.

  AT&T controlled the coaxial cable and microwave links that carried television signals between stations during the 1940s and 1950s. The phone company lacked enough circuits to relay all four networks' signals simultaneously, so it allocated relay time among them. In 1950, NBC and CBS each received more than 100 hours of live prime time network service. ABC received 53 hours. DuMont received 37. AT&T also required every network to lease radio lines as well as television lines. DuMont was the only network without a radio operation, making it the only one that paid for a service it had no use for.

  By February 1955, DuMont's management concluded it could not continue operating a national television network.

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• 7. What Survived

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  DuMont's kinescopes were recorded on 35mm and 16mm film. The Ampex electronic videotape recorder did not exist until late 1956, after the network had already closed. By the early 1970s, a successor company, most likely Metromedia, reportedly disposed of the library in New York City's East River. The aim was to clear warehouse space for videotapes. Submerged film has occasionally been recovered from such situations; a title called The Carpet from Bagdad is one example of a film retrieved after years underwater. No salvage-diving effort has been made for the DuMont archive. Other kinescopes not thrown into the river went through a reclaiming process in which silver was extracted from the photographic emulsion.

  About 350 complete DuMont programs are believed to survive. Seven of them are early Honeymooners comedy sketches recorded between 1951 and 1952. Most surviving episodes are thought to have come from the personal archives of hosts, not from any formal preservation effort. Jackie Gleason and Dennis James are among those whose collections contributed.

  The Paley Center for Media in New York holds some of what survives. So does the UCLA Film and Television Archive in Los Angeles, the Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia, and the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago. In the late 1970s, Metromedia chose not to renew copyright registrations on DuMont's surviving material, and those copyrights lapsed. Some DuMont programs had never been copyrighted at all; live broadcasts were ineligible for copyright protection under the laws of the time. Rebroadcasting DuMont material costs nothing in licensing fees, yet most series are seldom seen because so few episodes remain.

  Life Is Worth Living is an exception. A large number of its episodes survived, and the Eternal Word Television Network airs them weekly and sells a collection on DVD. Small numbers of Cavalcade of Stars and Morey Amsterdam Show episodes have been commercially released. Captain Video and Rocky King have each had surviving episodes distributed by at least one public-domain programming company. Clarke Ingram, who maintained a DuMont memorial website, suggested Fox can be considered a revival of DuMont, or at least its linear descendant. When News Corporation purchased WTTG and the former WABD in 1986, those original DuMont stations became the nucleus of the Fox Television network. For 50 years after DuMont's closure, it remained the only major American broadcast television network to have ceased operations. That distinction ended in September 2006 when The CW Television Network launched from the merger of UPN and The WB.

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