This Was Television On August 26
1939: MLB plays ball on TV for the first time
The Cincinnati Reds met the Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field in the first Major League Baseball contest to be aired on television. Experimental New York City station W2XBS, the forerunner to today’s WNBC-TV, carried the game. Regular TV programming of any sort, sports included, was still many years away, but the World’s Fair going on in New York during this week encouraged the attempt to join one of America’s newest technologies with its national pastime.
With only about 400 TV sets extant in the New York area in 1939, the broadcast likely reached an audience slightly larger than an average Miami Marlins game in 2012. -A.D.
Today’s Birthdays: Lee DeForest, inventor (d. 1961); Meredith Eaton, legal eagle (38); Michael Jeter, evening shaded (d. 2003); Melissa McCarthy, Stars Hollovian (42); Dylan O’Brien, lycanthrope (21).
One Response to “This Was Television On August 26”
[…] Columbia University’s Baker Field hosted a contest between Columbia and Princeton, ultimately won 2-1 by the visitors. Approximately 400 TV sets in the New York City area received the game, which was aired by experimental station W2XBS, the precursor to WNBC. The successful seven-inning broadcast led the station to move on to the major leagues later that summer. -A.D. […]