| By: Carolyn Braff, Managing Editor | Published: October 1, 2009 |
September 30 marked the 70th anniversary of the first-ever televised football game, a 1939 contest between Waynesburg College and Fordham University. The telecast was produced in conjunction with the RCA/NBC pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair and aired on NBC’s experimental noncommercial television station, W2XBS. NBC’s first professional football telecast came the following month.
The first mobile production units ever built. The production truck (background), called the “pick-up bus,” had a camera on its roof. The transmission truck (foreground), or “transmitter bus,” had a mast that relayed the live signal to the Empire State Building.
The broadcast was a two-camera show that used two mobile units, the first mobile-television-production trucks ever built, both designed by RCA. The production truck contained rack-mounted equipment for two cameras: one up camera and one sideline camera, the latter carted on a dolly.
The second unit, a transmission truck, housed a 159-megacycle, 300-W transmitter with a hinged antenna mast. Each unit was about the size and shape of a 25-passenger bus and weighed 10 tons. Total power required to operate the units was approximately 20 kW.
The signal was sent from the remote site, the football field on Randall’s Island in New York City, to a receive point at the Empire State Building. From there, the signal was transmitted to a 50-mile radius within the New York metropolitan area.
Two cameras like this one were used at the first football-game production, an up camera and a sideline camera.
Camera-support equipment included Mitchell heads from the film industry, and 30-in. parabolic microphones from NBC Radio were used for sound gathering. RCA had two camera models — one for studio use and one for the field — but the field cameras did not have electronic viewfinders. Some had two sighting posts at the rear, and others had a foldout wire-frame viewfinder on the left side of the camera, similar to still-photography cameras of the time.
(Information provided by Bill Molzon, assistant professor of communication, Waynesburg University, Waynesburg, PA. For further details, read his article in Sports TV Production, available at http://www.sportstvproduction.com/issues/stvp_11.2003.pdf).
Related Stories
Sponsor Microsite Spotlight
Sponsor Microsites
Team SVG
