Radio/Television/Sound: Radio Aesthetics and Perceptual Technics in Early American Television

Media theorists and historians have long posited a genealogical connection between radio and television. 1 Most commonly, this relationship has been discussed in terms of a history of broadcasting, the dominant framework within which both media were developed in an American context. 2 In addition to the large number of historiographic works that stress the institutional continuity between television and radio, theories of television sound have typically centered on the assumption that the emergence of television was simply a function of adding images to the medium's blind ancestor, the inverse of the transformation from to silent to sound cinema in the 1920s. 3 But as a 1950 television advertisement by Westinghouse Electric Corporation demonstrates, the relationship of radio sound to television sound is not as uncomplicated as existing models of television sound have suggested. During the two-minute spot, the company's spokesmodel emphasizes the "eighteenth-century styling" of the unit on display and touts the benefits of the company's proprietary "electronic magnifier" feature as well as the Westinghouse black glass tube, which would deliver "a better, clearer, sharper picture, day or night." In addition to the unit's allegedly superior visual capacities, it also offered superior sound via "three other kinds of entertainment right at your finger tips": AM radio, FM radio, and phonograph. In distinguishing the first two formats from one another, the spokesmodel observes, "you get wonderful static-free music when you turn [the dial] to FM; you get your favorite radio programs when you turn it to AM."