156 | Mass Media and Historical Change
stepped into the footsteps of radio – up to and including being placed in the
living room and having its programme schedules published in the radio pro-
gramme guides. On the other hand possible alternative uses analogue to the
telephone (picture telephones) or to the phonograph record (video storage)
were hardly followed up.
Television, like film and radio, did not have a single inventor. It was based
on a multiplicity of loosely linked individual research in various countries (cf.
Abramson 1987). A foundation was laid in 1884 by the German engineer
Paul Nipkow with a disc that broke up pictures into light and dark signals
for purposes of transmission. He never recognised the potential of his pat-
ented invention and did not pursue it further. Beginning in the mid-1920s,
Germany, Great Britain and the United States made first attempts at transmit-
ting television signals, after radio had suggested possible means of implemen-
tation. The Berlin Radio Exhibition of 1928/29 played a prominent role in
making television known to the German public, but many were disappointed
by its poor picture quality. The world’s first regular television operation began
in 1935 in National Socialist Germany, and just before Great Britain. This
enabled Nazi Germany to propagate its modernity to the world on the eve
of the Berlin Olympics. Even later, international sports events continued to
spur on the development of television: the 1946 Olympics in London played
a defining role in accelerating the re-establishment of British television, the
Football World Cup of 1954 introduced it on the European Continent, and
the 1960 Rome Olympics led to the exchange of live images between Eastern
and Western Europe.
The television of the 1930s differed greatly from that of today. There were
usually only two hours of programming time during the evening and the trans-
mission range hardly reached beyond Berlin, London and Paris respectively.
Moreover, there were only three thousand sets before the war in London, and
in Berlin a mere seventy-five in 1937 (Abramson 1987; Winker 1994: 197).
In Berlin ‘television rooms’ allowed groups of people to view programmes on
small screens, and up to ten thousand people daily were said to have watched
major events like the Olympics in this way (Winker 1994: 195). Program-
ming already exhibited characteristic elements of later developments: in addi-
tion to the news, called ‘Aktueller Bildbericht’ (topical picture report), there
were game shows, music and comedy. Due to technical problems, only major
outdoor events were broadcast live – like the coronation of Britain’s King
George VI in 1937 and the Nürnberg Convention of the Nazi Party in the
same year. Since costs were immense and the number of viewers small, televi-
sion in its early days can best be seen as a prestigious investment that promised
participation and was equally opportune for both democracies and dictator-
ships. However, the Second World War brought an end to television in Great
Britain and reduced it mainly to a form of troop entertainment in Germany.