CABLE TV: THE EARLY YEARS

What we know today as Cable Television was originally called Community Antenna Service.  It was born in the mountains of Pennsylvania in the late 1940s; and John Walson, a small appliance store owner in Mahanoy City, is considered its creator.

Mr. Walson found himself having a great deal of trouble selling TVs to local residents since good picture quality was impossible to obtain.  He quickly determined he had two major problems.  First, his town was 90 miles from the three Philadelphia TV stations; and secondly, it sat in a valley surrounded by mountains.  Receiving good signal from Philadelphia was almost impossible since the mountain ranges hindered transmission. But the innovative Mr. Walson devised a solution.  He erected an antenna on top of a large utility pole located at the top of a nearby mountain.  This antenna received the distant television signals and transported them over twin-lead army surplus wire.  Walson then ran the wire on trees down the mountain ending at his appliance warehouse.  Area residents were amazed by the superior picture quality they saw at Walson's warehouse.  Needless to say, sales soared; but then another problem surfaced.  Buyers wanted to see the pictures on their newly-purchased sets as clearly as they had seen those at the television store.  It, therefore, became the responsibility of Mr. Walson to improve picture quality by using coaxial cable and self-manufactured "boosters" (amplifiers) to bring his community antenna system (CATV) to the homes of his customers. And thus cable TV was born.

In the early 1950s television was still in its infancy.  Though its popularity had not yet peaked, department stores still displayed many models obviously erecting unsightly antennas on top of its rooftops to obtain the best reception possible. Milton Jerrold Shapp (later governor of Pennsylvania) developed a system of consolidating this "forest of antennas" appearing on rootops city-wide.  Under his system, one master antenna (MATV) was used for all the TVs contained within that building.  Around the same time in nearby Lansford, another appliance salesman named Robert Tarlton decided to take the creations of Walson and Shapp one step further.  In order to sell TVs, he wired his entire community using coaxial cable and commercially-manufactured boosters.  This formed the basic footprint of what we today consider the Cable TV Industry.

The Later Years
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