Today's Tidbit... The First Televised Football Game

Many football history buffs know the first televised football game was the 1939 season-opening contest between Fordham and Waynesburg. Still, fewer know why they chose that game for the first televised football game or other aspects of the game. Don't worry. We've got you covered.

RCA president David Sarnoff introduced commercial television to the world at the 1939 World's Fair in New York, after which RCA began broadcasting fifteen hours of content per week. Like some later Silicon Valley companies that made good, RCA lost their butts on early television, but they had to prove their value to some consumers before others would adopt the new technology.

RCA's early content was mostly studio-based musical acts, discussions, and similar content with isolated content shot on location, particularly sporting events. During the spring and summer of 1939, RCA broadcast a Columbia baseball game, cycling and track events from Madison Square Garden, a prize fight from Yankee Stadium, and tennis from the Westchester Country Club. Each event occurred in metro New York for two interrelated reasons. First was the greater Gotham City area's installed base of 1,000-some televisions -more than anywhere else in the country- so content of interest to New Yorkers made sense. Second, New York was home to the Empire State Building, which housed RCA/NBC's only transmitter. The relays of the era that sent the video signal from a remote location to the Empire State Building could only send the signal a limited distance, so New York locations were a requirement.

Harrison High received a television as a gift, and it was so advanced that they put the physics teacher in charge of it. Of course, this was the beginning of high school audio-visual teams. ('Harrison High School Gets Acquainted With World's Eighth Wonder,' Daily Item (Port Chester, NY), September 15, 1939.)