Black Gate

Through the number of television sets in living rooms rose exponentially from 1948 to 1958, programming lagged behind. At first networks provided their affiliates only enough programs to fill what we now call prime time. The rest of the day was filled in piecemeal over time, early morning shows, late-night chat, afternoon soaps and game shows.

Local stations had little choice. They found ways to fill in non-network time. Budgets were ridiculously small, just sufficient to hire a personable young newcomer willing to work cheap with few other props than a desk and a chair and their ingenuity in filling hours of airtime without a script. Steve Allen and Ernie Kovacs made their names with innovative and distinctive locals shows before the networks swooped them up. Thirty-year-old Betty White took over a show called Hollywood on Television in 1952. It broadcast five-and-a-half hours a day, six days a week for four years. (To fill up her copious free time she also starred in the local, later syndicated, sitcom Life with Elizabeth.)

Having no idea of what would work and hours to experiment with, local stations tried every type of show they could think of: cooking, gardening, public affairs, fashion. And then for the afterschool crowd, kiddie shows.

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The 20th century is one long run of wonder elements. Radium dominated the early years, when the magic of X-rays – seeing through solid objects! – created a worldwide sensation. Uranium and atomic power followed after World War II and then it was silicon’s time as driver of the computer age.

Forgotten today is that selenium once stood as high as these three, especially in the years around World War I. Headlines called it the “Mystery Metal” and the “Magic Eye,” that it would “Revolutionize Aerial Warfare” and “Make Blind See” and maybe even be a “Cancer Cure.” Selenium had the property of transforming electromagnetic radiation – visible light, in this case – into electricity, almost as much a miracle as penetrating hands to see the bones underneath.

“Selenium is also used in the observation of the transit of Venus and eclipses of the sun, to light and extinguish buoys automatically, to guide, and explode torpedoes, for measuring X-rays, and in the glass industry,” explained a 1913 Harper’s Weekly article that was widely reprinted in newspapers.

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Probably the quickest and most thorough technological disruption in history was the introduction of sound to movies. A novelty when a few short scenes were included in the 1927 film The Jazz Singer, sound had almost completely taken over the industry by 1930 despite the at times desperate battle against the cost of changing by both movie studios and theater owners.

The havoc wreaked over Hollywood is the stuff of a thousand books. Performers, especially those dozens of stars who migrated from Europe to share in the movie boom of the 1920s, saw their careers disappear because of their accents or some other failing in their speaking voices. Writers who until that time could make do with plot outlines lost their jobs to stage writers accustomed to creating atmosphere from pure dialog. Cameramen found their expressively mobile cameras confined to soundproof booths whose heat could make them faint if a take too took long. Practically every craft got turned upside down and shaken hard – just as America started sinking into the Great Depression.

One allied but non-Hollywood aspect of the business got hurt worst of all, an entire profession wiped out in a matter of months. Who got the blame? Robots.

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Robot fever first gripped the U.S. in the 1930s. The decade saw a procession of robots across newspaper headlines, with everybody from industrial giant Westinghouse to 13-year-old Bobby Lambert making the news for robots they built. Tens of millions of households owned automobiles, telephones were never far from a hand, families huddled around radios, and electric appliances dotted modern kitchens. The economy might have hit a minor glitch, but despite that – and in many cases because of that, as newspapers strove to carry stories that looked forward to the glistening recovery rather than the gloomy present – robots seemed the obvious choice for the next major technology to invade daily life.

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The International Time Capsule Society (ITCS) is an organization established in 1990 to promote the careful study of time capsules. It strives to document all types of time capsules throughout the world. When founded, the group was headquartered at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, Georgia.

Hey, that’s not crazier than studying robots. And, like robots, information about time capsules – like time capsules themselves – easily gets hidden or obscure. Somebody needs to dig around, often literally, to get their stories on paper. And sometimes a robot is involved.

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In my last column I talked about the hugely exciting and popular Sinclair Oil robot dinosaur exhibit at the 1933 Chicago Century of Progress Exposition. As an aside I mentioned that the exhibit traveled to the Texas Centennial Exposition in 1936.

Few people remember that the Texas Exposition had another robot exhibit. This one was quite a contrast. What would qualify if you wanted to imagine the most boring robot exhibit ever devised? C’mon, you might say, a boring robot exhibit is an oxymoron. Not for the government. They rose to the challenge. The U.S. Department of Labor choose to build a talking robot to justify machines taking away jobs from people. In the middle of the Depression. Triumph! Let’s go, gang! The sarsaparilla’s on me!

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Oil comes from dinosaurs. That’s not true, but millions of kids in the 20th century knew this as a fact. They were the victims of one of the most wildly successful marketing campaigns of all time. Or maybe the marketers were, because their modest claims were equally wildly misinterpreted by a wholly credulous audience of scientific illiterates. How do I segue from oil and dinosaurs to robots? Just like every other journey I’ve ever taken I do it by changing planes in Chicago.

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