![]() Within two months of its 1948 debut, Milton Berle’s “Texaco Star Theater” was so popular, it was the only network show not preempted for coverage of Harry Truman’s surprise election upset over Thomas Dewey. 14 years later, 45 million football fans viewed the heart-stopping NFL championship game between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants, helping launch the nation's enduring love affair between TV and football.ĭominant TV personalities also captured the nation’s collective attention. Some 29 million people around the country watched Dwight Eisenhower’s 1953 presidential inauguration. ![]() Americans could now see events happening live, thousands of miles away, from the comfort of their living rooms or local taverns. Television heightened the nation’s sense of shared community, fostered for decades by radio. ![]() households owning a TV set rose from 2 percent in 1948 to almost 90 percent by 1960. But as the number of stations, channels and programs scaled up, so did TV sales: U.S. At first, a handful of stations operated, with limited broadcast range. ![]() While the technology for the new medium had been introduced before the war, it wasn’t until 1947 that full-scale commercial TV broadcasts began. Between 19, years now considered the “Golden Age of Television,” a mix of pioneering shows, from "Howdy Doody" to “I Love Lucy” to “Dragnet,” began shaping and redefining TV-and with it, American culture. When television flickered into America's living rooms in the years after World War II, it took less than a decade for it to overtake radio as the nation's dominant entertainment medium. ![]()
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