You think you spend too much time with your TV? Philo Farnsworth -- the Beaver, Utah, farm boy who had a workable idea for ''a way of sending pictures through the air'' by the time he was 16 -- told his undoubtedly baffled bride on their wedding night, ''You know, there's another woman in my life. Her name is television.'' Think about it: It was only the mid-1920s, yet already the notion of television as mistress was alive in an American imagination besides that of Aaron Spelling.
By 1931, the Radio Corp. of America (RCA) had reached a deal involving Farnsworth's patents for television technology (no fool, our Philo -- he demanded and got royalties, and the RCA lawyer was said to have cried when the contract was signed). Soon RCA, which would give birth to NBC, had rivals in the General Electric and DuMont companies, all racing to get shows -- and this was a new, odd-sounding phrase back then -- ''on the air.''
In 1931, William Paley, founder of what would become CBS, filed with the FCC to set up his first TV station, in Manhattan; it would feature, said its station director, ''boxing bouts, wrestling, football games, art exhibitions, classic dancing, palmistry, and news.'' Substitute sitcoms and dramas for art exhibitions, the Psychic Hotline for palmistry, and American Bandstand and MTV for classic dancing, and you could say that the essentials of television were already established. The American Broadcasting Co. (ABC) came along in 1943, and the three-way competition that was to dominate network television for the next five decades was in place.
For all the changes in society over the course of this century, the purpose of television -- a profit-driven medium constantly yielding edifying news and entertainment almost in spite of itself -- has remained remarkably consistent: to reach as many people as possible with the most democratic programming conceivable. Television unites the country in times of crisis and creates stars whose fame and cultural outreach exceed that of comparable figures in the movies or pop music. (The Beatles had screaming fans when they landed in America, but they didn't become a phenomenon until they appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show.)
In the '40s and '50s, this nascent medium borrowed and thieved from every aspect of entertainment to fill its airtime and nurture its own formats. From vaudeville, movie shorts, and radio programs, TV brought forth the half-hour sitcom. (Radio superstar Fred Allen sniped with bitter wit, ''TV is a device that permits people who haven't anything to do to watch people who can't do anything.'') Extrapolating from the theater and film worlds, television developed the hour-long drama. The first TV newscasts were bound by the conventions of the front page of the newspaper, but a newspaper that advertised cigarettes and wristwatches right alongside the headlines -- as in NBC's nicotine-sponsored Camel News Caravan. (Ashtrayed anchor John Cameron Swayze would sign off: ''That's the story, folks! Glad we could get together!'' Well, it beats Dan Rather's ''Courage!'').
