This website seeks to encourage researchers and collectors to discover and study obscure ephemera that document American culture and life.  Worldcat reveals that most of the items that I post cannot be found in more than a few research libraries–often none at all.  Alternately, research libraries do not bother to catalog ephemeral publications like these.  I believe, however, that because these were distributed free, or at nominal cost, to consumers, they were the publications most likely to make their way into homes and be read by large numbers of Americans.

I acquire pre-1960 examples of the kinds of publications that prove so useful when scholars study 19th-Century America.  The limited competition that I encounter for them suggests that libraries, which could easily outbid me, have little interest in post-Civil War and 20th-century ephemeral publications in general.

I try to anticipate what materials future historians will find useful.  Being an historian first and a collector second, I organized this website to encourage others to do this too—even if this means new competition for me. I am aware that I could be wrong in prizing particular ephemera or even whole classes of ephemera.  I may even be wrong to encourage scholars to study obscure ephemeral publications; these may be obscure for good reason.

Ephemerastudies.org will permit me to share with others the information and imagery that I am acquiring, and to benefit from the knowledge, intelligence and experience of other scholars and collectors.  Please contact me with your impressions of the site.

~ Saul Zalesch

Title

1925 Vision of Television in 1935
Category
Magazine, gallery
Date

1925
Why It's Interesting

This is the cover of the May 1925 issue of Radio News.  [The margins are cropped off because damaged.]  This was America’s leading radio journal, edited by Hugo Gernsback, the technology visionary for whom sci-fi’s most prestigious award, the Hugo, is named.  He had organized the first radio club in 1909 and written the next year the first important popular book on radio.  In this issue he predicted a brilliant future–by 1935–for radio television.  This shows his ideal set.  The control that the woman holds, as he described it, sounds something like a cross between a video game controller and an ipod.  He wrote this when television “is almost within our grasp now.”  He credited the work of C. Francis Jenkins of D.C., and Edouard Belin, of Paris.  [The first acknowledged demonstration of TV would not occur until 1926.]  This article provides a lengthy discussion of the technology, especially the kinds of tubes that would be needed.

Gernsback was almost right.  Commercial TV was set to be launched in 1929, but the Wall Street Crash crippled it; then the Depression and World War II delayed it.  It finally reached the level he predicted for 1935 around 1947.

One interesting aspect of this artifact is what he chose for the video image.  It related to an explorer in “darkest  Africa” or up the Amazon sharing with viewers what he was seeing.
 
1925 Vision of Television in 1935 1925 Vision of Television in 1935