Nothing brings a community together like the collective glow of its televisions. In the spring of 1948, American John Walson (1914-1993) installed community antenna television, bringing the wonders of cable television to his customers.
Walson and his wife Margaret, owners of the Service Electric Company of Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania, came up with cable television as a way to help their customers pick up signals blocked by nearby mountains. Walson decided to take his service literally to new heights by climbing to the top of a mountain and planting an antenna. Using cables and signal boosters, he connected the antenna to his appliance store. Along the way he dropped the signal directly off at his customers' homes, thus creating the first community antenna television system.
Community antenna television, now known as Cable TV, is found in nearly 60 percent of U.S. homes and throughout Europe. The first cable systems consisted of a large antenna to capture the signal and a grid of signal amplifiers arranged throughout the service area. As the signal moved along the cable it weakened, forcing the designers to implement amplifiers at regular intervals. But amplification added noise and distortion to the signal and created a potential place for the signal to be completely lost.
Soon thereafter, cable was fortified as more and more channels were added. Microwave transmitters and receivers were used to capture distant signals, giving cable providers more channel choices. The wave for sofa-bound channel surfers was fast approaching tidal proportions.
