Dissertation Research: Behind the Box: Science, Technology, and the Television Industry, 1920-1970

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Using television as a case study, this study contributes to the broad understanding of the complex relationship between technology and society in twentieth century America. It focuses on the technological and organizational development of television from its beginnings as a laboratory experiment in the first decades of the twentieth century to its maturity as a large technological system in the postwar years. The research and business strategy of the electronics firms involved in television changed fundamentally from the prewar to the postwar period. As such, television serves as a case study of how an industry, its research structure, and a complex technological system changed in response to the profound transformations of World War II and the Cold War. Drawing from a wide range of documentary sources, the study analyzes the large technological system of television through much of the twentieth century. It is driven by a series of questions, much of which are embedded in the broad historical literatures on American technology, industrial research, and Cold War science and technology. How did independent and corporate inventors define, approach, and solve the `problem` of television in the 1930's? What were the implications of WWII for the technology of television and for the ways in which research was managed at U.S. electronic firms? How did the Cold War influence the development of consumer electronics in the postwar years? In what ways was television applied to military projects?