International Clown Hall of Fame via AP
Was Channel 7 the first TV station in Chicago as they claimed in their 1970s sign-off blurb? Nope. The real story is fascinating and surprising. There was television broadcasting in Chicago as early as the 1920s and 1930s according to the Broadcast Museum in Chicago.
Steve Jajkowski, the creator and webmaster of ChicagoTelevision.com, has worked with the MBC on past projects. He contributes to the MBC Experts blogs and he says:
From the middle to late 1930s, there were visual broadcast facilities utilizing a mechanical television system incompatible with today's broadcast standards but running a daily broadcast schedule, albeit just a few hours a day including test patterns.
The very first electronic experimental station in the Chicago area was W9XZV, launched in 1939; a small 100 watt station operating on what was then channel 1 on the VHF dial. Owned and operated by The Zenith Radio Corporation.
It's hard to believe there was TV that early on, but it kind of reminds me of the early days of the World Wide Web and the Internet when geeks and gurus put up information websites where you could get independent information without ads or spam or junk. Hey - that's kind of like Examiner!
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