Telegraph to Television: Telecomm's Long and Bumpy Beginning

If you happened to have been a late-night wanderer in the darkened upper floors of Old Main in the mid-1890s, you might have been puzzled to hear a quiet, metallic, clicking noise coming from some of the student rooms. Old Main at this time served as dormitory and classroom, as well as administration building, and the students had augmented their modest quarters by running wires from room to room, setting up a small telegraph system and messaging each other with the dots and dashes of Morse code. Telecommunications came early to Penn State.

The telegraph was a revolutionary technology, the first harnessing of electricity for distant, instant communication. It would evolve into the transmission of voice – the telephone – then shed its wires to become radio broadcasting, and later television. That technology would blossom into today’s global communications system, the technical and industrial spine of contemporary information, commerce, culture and politics.

The study of and career preparation for this powerful and multifaceted enterprise is the mission of today’s Telecommunications and Media Industries Department in the Bellisario College of Communications. This article looks at the early development of the department, from the dots and dashes of the 1880s to the formation of the School of Communications in the mid-1980s.

An Engineering Prologue

The first classes that would serve as the direct ancestors of today’s department weren’t introduced until the 1940s, but at least a dotted line connection can be made to the activity in engineering at the turn of the last century. Electric lighting came to Old Main in 1887, with the Physics program promptly creating an “electrotechnics option” that same year. In 1891, “electrotechnics” became Electrical Engineering (EE) and the first class in “Telegraph and Telephone” welcomed students. EE gained departmental status in 1893 and was soon the most popular major at Penn State.[1] Popular as well, on campus and far beyond, was the fascination with telegraphy and telephony, both wonders of the age. Students not only wired Old Main, they created clubs for both telegraph and telephone.[2]

The wires soon began falling away, however, and with the new century came over-the-air, or “wireless” telegraphy, the radio transmission of the Morse Code dots and dashes. EE added a class on the subject, EE 13, in 1910 and created as a class laboratory Penn State’s first rudimentary wireless station.[3] The modest facility was soon upgraded with the addition of a 203-foot tower, and in 1912 received a government license to operate as an experimental station with the call letters “8XE”. The station was used primarily for research and instruction, but it could not escape the gravity well that was, even then, Penn State football. In November 1911, in what the Penn State Collegian hailed as “the first official messages directed to the Pennsylvania State College wireless station,”[4] quarter-by-quarter scores of the away game against the University of Pennsylvania were relayed to eager students waiting in the Old Main Chapel. The final score: State 22, Penn 6. The graduating class of 1912 was so taken with the wireless project that they paid for the new tower and for construction of a small brick operations building, donating it to the school as that year’s class gift.[5]

The Radio Years

It wasn’t until 1939 that Penn State College offered a liberal arts class that embraced, at least in part, radio: Dramatics 61: Appreciation of the Theatre, Cinema and Radio.[7] Given its nature and scope, it was arguably also Penn State’s first “media studies” class. It was certainly a recognition of the growing importance of both film and radio in the life of the nation. In the era before television, they were two of the country’s principal forms of entertainment. Pictures first began “talking” in the late 1920s, quickly attracting millions of weekly theater goers and helping displace much of Vaudeville. Radio was, if anything, even more popular by virtue of its economics. After purchase of the receiving set, it was essentially a free source of entertainment and news, an especially important consideration during the Depression when even the cost of a movie ticket was beyond the means of many.

At Penn State, a growing emphasis on liberal arts education provided a nurturing environment for course work that could take advantage of the opportunities created by the new communications media, and in 1941 the Speech Department launched the College’s first professional radio course. Speech 300: Principles of Radio Speech was crafted, according to the course bulletin, for “The study and practical application of speech as it pertains to radio,” with emphasis on voice training and “the general problems of radio delivery.” Issues of programming and production were added to the class in 1943, although little more was done until after World War II.

In 1947, the Department hired Dr. Harold Nelson, a Ph.D. from Iowa State, who would be instrumental in leading their radio activities over the next several decades. With Nelson onboard, the Speech Department added two more undergraduate radio courses: Speech 425: Advanced Principles of Radio Speech; and Speech 435: Radio Organization. The latter went beyond radio announcing and for the first time took up all the principal elements of industry practice. The catalog copy promised “An analysis of the organization and operation of stations and networks, their legal regulation, and their relationship to business agencies and the general public.”

Moreover, the department designated a program in “Radio and Lecture-Recital” as one of its three general curricular options. And in the 1948-49 academic year, it began Penn State’s first graduate course in radio, Speech 540: Seminar in the Problems of Radio. The department also initiated what became an annual summer Radio and (later Television) Institute, bringing in leaders from educational and commercial broadcasting for lectures and discussion.

The post-War years saw radio moving into other departments as well. Journalism introduced Journ 90: Writing Radio News and Advertising in the 1946-1948 (cq) catalog, adding Journ 95: Practices in Writing Radio News and Advertising in the 1948-49 academic year. Dramatics began Dram. 480: Radio Drama, and Dram. 481: Advanced Radio Drama at the same time.

Just as the young radio curriculum was gaining momentum, however, a new form of media technology was emerging, one that would reshape not just the Penn State course catalog, but global economics, politics and culture. In the early 1950s, television was on its way.

The TV 50s

Television technology was sufficiently advanced by the late 1930s that NBC was ready to roll it out for public consumption, but World War II halted commercial development. Following the war, the nation’s industrial engine retooled for the production of consumer goods, including and especially television sets. Demand for TV station licenses was so strong that the Federal Communications Commission couldn’t handle the flood of applications and in 1948 ordered a freeze on allocations. It took four years to sort out the technical and policy issues, but when the regulatory smoke cleared, the Commission had set aside 242 licenses for educational stations. Penn State, which had been experimenting with closed-circuit television as a teaching tool, was almost vibrating with eagerness to get involved. The College hosted a national conference in 1952 to consider the ways and means of distributing the new educational licenses and began preparations to start a station of its own.[8]

While it would take more than a decade to realize that goal, the national and local enthusiasm for television served as the backdrop for the Speech Department’s creation of Penn State’s first TV course. Speech 437: Principles of Television Speech debuted in 1952. The Department built a TV studio for the class, which produced and recorded programs subsequently aired by local commercial stations.

Radio, meanwhile, was far from neglected. Students, supported by Speech, formed the Penn State Radio Guild. Using the Department’s radio labs, they produced weekly programs aired by local broadcast outlets. They also rallied efforts to start a new College radio station. After a stuttering start, Altoona’s WFBG-FM radio station donated a used transmitter; Senior Class Gifts in 1951 and 1952 provided funding; and the University secured an educational FCC broadcasting license. In December 1953 WDFM went on the air.

At about the same time, Speech reorganized its curriculum, creating seven areas of specialization. Radio and Television was among them and by 1955 it had some 40 majors.[9] Journalism joined the television parade the next year. Journ 92 became Radio and Television News, and Journ 94, Radio and Television Advertising. And while the department’s listing of potential career paths for majors – newspapers, magazines and advertising – did not mention broadcasting, changes were afoot. Interest in journalism and advertising had been growing steadily through the early 1950s and by mid-decade, the Department was lobbying for elevation to “School” status, which would provide more autonomy and more prestige in the College of Liberal Arts. In its initial 1953 proposal, the Department went so far as to suggest that all of the university’s research and teaching activities in communication be combined into one unit to be designated as the School of Journalism and Communications. It would house academic studies in mass communication as well as professional preparation in journalism, advertising, public relations and radio and television. Thirty years later, this would be a template for the new School of Communications, but at the time not all parties were enthused, and discussion of the plan was, if nothing, robust. At one point in the process, Speech Department head Robert Oliver wrote a memo taking clear umbrage at a suggestion that journalism might oversee or control the mass communication and television curriculum: “. . . to do anything at all that would imply that television – and the basic theories of mass communication – are adjuncts of any one department would, I feel, be untrue to the facts and detrimental to best educational utilization.”[10]

In the end, a more modest plan was adopted, one for the formation of a School of Journalism within Liberal Arts.[11] For a few more years, but only a few, Speech and Journalism would pursue broadcast education independently.

In one other significant reorganization, the University, in 1956, created the School of Fine and Applied Arts, also within the College of Liberal Arts. A Department of Theatre Arts replaced the Dramatics program within the new School and offered its own small roster of courses in radio and television, as well as in motion pictures.

It was all an example of a common phenomenon in the academy. As a new communications technology emerged – be it radio, television, the internet or artificial intelligence – various units across the university would stake their own particular claim to its study and technical or professional development. So, by 1957, instruction in and the study of broadcasting was spread across the university. Everyone knew it was not an optimal situation; and it was one just begging for the attention of a university committee.

The Interdepartmental Major

By the end of the 1950s, television was in 90 percent of the nation’s homes. It was rapidly becoming the dominant form of entertainment in the United States, displacing radio and film. The two major TV networks, NBC and CBS, were offering 15-minute evening news programs, expanding them to 30 minutes in the early 1960s. Consequently, at Penn State, TV was burrowing its way into multiple majors across campus.

In March 1959, the University’s Vice President for Academic Affairs, Larry Dennis, organized a committee of interested parties to bring some order to the curricular jumble. Noting that representatives of Speech, Journalism and Theatre Arts had been meeting “for some time. . . as an informal committee,” Dennis sought to formalize their conversations, which he aimed at creating a “cooperative curriculum in television and radio.”[12] Harold Nelson and Department Head Robert Oliver would represent Speech; Walter Walters, Theatre Arts; and Richard Byers, Advertising. A newcomer to the faculty, Marlowe Froke, was tapped to represent Journalism. Froke had significant professional experience in radio news plus undergraduate and graduate degrees in journalism. He was recruited from the University of Illinois where he ran public affairs programming for its educational TV station.[13]

The person doing the recruiting was himself relatively new to Penn State. Gene Goodwin took over as Director of the new School of Journalism in 1958, coming with impressive professional credentials as a reporter and editor at the Associated Press, the Washington Star and Baltimore Sun.[14] He had bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism and political science but no other academic experience and set out on a self-educational tour of college journalism programs across the country. He discovered, in part, a growing emphasis on radio and television news. And, as he explained in a February 1959 memo to Liberal Arts Dean Ben Euwema, hiring Froke and creating a new course in advanced TV news was “the logical next step in the expansion of the radio-television part of our program.” [15] The following month, Goodwin was named chair of the new University TV-Radio Curriculum Committee.

The committee wasted no time in attacking its charge of creating “a broad professional program of education in television-radio that is inter-departmental in its scope and professional in its orientation.”[16] In late April it proposed, as a start, the creation of two foundation courses in radio-tv, a broad Introduction to Mass Media of Communication survey course, and a practicum in “basic operating and production techniques for radio and television.” Beyond that the program would draw from existing courses across the four departments. Additional meetings through May shaped and polished the full major. The nomenclature was changed early on, with “Radio-Television” replaced by “Broadcasting.” The committee also became quite territorial, arguing the singular right to control the character and content of the emerging broadcasting curriculum, going so far as to propose that all existing broadcast-related courses across the effected units drop their existing departmental designations and be relabeled as “Broadcasting” courses. Subsequent, and no doubt lively, discussion culminated in agreement to cross-list relevant courses instead. At the same time, a long list of serious and thoughtful policy positions were articulated concerning the growing social, political and cultural role of television and the critical importance of emphasizing to students their public responsibility as broadcast professionals.

The final proposal envisioned a major composed of the two core Broadcast courses and three courses chosen from a short list across Speech, Journalism and Theatre Arts. Students would specialize in one of four areas aligned with the relevant departments: News, Advertising, Production Arts (in Théâtre Arts), and Programming (in Speech). Students would graduate with a BA in the particular department, Speech for example, and a major in Broadcasting.[17] With minor amendments, the new program, the University’s first full Broadcasting major, appeared in the 1961-62 Undergraduate Bulletin, with Froke listed as Professor in Charge.

The program was adopted by all four departments. Previously students in each area could take specialized classes in broadcasting but only within the existing degrees, News and Editorial, for example, in Journalism. Now they had their own major.

Despite the logical practicality and the good intentions of the program, however, inter-departmental majors are awkward beasts and don’t always fit well with university cultures marked by strong departmental sovereignty. Within two years of its creation, the Broadcasting program had come under attack by the School of Journalism’s accrediting body, which said that it suffered from “administrative confusion,” and advised the School to abandon it in favor of an in-house curriculum.[18]

By 1965, the School was taking that advice. Director Goodwin reported to the Liberal Arts Dean that “the major in Broadcasting continues to be a problem for us.”[19] He explained that the School was taking a cross-media approach that integrated print and broadcast in most of its courses, so the break-out by technological platform was making less sense. The Advertising Department voted outright to drop the program. Journalism was considering doing the same. Goodwin went further, proposing that the major be killed in Liberal Arts. It didn’t help the program’s cause that Froke, its Professor in Charge and champion in Journalism, left that post to take a new job heading up the University’s effort to launch its educational television station, WPSX-TV. Ultimately, Speech and Theatre Arts joined Journalism in voting to kill Broadcasting as a stand-alone major, making it a program option for each department in 1967. As such it melded into the three existing curricula. By the end of the decade, Journalism, for example, had dropped several of the non-departmental course requirements and substituted its own.

Theatre Arts continued through the 1960s and 1970s to offer three courses in radio and television production but gradually moved away from broadcasting and toward film. From its original listing as the “Major in Broadcasting (production arts)”, it became the “Film-Television Production Arts Option” in 1968. The Department of Theatre Arts itself became the Department of Theatre and Film in 1975 and two years later even the “Film-Television Production Option” vanished, replaced by a new major in “Film.” One or two courses in TV remained on the books, but for Theatre, the broadcasting program faded to black.

Speech made its own modifications, but in contrast to Theatre Arts began expanding the program. With Froke’s departure, Arthur Hungerford, in Speech, took over as program administrator. Hungerford had been with Penn State for only a few years but was one of the nation’s most experienced television professionals, having helped launch the technology with RCA in the late 1930s, then turning his significant energies to educational television in the early 1950s. Through the late 1960s and into the 1970s, the Speech Department’s “General Broadcasting Option”, then, underwent significant change. By 1974 all of the original journalism and theatre requirements had been replaced with Speech courses. And Speech courses proliferated. Starting with four radio and television classes in the early 1960s, Speech offered nine by the mid-1970s, adding topics in programming, writing, international media (SpCom 419: Comparative Broadcasting Systems) and history (SpCom 140: The History of American Television). By the end of the decade, the Department had clear ownership of the university’s television curriculum. The General Broadcast option retained an “interdepartmental” label, but for all practical purposes it was a Speech program.

It was a good subject for a university department to control at the time. Through the 1960s and into the 1970s, television’s dominance of news, information and entertainment only grew. It was the national narcotic, the ubiquitous evening occupation, and the medium that, by the late 1970s, the country’s high school and college age population had been raised on. Increasing numbers of young people sought careers in television and the demand for a college degree in the area boomed. In 1963, in the early days of the Broadcast major, 53 students were enrolled across the participating departments. By 1968, even with the various changes to the options, that number had grown to 100, more than half of them in Speech.[20]

The Telecommunications Major

The increase in student numbers, and therefore student credit hours, would have benefited Speech in any requests it made for additional resources to help meet demand. At the same time, it created a conundrum for the Department, which had, despite its support for the broadcasting curriculum, historically privileged a scholarly versus professional academic orientation. Its culture and traditions were rooted in rhetoric and rhetorical analysis and in the freshly developing field of communications studies; in 1976 the Department changed its name to Speech Communication, denoting the wider wingspan. The broadcasting program, in fact, served as something of a cash cow for the Department, helping support the smaller general speech-comm program with its larger complement of tenured faculty.

Moreover, there was growing pressure from the College and the University to continue to improve scholarly productivity. Therefore, as it hired new faculty in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Department brought in people with strong interests and abilities in research and publication, but who also could be assigned, as part of their course load, to the broadcast production courses. Unfortunately, it left the department with a group of young scholars more interested in the critical analysis of media systems than in teaching undergraduates to operate Vidicon TV cameras. The end result was a push to deflect the direction of the Broadcasting option, creating a new major that would subsume the production aspects of the program but elevate to pride of first place theory and analysis.

In 1981, Speech Communication put forward a proposal for the creation of a major in “Communications Media.” As the subsequent bulletin description explained, “the emphasis in the program is on critical and theoretical analysis of the foundation of media systems,” although students could “also learn the fundamentals of audio and video production.”

The proposal was, of course, shared with Journalism, where it raised eyebrows if not hackles. While the School of Journalism had corralled its own broadcasting curricula into the narrower confines of news and advertising, it too had been expanding its interests and resources in the realm of scholarly communications research. Several of the new or newly-named Speech Comm courses appeared to duplicate classes offered by the School and the proposal as a whole was seen by some as a disciplinary landgrab.

Journalism requested that the College of Liberal Arts curriculum committee put a hold on the proposal. The committee did so and directed what it saw as the two feuding camps to sit down and thrash it out. Taking the lead in the discussions were Richard Barton from Speech Communication and John Nichols from Journalism, both young scholars with shared interests in international communications. (One of the points of contention was the overlap between Barton’s SpCom 419 class and Nichols’ Journ 473 course, both of which focused on international media systems.)

Initial conversations between the two were guarded and uncertain, but whatever chill might have existed at the start soon thawed as both men, smart and well-intended, reach accords on the various interlocking issues. Ultimately, the talks were, in Barton’s words, “frank and positive” and “reflected a general willingness. . . to work together to strengthen the study of mass communication at Penn State.”[21]

Redundancy in courses such as international communications and media and society were sorted out by dividing up the territory and cross-listing. So, Journalism’s 473 targeted cross-border communication and Speech Com’s 419 focused on international comparative communication. The real key to the resolution, however, was a relabeling of the major and most of its courses. Instead of “Communications Media,” the new program would be a Bachelor of Arts in Telecommunications. Course titles followed suit, with, for example, SpCom 401: Communication Media Research becoming Telecommunications Research, and SpCom 435: Theories and Issues of Mass Media becoming Theories and Issues of Telecommunications. The relabeling did not alter the overall substance of the curriculum but the new nomenclature helped paper over the structural conflict in a way that allowed the revised proposal to go though. (Discussions between the two units additionally generated proposals for a joint undergraduate degree and a master’s degree in Mass Communication.)

With some fine tuning by subsequent committees, the Degree in Telecommunications appeared in the 1983-84 course catalog. The required core courses, one in production and one in theory, were: SpCom 335: Introduction to Audio and Video Production, and SpCom 419: International Telecommunications or SpCom 435: Theories and Issues in Telecommunications. Further reflecting the turn toward theory, three more courses would be chosen from: SpCom 210: Production of the Linguistic Code, SpCom 220: Rhetorical Foundations of Communication, SpCom 230: Introduction to Human Communication theory and Research, and SpCom 240: Foundations of Telecommunications. Another 9-15 credits had to come from “courses related to media studies.”

Ironically, the major lived for only a year or two in the Department of Speech Communication. Discussions about the major were a precursor to much larger talks concerning the creation of a new college-level School of Communications at Penn State. Early concepts for such a school envisioned the aggregation of the existing Journalism and Speech Communication units with Ag. Communication and the Film program from Arts and Architecture. The faculty in Speech Communication balked at such proposals, however. They were not keen to participate in what they saw as a largely professional program, preferring to maintain their posture as a cadre of rhetoricians and communication theorists. That sensitivity did not, however, extend to the Telecommunications major, for despite the attempt to reshape it into a media studies program, the great majority of its students wanted production. When the new School of Communications opened for business in 1986, it therefore included in its offerings the Telecommunications major, forged in and then jettisoned by Speech Comm.

In the Telecomm major, the new School inherited a curriculum, a fair amount of radio and television equipment, and 264 majors, more than one-third of all the students in the School. What it did not receive were any faculty members. While Barton and Assistant Professor Mary Mander came over from Speech Comm, they took advantage of the jump to flee from the Telecomm production classes and fill their teaching load with media studies courses.[22]

The School of Communications quickly organized its own media studies program, which included Barton and Mander, but pondered for a year or so what to do about Telecommunications. Given the lack of faculty, suggestions included combining it with the arts-oriented Film program, which terrified the film faculty, or killing it altogether.

Losing hundreds of undergraduates did not, however, seem like a realistic proposition and a body of instructors, many of them fixed-term and part-timers, was hobbled together until the major could mature in its new home. The process would take some years but was aided by the fact that, initially, the School was not organized in formal departments and faculty could teach in multiple areas. Early tenured and tenure-track instructors in Telecomm included Nichols and recently-arrived University of Minnesota Ph.D. Patrick Parsons.

Over the next few years, the School also sorted out problems of curricular overlap between Telecommunications and both Film and Media Studies by reorienting to serve the interests of students going into business and legal careers in broadcasting, while still maintaining production opportunities. The curriculum over time would continue to adapt to the ever-changing technology and its social implications, crafting courses in internet law and policy, telecommunications ethics, wireless communication even gaming. In the new School, and later College, of Communications, it was an academically integrated and well-supported program, finally and firmly situated to engage the telecommunications industries of the 21^st century.