Television's false dawn: The problematic introduction of television in the Netherlands

Abstract

In the late 1920s and early 1930s countries like the United States, the United King dom and Germany experienced an early and rather premature television-boom. In hindsight the 'mechanical' television of those days seems primitive, but at the time it must have looked as if the time of 'seeing at a distance' had finally come, whatever that might eventually come to mean. Under those circumstances parties with a real or an assumed interest would be forced to take decisions with possibly long-lasting effects, based on tentative definitions of the tech nology and its uses, and their own position vis a vis the new medium. As far as Germany, Britain and the USA are concerned, what happened during the boom, as well as its causes and its effects, have been reasonably well documented by now. This study focuses on the case of the Netherlands, a pioneer country in radio broadcasting, with a large electronic industry, but with a radio system that differentiates it from both main types of broadcasting institutions, the public broadcasting monopoly and the private commercial broadcasting system.