OTD in early British television: 29 January 1939
John Wyver writes: A fortnight ago, one of the two mobile outside broadcast units took us to Watford Junction railway station for the first of a Sunday afternoon outing series titled Television Surveys. On Sunday 29 January, while its companion was presumably packing up at the Empire Pool, Wembley, the other unit was at the International Telephone Exchange (in operation above) in London’s Faraday Building for a broadcast that would appear to have been a pure expression of ‘the technological sublime’.
Britannica offers a useful introduction to the idea of the technological sublime:
Leo Marx, author of the techno-social study The Machine in the Garden (1964), coined the useful term technological sublime to indicate a quasi-spiritual haze given off by any particularly visible and impressive technological advance… Common models of the technological sublime include railroads, photography, aviation, giant dams, rural electrification (a particular Soviet favourite), atomic power and atomic weapons.
The best studies of the idea, at least against the history of the United States, are a pair of books by a pupil of Leon Marx, David E. Nye, who published Electrifying America in 1992, and its follow-up two years later, American Technological Sublime. Both are great reads.
International telephony given visual form in the internal workings of the Faraday Building in London would have been a fine example in 1939 of the technological sublime. Constructed on the site of an earlier telephone exchange, the dominating block, which more than doubled the size of the previous structure, was put up in 1933 to house the International Telephone Exchange.
With the OB van parked outside, this was the setting for host Leslie Mitchell to interview Miss Pagel and Miss Spinks, two of the supervisors of the hundreds of young women operators who worked there, and to discuss radio links and submarine cables with the exchange’s Chief Superintendant, Mr Spinks.
After which Leslie Mitchell made a call to the captain of the passenger liner ‘Aquitania’, at that point sailing across the Atlantic, and arranged for director of television Gerald Cock to make a call from Alexandra Palace to America. Shots were apparently included Cock phoning the Vice-President of the National Broadcasting Company. Intriguingly, the broadcast closed with a brief discussion of ‘Telephone-Television’.
The most detailed and delightful contemporary account of the International Telephone Exchange that I have found is in volume 2 part 31 of the weekly publication Wonders of World Engineering, which was published by Amalgamated Press between 2 March 1937 and 1 March 1938. Some kind soul has transferred each issue into online form, and it is a glorious collection of photographs, texts and – especially cutaway drawings – hymning railways, dams, cranes, oil refineries, bridges, mines and more.
Here is the publication’s breathless introduction to the Faraday Building, ‘the home of long-distance telephony’:
This building is, by its position and purpose, the telephone centre of Great Britain, of the British Empire and of the greater part of the world. From Faraday Building and its sister building in Carter Lane wire and wireless links radiate in every direction, and inside the buildings a maze of complicated apparatus embodies everything that human ingenuity and engineering skill have been able to devise in perfecting the telephone.
The header image comes from this article, as does this one of the radio control room, which is accompanied by the text that follows.
From this room many famous worldwide broadcasts have been controlled, the Post Office providing the channels between the point where the programme originates and the broadcasting authority which is radiating it. Australia. Canada, New Zealand, India and South Africa have often been “brought together” in this control room.
Much like Wonders of World Engineering, albeit in a considerably more dilute form, the series of Television Surveys might be seen, in part at least, as an exploration of aspects of the technological sublime in the London of the late 1930s.
The first transmission, as we have seen, was from a railway station with express trains thundering through, and broadcasts to come included ones with the mobile police on the Barnet by-pass, autogiros from the Hanworth air park, and motor racing from Crystal Palace. Set against these visions of the speed and spectacle of technology were quieter and more sedate editions that looked at life on the canals, dingy sailing, and the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy.
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