1949: A secretary at the Federal Communications Commission sends a letter to cable pioneer Ed Parsons in Astoria, Oregon, asking him to explain his community-antenna television system. It’s the first-known FCC involvement in cable TV.

Parsons was a radio engineer and station owner who’d worked in Alaska, Washington and Oregon. He and his wife saw television demonstrated at a broadcasters’ convention in Chicago in 1947. Mrs. Parsons wanted one of the newfangled gizmos, and Ed bought one when Seattle’s KRSC-TV, Channel 5, announced plans in the spring of 1948 to go on the air.

Parsons had to figure out a way to receive the TV signals from Seattle 120 miles away to Astoria, near the mouth of the Columbia River. He rigged a large antenna atop the Astoria Hotel and ran a coaxial cable across the street to his apartment. He got it working Nov. 25. Problem solved.

Problem created: The apartment was the only place in town that could pick up the signal from Seattle, and soon friends, neighbors and total strangers were crowding into the Parsons’ living room to watch the modern marvel.

Parsons was nearly driven out of house and home: “People would drive for hundreds of miles to see television. We had gotten considerable publicity …. And when people drove down from Portland or came from The Dalles or from Klamath Falls to see television, you couldn’t tell them no.”

He ran another cable from the hotel roof down to a TV set in the hotel lobby. So many people clogged the lobby that they got in the way of the hotel’s paying guests. Parsons began running cable to other people’s homes. Problem solved, industry born.

The Cable Center says Parsons charged the people he hooked up only for his materials and labor, never exacting a subscription fee. But MSNBC reports that Parsons charged $125 (almost $1,200 in today’s money) for installation, plus $3 (about $28 today) a month for service.

The Cable Center credits Parsons with inventing cable TV, because his system, completed in February 1949, was the first in the United States to use “coaxial cable, amplifiers and a community antenna to deliver television signals to an area that otherwise would not have been able to receive broadcast television signals.” Nonetheless, the center notes that Jim Davidson beat Parsons to the punch with the first cable program: the Tennessee vs. Mississippi college football game Nov. 13, 1948.

In any event, FCC secretary T.J. Slowie wrote to Parsons on Aug. 1, 1949, requesting “full information with respect to the nature of the system you may have developed and may be operating.” Parsons complied, and an FCC attorney eventually concluded that CATV was a common carrier, subject to FCC jurisdiction. The commission, however, didn’t adopt his recommendation, and it would be 1965 before the FCC decided to regulate cable TV.

Source: Cable Center, MSNBC

Photo: Time was, cable TV was just a way of getting better reception of distant over-the-air stations. (Charles Hall/Flickr)

This article first appeared on Wired.com Aug. 1, 2008.