W6XYZ Hollywood

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Early Television

W6XYZ Hollywood (KTLA)

W6XYZ received its construction permit in 1939, and went on the air in 1942. It was owned by Paramount Pictures, who hired Klaus Landsberg, a refugee from Hitler's Germany, to put the station on the air.

Landsberg worked on televising the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Farnsworth Television hired him as television development engineer in Philadelphia in 1938, shortly after he arrived in the United States. In 1939 he went to New York to work for the National Broadcasting Company television division. It was during this period that Landsberg participated in NBC's introduction of TV at the 1939 New York World's Fair.

Allen B. DuMont recognized Landsberg's abilities, and hired him as television design and development engineer for the New York DuMont Laboratories. Here he supervised technical operations of the television unit at the U.S. Army Maneuvers in Cantons N.Y. and developed DuMont's automatic synchronizing circuits.

Paramount was a major DuMont stockholder at that time and Landsberg was sent to Hollywood to organize W6XYZ for Paramount Pictures in 1941. Landsberg brought two DuMont iconoscope cameras with him, and built the transmitter, which operated on channel 4. In 1947 W6XYZ became commercial station KTLA.

W6XYZ before World War Two

1943 Popular Mechanics article

Photos from 1960

Photos from Don Kent

Broadcasting, Nov. 15, 1938

1944 Los Angeles phone listing

Prewar program listings
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Steve Dichter, a collector of early color television equipment, worked for KTLA for 16 years starting in 1965. He kindly provided these rare photographs of the early days of W6XYZ and KTLA. Here is a 4 part interview with Dick Lane, an announcer hired by W6XYZ in 1942 (courtesy of Steve Dichter).

Early Television

W6XYZ logo card

Early Television

Klaus Landsberg pictured with large W6XYZ logo card in 1942.

W6XYZ remote truck during a 1943 telecast in downtown Los Angeles. Cameras are DuMont Iconoscope types. When not using the truck and cameras on remote locations, W6XYZ originated studio programs from a small sound stage on the Paramount lot. Telecasts were also done from other Paramount stages where various motion pictures were being shot. Stars of the period such as Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake were interviewed, live of course, for the several hundred viewers who might be tuning in. This filled program time and gave Paramount some insight into television's potential as an entertainment medium by requesting viewer's comments on both programming and picture reception.

Early Television

1944 remote telecast

Early Television

1944 telecast

Early Television

This is a picture, from 1942, of W6XYZ's visual transmitting antenna

Early Television

Klaus Landsberg posed with a W6XYZ DuMont Iconoscope camera.

Early Television

Klaus Landsberg, founder of W6XYZ at the controls in the W6XYZ truck. Pre-1947.

Early Television

Klaus Lansberg chats with Paramount stars Alan Ladd & Veronica Lake as W6XYZ broadcasts from a Paramount sound stage during movie production of "The Glass Key" (1942).

Early Television

W6XYZ claimed that their telecast in 1943 of the Sheriff's Rodeo from the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum was the first on the west coast. However, Don Lee's W6XAO is known to have telecast the 1940 Rose Bowl parade. A total of 100 television sets were able to receive the W6XYZ broadcast.

Early Television

Christmas card from 1945

The following is from Al Germond:

Under "Active Experimental Stations" in the 1944 Annual [p. 944] W6XYZ is lised as having 1 kW aural/1kW visual on channel 4 [78-84 mc], studio/office/transmitter-/antenna at 5451 Marathon St, [this was on the Paramount Lot]. Time on air 6 hours per week. Klaus Landsberg is station director.

"W6XYZ has operated regularly since February 1 [1943] each Wednesday and Friday night and has been producing a weekly total of four to six hours of live talent programs. These programs were entirely dedicated to the training of Civilian Defense volunteers until the Summer of 1943, since which time entertainment as well as educational programs have been aired. These programs include gymnastic courses, museum visits, varietry shows, dramatic skits and one act plays..."

Facilities: Equipment includes complete apparatus for studio as well as field operation. Cameras and transmitters were built by Allen B. DuMont Laboratories, Inc, and many additional units including electronic special effect equipment were designed and built by Television Productions, Inc. A relay transmitter W6XLA to operate in conjunction with W6XYZ was also developed and constructed by the company. A special antenna system combining a double-cone type of antenna for video and a special four dipole antenna for audio of its own design and construction are used. Studio facilities also include a flexible lighting arrangement and background projection apparatus and screens.

Early Television

Here is a screen shot from a modern video game using the W6XYZ mobile van

W6XYZ and KTLA After the War

Los Angeles advertising rate cards - 1950

Photos from 1960

Photos from Don Kent
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Early Television

Small sound stage, (called the "test stage"), located on the Paramount Pictures lot occupied by W6XYZ until 1947

Early Television

Cameraman Eddie Resnick, who Steve Dichter worked with when he started at KTLA in 1965 was seen here in 1946. The show: "Shopping at Home" with host, Keith Hetherington (r). This was an early version of QVC.

Early Television

Another shot of Eddie Resnick, and another camera operator atop the W6XYZ remote truck. Looks like a cold day in Los Angeles. This must be late '46 because the Paramount logo has replaced the W6XYZ logo on the camera.

Early Television

January 22, 1947. Premier broadcast of KTLA as W6XYZ changes to commercial station KTLA and a channel change from 4 to 5. Note that at least 4 DuMont Iconoscope cameras are now in use. RCA cameras would replace the DuMonts withn the year.

Early Television

Here is a 1947 test pattern

Early Television

A 1947 sign-on after the station became KTLA. Here is the audio that accompanied the sign-on

Early Television

Bob Hope emcees the premier telecast of KTLA Jan. 22, 1947. A total of
322 televisions are in the Los Angeles Viewing area.

Early Television

1948 Station Card

Courtesy of Steve Owen

Early Television

1951 remote

Early Television

In 1952, KTLA broadcast an atomic bomb blast live from Yucca Flat. Here is a story from a 1986 book from the Museum of Broadcasting about that event (courtesy of Richard Hess)

Early Television

KTLA's original color unit was a custom built Fruehauf trailer designed by KTLA's engineering dept. in 1954. In the early '70's, after being stored for many years, it was converted to house our new Norelco color cameras. Pictured above is that original KTLA color unit seen on Jan. 1, 1956 at the Rose Parade. It used a CT-100 as it's only color monitor. The CT-100 was still sitting in the stored trailer in the late 1960's. KTLA quit live color broadcasts in 1958. It continued with limited film color broadcasts. KTLA aquired TK-41 color equipment in 1964 with the purchase of Red Skelton's Red-EO vision Crown Coach color buses. (comments courtesy of Steve Dichter).

Early Television

John Silva, the chief engineer at KTLA, was the first to use a helicopter for news coverage. In 1958 he rented a Bell helicopter and installed a camera and transmitter.

Early Television

Van used to televise the 1955 Rose Bowl parade

Early Television

KTLA Television transmitter located on Mt. Wilson.1949

From Geoff Schecht:

Interesting to note the number of microwave dishes feeding into that transmitter building in 1949. The large one looks like it was set up for operation in the S-band but the other (smaller) ones may have been set up to operate in the X-band. By the end of WWII, warehouses were filled with war-surplus production lots of microwave tubes and assemblies built for WWII radars. Planar triodes developed in the mid-1940's (such as 2C39's) could deliver around 5W at 3Ghz in cavity amplifiers, which was plenty of power to run a short-haul microwave link employing high-gain antennas to carry a TV-bandwidth video as well as an audio channel feed between a TV studio located in LA (the original KTLA studios were located on the Paramount Pictures movie lot in the central part of LA...Hollywood...on Melrose Avenue) and Mt. Wilson (the broadcast antenna farm which eventually grew there was located at about 5700 ft above sea level).

KTLA was headed up by a German immigrant, Klaus Landsberg. Landsberg, having helped set up the groundbreaking TV system used to televise the 1936 Berlin Olympics, had a ton of experience with TV by the time he moved to LA in 1941 (he worked with Farnsworth in Philadelphia upon arriving in the US in 1938). Landsberg also held a number of German patents involving early radars...the reason he fled Germany was his disgust with the Nazis and their intentions to use his designs as weapons of war. So he not only knew about the technical aspects of television; he also understood the value of microwave technology even before it grew into commercial prominence as a result of WWII developments.

In 1947, KTLA was the first TV station to enter into commercial service west of the Mississippi River (surprising to think that LA, with all of its high-tech industry, was such a relatively late entry into that area). Landsberg had been hired by Paramount in 1941 to set up its experimental TV station W6XYZ (the earliest TV broadcasters were issued amateur radio callsigns before they became commercialized). So before W6XYZ became a commercial TV station, the handful of LA residents who owned early TV sets could pick up the experimental TV broadcasts from what was to become KTLA by 1947. (Another experimental TV station, W6XAO, owned by Don Lee, had been broadcasting since 1931 but it used a low resolution standard only specific equipment could view...and it was considered to be very crude even then. By 1947, only around 350 TV sets were in LA that could receive FCC-mandated NTSC standard signals. That number increased REALLY quickly once word got around about 525-line TV pictures..)

Under Landsberg, KTLA pioneered a lot of the things we now take for granted. Live remotes were one of those. In 1947, the first "live remotes" apparently involved a special truck with electronics inside to run the camera as well as provide a cable link between the KTLA control room at Paramount and the huge camera that had to be set up near wherever the truck had been parked. Setting up that "remote" outside of Paramount Studio's front gate was about the range limit of such a wired link setup. It was a start, though.

Which brings us to those smaller dishes placed on the transmitter shack on the Mt. Wilson transmitter site around 1947. Landsberg was thinking way ahead of most others.. By the early-mid 1950's, KTLA was definitely using a microwave link on its remote truck to provide live feeds. They may have been providing those feeds to the main studio or to a control room set up for remote TV management in that transmitter building on Mt. Wilson.