The Night Football First Flickered Onto TV Screens

A Warm-Up Game Nobody Bothered to Hype

Fordham University did not think much of Waynesburg College. The Rams were a preseason pick for the national championship, and this was supposed to be an easy season-opening tune-up before tougher games against Alabama and Tulane¹. So when NBC decided to point its experimental cameras at Triborough Stadium on Randall's Island on September 30, 1939, nobody involved treated it as history in the making.

The New York Times covered the game the next day and buried the fact that it had been televised in a single sentence deep in the story: "The Rams had the televised game well in hand by halftime." That was it¹. Fordham fullback Dom Principe later admitted the cameras meant nothing to the players at the time: "The fact that the game was being televised had no significance to those of us playing," he said, adding that Waynesburg's early touchdown caught the Rams off guard because they had underestimated the visitors¹.

That touchdown belonged to Waynesburg's Bobby Brooks, who broke off a 63-yard run on just the third play of the game, making him the answer to a trivia question nobody knew existed yet: first man to score a touchdown on television^4,2. Fordham, coached by Frank "Sleepy Jim" Crowley of Notre Dame's old Four Horsemen fame, shook off the shock and scored in every quarter afterward, finishing with 337 yards of offense against Waynesburg's 157 and closing it out 34–7^1,4.

Game official Jack McPhee remembered noticing something odd near the sideline before kickoff: "a vehicle that looked like a boxcar" parked at the edge of the field, with a camera on a tripod nearby. He didn't think much of it until he got home. "I told my wife the game had been on TV," he recalled. "She said, 'What is it? How does it work?'"¹ That question was, in its way, the whole story of American television in the fall of 1939.

The technology on hand was primitive by any later standard. NBC ran the signal through its station W2XBS, transmitting from the Empire State Building as part of the network's push around the 1939 New York World's Fair^1,5. Announcer Bill Stern, already a well-known radio voice, called the play-by-play, and some accounts add that Mel Allen handled pregame interviews, though that detail doesn't appear in every version of events^2,6. However many people were actually watching — and that number is disputed — they were witnessing the first documented attempt to bring a fast, chaotic outdoor game into American living rooms in real time^1,3.

Why a Football Game, Why 1939

Television in 1939 was less a product than a demonstration. NBC's parent company RCA used the New York World's Fair, which opened that April, as a stage to show off the new medium, and David Sarnoff had already declared from the RCA pavilion that television marked the birth of "a new art and a new industry"^7,5. A football game was a useful test case precisely because it was hard: unlike a studio broadcast, it required tracking fast, unpredictable motion across a wide field.

NBC had already tried sports on camera that year, televising a Princeton-Columbia baseball game in May and a Cincinnati Reds-Brooklyn Dodgers doubleheader in August^5,3. Football was the next logical target, and Fordham's season opener against Waynesburg, played away from Fordham's own campus at Triborough Stadium on Randall's Island, gave NBC a nearby, accessible venue^1,8.

The cameras themselves used iconoscope tubes, an early electronic imaging technology that was notably insensitive to light compared with what came later. That meant outdoor coverage demanded careful camera placement and strong natural lighting, with only a couple of fixed vantage points available rather than the roaming, multi-angle coverage modern viewers take for granted^3,9.

Who Was Involved

• NBC: Organized and transmitted the broadcast through its experimental station W2XBS, forerunner of WNBC^1,5
• RCA: Supplied the iconoscope cameras and technical equipment; closely tied to NBC corporately at the time^3,9
• Bill Stern: NBC's play-by-play announcer, already a prominent radio sportscaster^2,1
• Mel Allen: Credited by the National Football Foundation with conducting pregame interviews, though not mentioned in every account⁶
• Fordham University: Coached by Frank "Sleepy Jim" Crowley, won the game 34–7^1,2
• Waynesburg College: Scored first through Bobby Brooks's 63-yard touchdown run, lost 34–7^2,4

How Big Was the Audience, Really

• 500 to 5,000: the NCAA's range for the television viewing audience¹
• Approximately 1,000: the figure most often cited for television sets or viewers reached, per Wikipedia and several later accounts^4,7
• 9,000: attendance in person at Triborough Stadium¹
• 50 miles: the effective reception radius from NBC's Manhattan transmitter, according to an NBC-linked historical account³
• $600: the approximate cost of a television set at the time, according to Waynesburg's own athletics history — a price that put ownership well out of reach for most households²

These numbers don't all measure the same thing — some are sets, some are people — which is why the honest answer is that the audience numbered somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand, not the mass audience the phrase "televised football" might suggest today^1,4.

One Camera or Two

Sources disagree on the most basic technical detail of the broadcast. Wikipedia and Waynesburg's own athletic-history page state that NBC used a single camera^4,2. The Early Television Museum's account, drawing on an NBC photograph from October 1939, describes two cameras: one positioned on the sideline for close-ups and another in the press box for a wider view of the field³.

The two-camera version is the more technically detailed of the two, and it lines up with a surviving NBC photograph of the sideline unit, which suggests it's the sturdier account^3,9. Either way, the production was nothing like the multi-camera coverage that would define football broadcasting decades later — this was, at most, two fixed vantage points relaying a signal by short-wave radio to Manhattan before it reached anyone's screen³.

Accounts also diverge on just how rough the picture looked. Popular retellings tend to describe the broadcast as a bumbling technical mess, but NBC's own contemporary materials called the images "newsreel quality" and said viewers within range followed the game "without the slightest difficulty"³. The honest read is that the broadcast was a serious technical achievement with real limitations — small camera count, poor low-light sensitivity, a tiny audience — rather than the outright farce it's sometimes made out to be in the retelling^1,3.

Timeline

1. April 30, 1939The New York World's Fair opens, giving NBC a showcase for television demonstrations^1,5.
2. May 17, 1939NBC televises Princeton vs. Columbia baseball, an early sports broadcasting test³.
3. August 26, 1939NBC televises a Cincinnati Reds–Brooklyn Dodgers doubleheader from Ebbets Field⁵.
4. September 30, 1939Fordham defeats Waynesburg 34–7 at Triborough Stadium in the first televised football game, broadcast by NBC on W2XBS^1,2.
5. October 22, 1939Brooklyn's NFL Dodgers beat the Philadelphia Eagles 24–14 at Ebbets Field in the first televised professional football game^4,10.

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