Originally appeared in The Daily.
Milton Berle pushes the TV envelope when the medium is brand-new
When television was first invented, it produced blurry, flickering images that were perfectly adequate for telling ghost stories, but not exactly the stuff of Sweeps Week. In 1947, two decades after the first prototypes whirred to life, about 44,000 TVs were running in the entire United States, which meant television ownership was only slightly more common than Segway ownership is today. The idiot box hadn’t quite caught on.
Graeme Wood 