Cable television

Community antenna television in the United States, from 1948 Cable began as a fix for bad reception. In towns where mountains, buildings or sheer distance blocked broadcast signals, operators put an antenna where the signal was good and ran coaxial cable to homes. John Walson in Pennsylvania claimed the first such system in 1948, a claim that cannot be verified, and Ed Parsons of Astoria, Oregon, is remembered as the father of community antenna television. For decades cable mostly relayed distant stations, until HBO became the first cable network delivered nationwide by satellite in 1975. That made the wire a source of channels of its own, and cable grew from an estimated 16 million homes in 1980 to 50 million in 1990.