The History of Cable

Do you know how cable television started? It is actually quite interesting. Back in 1948, a group of people that were living in remote valleys in Pennsylvania were looking for a way to solve their poor reception problems. At this time, it was difficult to get reception if you lived in remote areas or in mountainous areas because television signals could only be received by antennas that were in a “line of sight” with the transmitting antenna.

In response this problem, the Pennsylvania residents decided to put antennas on hills and then run cables from the antennas to their houses. Voila! The idea of cable television was born. By 1990, almost half of the homes in the US were using cable television and the same basic technology is still used today by the cable companies.

Of course, today’s cable companies are far more advanced than the antennas on the hills in Pennsylvania. In fact, the cable systems are now capable of delivering hundreds of channels to its customers and around 60 million people are using cable to help them enjoy watching television. Cable service has also become more advanced, with some systems allowing customers to make telephone calls in addition to television programming.

Transforming cable to what we know today was not a simple process, however. In fact, the original cable systems. In fact, the earliest systems often had a significant amount of distortion and noise because the television signal became weaker as it got further away from the original signal. As a result, companies had to place amplifiers at about every 1,000 feet. Each amplifier caused distortion and further problems developed if one of the amplifiers failed. Cable companies had a bad reputation for producing poor quality pictures and for being unreliable.

Companies then began to experiment with microwave transmissions in the 1950s and then with fiber-optic cables in 1976. Analog-to-digital conversion further helped to improve the broadcast quality of cable television and, today, cable is a very popular choice for those interested in enjoying a great number of channels with great picture quality.

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