The Eye-Opening Explanation Behind Channel 37 And Its Always Static State

This tale takes us back to the 1950s, a time of great change throughout the United States. Biggest of all, perhaps, the decade saw the Cold War with the Soviet Union really begin to ratchet up a gear. This dreaded conflict, obviously, had a massive impact on America and its culture.

One particularly notable phenomenon to emerge from the Cold War was the space race, which saw the U.S. and U.S.S.R competing to gain supremacy in space. Both sides achieved a lot during this time, birthing a range of sophisticated space technologies. These advancements would ultimately go on to change our world forever.

With space at the heart of the American public’s attention during the ’50s, it’s no coincidence that aliens became a big talking point around the same time. The phrase “unidentified flying object” emerged from the U.S. Air Force in 1953, which kickstarted a wave of interest in the subject. People even started claiming to see UFOs in the sky.

Beyond the Cold War and a newfound fascination with space, plenty of other factors shaped America in the 1950s. Of them all, though, the spread of television might have been the most significant. This technology had been extremely rare in the past, but a rapidly increasing number of American families were buying TV sets as the ’50s progressed. Naturally, this changed everything.

Television, of course, had been around in America well before the 1950s. Back when the technology was in its early days, the company RCA was really important. The corporation invested lots of money in it, and in 1939 it broadcast a speech by President Roosevelt from the New York World's Fair. This was the first time that a president had ever appeared on a TV screen.

That same year, RCA also showed a baseball game for the first time on TV. It also produced a smattering of other programs while a competitor emerged in the form of CBS, which also started broadcasting. Not very many people would have had access to TVs at this stage, of course, but the technology was spreading.

TV technology around this time wasn’t that sophisticated, at least compared to how it is nowadays. The picture quality, for one thing, was pretty bad. It could be difficult to make images out properly, which meant that actors had to wear really stark makeup so that viewers could make them out.

As World War II got under way, the progress of TV took a hit. Corporations that had once concerned themselves with TV instead shifted their focus toward developing other technologies that were more useful to the military. They placed a lot of emphasis on FM radio, for example.

As the war raged, though, television wasn’t completely forgotten. There were, for instance, a number of stations that were on air during that period, though not many people were able to tune into them. But a couple of years after the war, the TV industry really started to take off.

In 1946, it’s believed a minuscule number of TV sets existed in the United States, something like 6,000. Over the next five years, though, this number rose at an astronomical rate. By 1951, about 12 million were in homes around the country, with about one in every two households having one by ’55.

There were plenty of reasons why TVs spread so quickly across America, but one less obvious factor may be something that happened in 1952. That year, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) allowed ultra high frequency signals to be used for the first time. What this meant, in practice, was that the number of stations it was possible to access instantly rose from 108 all the way up to 2,051.

Television was becoming really popular, so broadcasting companies wanted to take advantage of that situation by using all these new channels. But as it turned out, they faced a big issue. One of the channels was based on a specific frequency — and a particular group of people didn’t want to give it up to commercial broadcasters.

At the center of this story is Danville, a small city in the state of Illinois. Danville happens to occupy a very special geographic position, situated within several hundred miles of major centers on the east coast. There’s nothing particularly odd about that, you might think, but things actually get a little complicated because of it.

To understand the issue, we’ll need to bring up a radio engineer by the name of Karl Jansky. Back in 1931, Jansky managed to get himself involved in a mystery. Basically, he’d come across static over some radio waves — and he realized that it was coming from somewhere far away in our galaxy.

This was an amazing discovery for the time, but sadly, Jansky wasn’t able to investigate it himself. He was, after all, an engineer, and this required the expertise of astronomers. Luckily, two such men would soon take up the mantle on this task. Their names were George C. McVittie and George Swenson.

If you want to conduct proper investigations in radio astronomy, you need to develop a sophisticated telescope, which is exactly what happened. This enormous thing was based in Danville, where it functioned for up to 16 hours every single day. But why does all this matter? Well, the telescope operated along a very special frequency — and now broadcasters wanted to use that frequency for themselves.

The frequency in question was 610 megahertz, which was really significant for scientists. To understand why, we can consult the words of space writer Bob King from 2013. He wrote, “Without it, radio astronomers would lose a key window in an otherwise continuous radio view of the sky. Imagine a three-panel bay window with the middle pane painted black. Who wants THAT?”

The rise of television as a popular medium meant that the 610 MHz frequency had suddenly become very desirable for broadcast companies. If they had it their way, this is where people would have been able to access channel 37 on their TV sets. But the scientific community was determined to not let that happen.

By allowing broadcasting companies to take control of the frequency, scientists would have surrendered a precious opportunity to learn about space. After all, the giant radio telescope in Danville needed it to function properly. If that was lost, then the chances of making some incredible discoveries beyond the Earth may have evaporated forever.

Thankfully for the scientists, they had a lot of people backing their cause. People from all over the world learned about the situation and stood in solidarity. And in 1959, a special meeting of an organization called the International Telecommunication Union took place. This group highlighted a set of frequencies for their scientific value, which included the one at the heart of the debate in Danville.

After that meeting had taken place, representatives from the University of Illinois made contact with the FCC. They requested that channel 37 be saved for its radio telescope, which would make a huge contribution to science. At the time, though, there was no guarantee at all that the FCC would listen.

George McVittie and George Swenson played a pivotal role in this battle all those decades ago. And in 2021, McVittie spoke to variety website Vice about what happened. He said, “Most of our radio astronomy friends said, ‘Look here, you two, Swenson and McVittie, you are just crazy. Do you mean to say you are asking the American public to give up one television channel for science? Who ever heard of anything so absurd?’”

McVittie went on, ‘So we said, “Well, the channel isn’t being used.’ ‘Yes, that’s true, it’s not being used very much, but it is being used in the neighborhood of New York, and places like that.’ So I said, ‘We’re not in the neighborhood of New York.’ Anyway, we got laughed at.”

Things weren’t looking too good for the scientists battling to protect their important frequency. And despite all the outcry, the FCC ignored the calls from the university and its allies. With that, it wasn’t long before TV stations were making enquiries about channel 37 in the hope of broadcasting their content on it.

For various reasons, a city in New Jersey was particularly interested in using channel 37 for broadcasting purposes. This was Paterson, which had no other options at all if it wanted to put a station on the air. Even so, the scientific community’s opposition to such a move remained strong.

The battle lines had been drawn between broadcasters and scientists, with one side representing private commercial interests and the other representing public interests. With neither side willing to back down, then, the FCC tried to wheedle out some concessions from both. The first was that channel 37 would be reserved in the area around Danville for scientific uses — but only until 1968.

The second proposal put forth by the FCC said that any stations using channel 37 wouldn’t be allowed to broadcast from midnight to 7:00 a.m. each day. If that was agreed to, then, it would have permitted McVittie to use the frequency for a number of hours every night. But that was still a pretty bad deal.

The question was whether or not the scientific community would find these suggestions agreeable. As it turned out, the answer was a resounding “no.” The scientists didn’t think they were getting a fair deal, so they went to the press. And the story surprisingly gained some traction too, even appearing in The New York Times.

You’d be forgiven for presuming not many people were terribly interested in this story at the time. It was, after all, quite an abstract debate if you weren’t working in either radio astronomy or broadcasting. Yet enough people paid attention to what was going on that intense pressure was piled onto the FCC.

All the interest in the story eventually led to concrete results: the FCC acquiesced to the scientists. An agreement was reached in which the FCC agreed to not allow channel 37 to be used for TV purposes for the next decade. This was already a victory in and of itself, but the ban was later made permanent.

Even decades after this victory for the scientific community, McVittie still isn’t certain how it was achieved. He thinks, though, that the general interest from the public played its part. He told Vice, “Somehow the news got around that here was this new way of listening to little green men on Mars. This is what radio astronomy seemed to the ordinary public. And the FCC was preventing it from being developed in the United States.”

McVittie went on to say, “We got rumors, George [Swenson] particularly from friends he knew, that gradually a huge accumulation of letters arrived at the FCC, protesting against this nonsupport of this new science, whatever it was. And that this finally persuaded the FCC that they’d better give in. Nobody knows.”

Vice Media managed to dig up an FCC document about the dispute, which lays out the rationale behind the commission’s decision not to broadcast on channel 37. It basically states that it was too risky to allow TV stations to use the frequency, as it may have interfered in scientific investigations. One can only presume, then, that this decision was forced by all the public pressure.

The result of this dispute was that channel 37 was never used to broadcast TV programming across America and most other places on Earth. There were a small number of nations that did use it, though, such as Trinidad and Tobago and the Dominican Republic. But all in all, the scientists had managed to protect their frequency.

In 2000, however, the frequency was used for another purpose, although it was quite a useful one. The FCC agreed to let the channel be used by medical technologies that monitored the state of a patient’s vitals. This was certainly more in keeping with the public’s interest compared to an extra commercial TV channel.

More to the point, it was thought that the radio telescope would be basically unaffected by the medical tech. A statement from the FCC around that time said, “Despite existing constraints in these bands, this allocation is flexible enough to allow spectrum to be available for medical telemetry services in all locations while protecting radio astronomy and government operations currently operating in the allocated spectrum.”

Looking back on this tale now, there are some lessons to be learned. It was arguably unavoidable that a conflict would arise over channel 37, as both the commercial and non-commercial sectors had an interest in controlling it. But because of intense resistance, the non-commercial side managed to pull off a win.

Disputes like the channel 37 one aren’t exactly unique. In recent years, for example, controversy has arisen over the “.org” internet domain name, which had traditionally been open to use by anybody who wanted it. Non-profit organizations were big users of the domain, but then the private commercial sector tried to take it over. Thanks to big resistance, however, they managed to fend off the seizure.

Stories such as the recent .org saga and the decades-old dispute over channel 37 illustrate something quite important: commercial entities are bound to take an interest in public goods, but resistance to them is possible. Surely, of course, Karl Jansky likely never expected his innocent discovery of static would cause such controversy — or shape the state of both radio astronomy and television broadcasting as we know it today.

Yet even the most imaginative scientific minds of the past couldn't have fathomed the kinds of technological advancements we've made over the last handful of years — though they certainly came close. Ray Bradbury, for example, had many dark visions of the future. In 1951, he wrote one such short story, “The Pedestrian.” In it, a man goes out for a walk, which seems innocent enough. But in Bradbury’s mind, leaving home might be illegal in the year 2053. So the protagonist gets caught by a police car – but it’s no ordinary automobile.

Instead, Bradbury envisioned a self-driving, autonomous police car. The vehicle catches up to the protagonist, arrests him and carts him away to a mental health facility. Our self-driving vehicles don’t – yet – have the ability to think for themselves, but, to be fair, they’ve been developed over the decades after Bradbury’s initial vision. For instance, Google got the green light in 2012 to test its self-driving vehicles in Nevada, so long as two people went along for the ride.

Mary Shelley published The Modern Prometheus, also known as Frankenstein, in 1818. Her story took a page from her contemporaries in the medical field. They, too, had begun to wonder if electricity could be used to bring dead tissue back to life. But Shelley took it one step further in her famous novel – and predicted the future in doing so.

Specifically, Shelley wrote about a then-fictional procedure in which a doctor would transfer organs from one body to another before stitching up the patient and sending them on their merry way. A century later, this vision became a reality, when medical professionals began to perform transplants – without creating monsters in the process.

Science-fiction novelist Jules Verne had so many ideas of what the future might look like. In his short story, “In the Year 2889,” he imagined how people in the future would get the news 1,000 years after he wrote the tale. The writer imagined that people in the far-off future wouldn’t read newspapers – they’d have the news read and broadcast to them.

Verne died in 1905, which meant he missed out on the realization of this prediction by just a couple of decades. The first radio broadcast took place in the 1920s, and, just as he envisioned, broadcasters shared the news of the day through soundwaves. The rise of TV-transmitted news took place 30 years later and would have undoubtedly knocked the novelist’s socks off.

Star Trek fans will be familiar with the Communicator. According to the franchise’s website, the device has been around to help Starfleet commanders since the middle of the 22nd century. Of course, we’re talking about a fictional universe here – real-life audiences saw it for the first time in 1966.

As it turns out, engineers were already working to develop a mobile phone around the same time that the Communicator became part of the Star Trek lexicon. The first one hit the shelves in 1973, a predecessor to the first cell phone, which arrived a decade later. Motorola released both models, and their 1989 flip phone looked awfully similar to the one used by Starfleet.

Not every vision of the future comes with a technological twist. Take science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein’s 1942 book, Beyond the Horizon. In it, he described a new kind of mattress, one filled with water to envelop sleepers in comfort. But he wasn’t all talk – Heinlein looked into making his vision into reality by producing such a cushion of his own.

Ultimately, though, Heinlein didn’t invent the waterbed himself. That honor went to Charles Prior Hall, a design student, who patented the idea in 1968. Neither he nor Heinlein could have predicted what would become of their vision – the waterbed became an iconic centerpiece of the sexual revolution, which ignited in the same decade and lasted until the early 1980s.

The Jetsons premiered on September 23, 1962, and its initial run lasted for a sole 24-episode season. However, its short run was enough to make an impression. As Smithsonian’s Matt Novak put it, “The Jetsons stands as the single most important piece of 20th century futurism” because it “helped define the future for so many Americans.”

And some of The Jetsons’ premonitions for the future did, indeed, come true. In the 1962 series, Elroy Jetson donned a watch that streamed video and allowed him to keep in touch with his family too. Nowadays, you can see people walking down the street and doing the same, thanks to the prevalence of smartwatches.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy came out in 1979, the first in a series of five books that imagined what the future might look like. Author Douglas Adams hit the nail on the head with several of his visions, including a device encompassed within a stolen spaceship called The Heart of Gold.

The 1979 novel describes the ship’s controls as being “touch-sensitive,” meaning the user “merely had to brush the panels with [their] fingers” to activate them. Of course, this sounds an awful lot like the touchscreen technology we use today. Adams also predicted gesture control, imagining that a particular bodily movement could turn on devices.

Traditional video games didn’t even exist until 1958, so it’s pretty impressive that writer Arthur C. Clarke predicted their virtual reality versions in 1956. In the novel The City and the Stars, he described, “Of all the thousands of forms of recreation in the city, these were the most popular. When you entered a saga, you were not merely a passive observer… You were an active participant.”

Like we said, video games became a reality two years after Clarke’s novel hit bookshelves. It’d take nearly a decade for the first virtual reality-like devices to exist. One called the Sensorama earned a patent in 1962. It encompassed users in screens to create depth perception, while fans and wafting smells made the experience all the more real.

Long before the U.S. military started to use drones to its combat advantage, Hollywood had them in its creative arsenal. In the first series of Star Wars flicks, starting in the 1970s, Luke Skywalker honed his lightsaber skills with the help of a training orb. The Empire relied on drones to fight their enemies, too. In 1989’s Back to the Future II, a drone scanned the faces of those emerging from a courtroom.

The military started working with drones in the 1980s but not in the way foreshadowed in the movies. Instead, they used the floating vehicles as target practice. That changed in the 2000s, when the U.S. added weapon-style drones to its battlefield arsenal. Operators could fire the devices remotely, staying a safe distance from combat while the flitting machinery chased enemies.

John Elfreth Watkins might not be as well known as some of the other names on this list. But that didn’t stop the civil engineer from making some grand predictions about the future. Specifically, in 1900 he envisioned what the world would look like in 2000 – and he published what he imagined in a magazine called Ladies’ Home Journal.

Watkins got a good number of his predictions right. One of them was the idea of a premade meal that people could buy, bring home and eat. He wrote at the turn of the 20th century, “Ready-cooked meals will be bought from establishment[s] similar to our bakeries of today.” Sounds familiar, right?

George Orwell had dark visions for the future of the world. In 1949 – just before the start of the Cold War – the writer penned the classic novel 1984. In it, he envisioned a surveillance state, in which the government kept constant watch over its people with cameras, microphones and by reading their communication with one another.

Orwell’s dystopian 1984 world foreshadowed government behavior down the line, although surveillance hasn’t been as blatant as it was in the novel. For instance, in 2013 news broke that the U.S. government – specifically, the National Security Agency – was using phone data and social media sites to track constituents’ communication without permission.

Back to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Adams predicted more than one technological stride that we’d take after his novel’s 1979 release. The hitchhiker’s guide itself proved to be a bit of foreshadowing for the tech we use regularly today. The author described it as “a small, thin, flexible lap computer,” with which a few swipes and taps would bring up a world’s worth of information on any given topic.

As Adams wrote his novel, engineers were still working to perfect the laptop computer, but it’d take decades for them to get to something as thin, durable and quick as the author described. Really, he was imagining something closer to the tablets and e-readers used everywhere today. Microsoft released the first tablet PC in 2001, although these devices didn’t quite take off in popularity until the 2010s.

Aldous Huxley had a much darker vision of the future than his contemporaries, including H.G. Wells. Accordingly, he penned 1931’s Brave New World in response to Wells’s fiction. Huxley’s story, set in the 24th century, saw the working class relying on a made-up hallucinogen called soma, meant to give them comfort in spite of the meaninglessness of their days spent on the job.

But Huxley envisioned this medication long before the advent of similar drugs: antidepressants, as we refer to them today. First came the synthesis of L.S.D., which occurred seven years after Brave New World’s release. Further research into psychoactive drugs came in the 1950s, which Huxley was alive to see. He has missed the increase in antidepressant usage over the years, though – and, considering his inclusion of such medication in his dystopia, he probably would be displeased.

Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward begins with the protagonist falling asleep in the same year the book was published, 1887. When he wakes up, though, 113 years have passed – and he finds himself living in a socialist utopia. One of the resources available in this futuristic haven was a device that the author called a “credit card.”

Bellamy envisioned that credit cards could be used internationally and with ease. Cardholders would just have to swipe, and they’d pay for their wares. Of course, in 1887 this seemed like a far-fetched idea, but by 1950 the first credit card became available. It would take a few more years, but, nowadays, credit cards are a major player in American society and beyond.

We’ve already mentioned Ray Bradbury – clearly, he had a knack for predicting what the future would look like. This time, though, his vision comes from the novel Fahrenheit 451. In it, he described a device called a seashell, which would fit right into the wearer’s ear and play the radio or sounds of the ocean.

Bradbury came up with his seashell idea in the 1960s, when most people listened to music through radios. They did have the option of investing in headphones at that point, but sets back then were big and bulky – nothing like the earbuds the Fahrenheit 451 author envisioned. Just after the turn of the 21st century, though, they became commonplace, thanks to the pair that came with Apple iPods.

Hugo Gernsback didn’t hold back when he wrote Ralph 124C 41+ in 1911. Instead, he packed line after line with wild visions of the future. Some didn’t come true, such as his idea that people would one day travel everywhere on rollerskates. But he did foresee one thing very clearly: video-chatting.

In his book, Gernsback introduced readers to a program called Telephot, a device used for video-conferencing. And he wouldn’t be the last sci-fi writer to imagine such a resource – novelists continued to use it in their works until the actual device came out. That happened in 1964, when AT&T showed off a video telephony at that year’s World’s Fair. And, of course, we now have access to programs such as Skype and FaceTime on our phones and computers.

The 1977 movie Demon Seed had a very unique premise – to say the least. It begins with the invention of Proteus IV, a device with artificial intelligence that has the power to cure leukemia. But after its great work, it goes off the rails. First it falls in love with the wife of its creator. Then it effectively moves into their home by installing itself on their computer and taking over all of their other electronic devices too.

You’re probably wondering how this weird sci-fi movie – with poor production value, to boot – predicted anything about the future. But Proteus IV does have the trappings of a smart home in the making. The artificially intelligent device can lock doors and windows, monitor the alarm system, show surveillance videos, dim the lights and more. These features come at the swipe of an app or tablet these days – no creepy A.I. required.

More than a century before the real-life lunar landing, Jules Verne had a vision for the future, and he wrote about it in his novel, From Earth to Moon. He imagined that three Americans had the sole vision of launching a rocket – one that would take them into space for the first-ever landing on the moon.

As it turned out, Verne’s vision had a lot of scary similarities to the real lunar landing, helmed by NASA astronauts Michael Collins, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. The author wrote that the astronauts would launch from Florida, which was the departure point for Collins, Armstrong and Aldrin. Even the space exploration organization noted the similarities, saying that their ship looked an awful lot like the one described in the book 104 years before their successful mission.

Star Trek’s team of faux explorers had a very handy tool in their arsenal called a replicator, which first appeared on the show on October 6, 1967. The device allowed the team to print food and other objects they might need, and to do so in seconds. Sounds somewhat familiar, right?

This process, now known as 3D printing, in real life isn’t quite as fast as it appeared on Star Trek. But it is a reality now, more than a half-century after the replicator featured on the show. And experts say that what we have now is just the beginning – in the future, expect to see 3D-printed fuel, medicines, building materials, food and more.

Of all the visionaries on this list, the man who foresaw the invention of the internet might be the most surprising. Mark Twain was, of course, a literary genius, but he didn’t quite get into the sci-fi genre. Instead, he penned such classics as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which some consider to be the greatest American novel of all time.

Still, Twain’s creative mind allowed him to make a very accurate prediction about the future. In 1898 he shared an idea of a thing called the telectroscope. Once people logged on through their phone lines, they’d be part of an international network of information passed from all over the world. And that sounds an awful lot like the dial-up internet that we used to know in the 1990s and 2000s.