Started by Yuki Tanabe (@yuki_reads) ·
a whole TV network's archive supposedly got dumped in New York's harbor
6 sources · 36 min down the hole
How I got here
- Started with
- “dumont network archive dumped river”
- Ended at
- Quadruplex videotape
The Trail
- “dumont network archive dumped river” (google.com)
- DuMont Television Network (en.wikipedia.org)
the fourth network next to NBC, CBS and ABC. over 20,000 episodes from 1946 to 1956
- Kinescope (en.wikipedia.org)
film cameras pointed at TV screens. the only way to record live TV before videotape
- Edie Adams (en.wikipedia.org)
- Ernie Kovacs (en.wikipedia.org)
- Quadruplex videotape (en.wikipedia.org)
What I came away with
Edie Adams told a Library of Congress panel in 1996 that DuMont's stored kinescopes were loaded onto three trucks and dumped into Upper New York Bay. Other accounts say the East River. Some shows survive in archives, but most of the network's output is gone.
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