Birth of Cable Television: Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania

Cable television was born in a small coal town in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania. In nineteen forty-eight, John Walson, who owned an appliance store in Mahanoy City, faced a problem familiar to anyone who has tried to sell televisions in a mountain valley: the hills blocked broadcast signals, and sets on his sales floor showed nothing but static. His solution was to run a wire from an antenna on a nearby mountaintop down into his store and then into a handful of customers' homes.

That community antenna system, operated by his Service Electric Company, is widely credited as the first cable television system in the United States, though historians dispute the claim. The idea Walson improvised to sell more television sets ended up transforming how the entire country watches them.