When the 1939 World’s Fair opened in Flushing Meadows, David Sarnoff was there to share the spotlight with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Fiorello LaGuardia, Mayor of New York City.
Sarnoff announced, via a single mobile NBC television camera unit connected from a coaxial cable to a transmitting van, which was placed fifty feet from the speakers’ platform, that NBC TV was ready to go on the air.
In the background, it showed the Fair’s symbols—The Trylon and the Perisphere, swept across the Court of Peace, panned the gathering throng, and captured the arrival of the president’s motorcade.
This same camera captured the first television close-up: Mayor La Guardia. Never the bashful sort, he casually strode up and ogled it.
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