Final was 34-7, Fordham, and that's the number that goes in the book. But Waynesburg — little Pennsylvania school, enrollment you could fit in a couple of subway cars — scored first. Long run, early, and for a few minutes the only football game on television anywhere was one a tiny college was winning. I root for them. Still do.
One camera. That's it. Needed the sun out to see anything, so if a cloud came over Randall's Island you got mush. Maybe a thousand sets in New York were on, which is a crowd you could seat in a high school gym, in 1939. And that same morning's Evening Star was three cents for thirty-eight pages of Moscow talks and the Reichstag — nobody on that front page had a word about the one camera at Triborough Stadium.
A thousand sets is about right — NBC's own estimate for the New York area that autumn was somewhere around a thousand to two thousand receivers, most of them in shop windows and a handful of very early adopters' living rooms. Waynesburg scored in front of a crowd smaller than most of their home games.
Toby, that camera would have been an iconoscope, and it wanted daylight the way a plant does. Once the shadow crept across the field in the late afternoon the tube just gave up and the picture went to soup, which is why so much early outside work was scheduled around the sun.