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THE FIRST TV STATION IN MEXICO (1935).
Francisco Hernandez Lomeli
Departamento de Estudios de la Comunicaci˘n Social
Universidad de Guadalajara, Mexico
Translated (with thanks) by: Joe
After 1920, the dominant faction in the Mexican Revolution
focused attention, among other goals, on the institutionalization of the
political and social ideals that were products of the armed movement. One of the
most complicated problems that the dominant group had to confront was to
reconcile the interests of established
cedillas strongmen) and military leaders throughout Mexico. The norm was that
disagreements among them, which were products of differing interests, were
resolved through the use of force.
The presidential succession of 1928 was particularly
contentious. General Obregon, the President-elect, was assassinated and his
followers pointed to then President Plutarco Elias Calles as responsible for the
assassination. (Calles) took a series of measures to prevent the political
tensions from exploding and turning violent, including declining his own
reelection and the creating the National Revolutionary Party (PNR). The solution
to this emergency would give Calles power for years after the end of his
presidential term to the extent that he was considered the “Jefe Maximo de la
Revolution” (Maximum Leader of the Revolution). Hence, the period between 1929
and 1935 is referred to as the “Maximato”. (Meyer, 1981)
The PNR arose as a coalition of all of the revolutionary
sectors. The central preoccupation of the PNR leaders consisted of creating and
maintaining a real consensus among the factions of the coalition through the
conciliation of their demands and aspirations and in this way to stamp out
violence as the method of solving conflicts among the elites. The later
organization and incorporation of the workers and peasants into the party (PNR)
and into the political process in general was of secondary importance at the
time. (Meyer, Ibid).
The PNR was born after the period of major armed conflict;
it is a political organization
created a posteriori and this fact gives it a defensive institutional character.
The PNR was created to maintain power, it was designed to fight for power.
The historical references (CIRT 1991; Gonzalez 1989; Mejia
Prieto 1972) point out the PNR as the first Mexican institution that acquired,
between 1928 and 1929, a television system. The equipment was bought from the
Western Corporation of Chicago and consisted of two cameras, a transmitter,
various receptors and auxiliary apparatus. The installation of the equipment was
left in the charge of Mexican engineer Francisco Javier (Stovoli ?) who in turn
was aided by Manuel Cerrilo Valdivia and Walter C. Buchanan. The later came to
head the Secretariat of Communications and Transportation of Mexico in the years
In 1931 the transmitting antenna, which consisted of a
tower made up of two pyramids joined at their bases which were supported on an
insulator by means of braces (struts). However, the transmitter produced
undesirable oscillations and for this reason the Piezo Electric Laboratories of
New York, manufacturer of the transmitting device, sent engineer Kellner to make
technical adjustments necessary for the proper functioning of the system.
In this year, the engineer (Stovoli?), furnished with a
portable camera, conducted field tests, where he was able to receive in
Cuernavaca a video signal generated in Mexico City (50 Km away). The first image
that was transmitted was a photograph of Amalia Fonseca, the wife of (Stovoli?).
The project advanced and as a complementary part a closed circuit system was
installed. (Herr n 1986; CIRT Ibid).
But it wasn’t until the beginning of 1935 when Senator
Angel Posada, head of the PNR’s Secretariat of Press and Propaganda, announced
a restructuring of the radio stations XEO and XEFO, the later under the direct
control of the PNR. The changes included the putting to use of the new
transmission equipment and reception of electromagnetic signals with the sole
aim of “increasing social services that, such as organization of class
opinion, the Political Institute of the Revolution presents to the working
masses.” (El Nacional 7-07-1935:1).
In effect, XEFO, considered by the PNR as “the social
platform (pulpit) of Mexico in the service of the proletariat”, was provided
with equipment with characteristics especially capable of generating and sending
radio waves but also the signal generated by the recently purchased television
system, “in such a way that everyone who has a television receptor and its
sound receptor, will be able to see and hear the broadcast programs in the same
manner as in movie theaters.” (El Nacional. Ibid). The broadcast station could
generate a short wave (onda corta) signal of 1,000 watts, at the same time it
was in conditions to radiate a television signal at 1,600 kilohertz (kilocycles).
The first public demonstration of this television system in
Mexico was on the 16th of May, 1935 and took place on the premises of
the building occupied by the headquarters of the PNR in Mexico City (Paseo de la
Reforma 18). General Matias Ramos, then president of the PNR, and other
functionaries of the PNR attended this presentation. The first image that was
transmitted was a photograph of the primer leader of the nation, General Lazaro
Cardenas [President Cardenas – who, by the way, is the father of one of the
candidates for the July2, 2000 presidential elections in Mexico]. The attendees
of the demonstration left “pleased with the effectiveness, safety, and
precision” (El Nacional 17-05-1935:1-2) of the new apparatus.
Days later, the equipment was reinstalled in the
Superior School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, a center of studies
under the direction of the Secretariat of Public Education. The selection of
this place was due to its privileged location in the center of Mexico City (calle
Allende). Also, it was hoped that an educational benefit would result, that it
would give the students of that school “the opportunity to verify some
practices (principles?) using the television equipment, [there is a font
problem at this point in the Spanish text…]
given that the equipment has a special design that permits high frequency units,
which lends itself to many laboratory experiments.” (El Nacional. Ibid).
The leadership of the PNR had very concrete plans for its
recently installed television system, it would not only have purely
entertainment and educational functions, but it would be a vehicle that would
contribute powerfully to the spreading of the party’s ideological principles.
It is hard to imagine that one
could transmit all of a page of a newspaper, for example, across any distance
and its image could be photographed in the given receptor, eliminating the need
to transmit word by word, as is the case with the method (telegraph) that we now
use. (Meztli 1935).
It [the PNR’s plans] had to do with a complete
program of the PNR to cover all of the national territory through a modern
communications network that included XEFO, the newspaper El Nacional, the
Autonomous Department of Press and Propaganda and the nascent television
station. According to Senator Posada, the reorganization of XEO and XEFO was to
give to radio “its true function: education”. And the introduction of
television in Mexico came to “powerfully widen the reach, already wide, of the
activities of the PNR’s Secretariat of Press and Propaganda (El Nacional
In spite of the plans and the investment made, the
television equipment acquired by the PNR never came to broadcast regularly.
Mejia Prieto (1972) offers a vague explanation of the suspension of the project:
bureaucratic designs were the cause of the initiation
of video in Mexico…(but) they were just intentions. The costly equipment just
ended up stowed away in the back rooms of the radio station. A great and long
lasting joke. In opposition to this argument, I propose a possible explanation
of the causes that impeded the continuity of the PNR’s television station.
One possible cause of a technical nature, given that the
aforementioned television equipment was based on an electromagnetic system that
applied the principles of the scientists P. G. Kipkow y J. L. Baird. This system
was very simple and operated in the following way:
a disc with tiny quadrangular holes arranged in a spiral spun at a rate
of 20 or 30 revolutions per second; through the holes were projected light rays,
each one of these projected points of light corresponded to a quantity of light
that showed the according tonality. This light was projected on a battery of
photoelectric cells made of Selenium (selenio), which due to the properties of
this mineral, converted the light variations into electric impulses, of the same
type which through a process of amplification are able to be transmitted in an
ordinary way by a short wave (onda corta) radio station. The television receptor
was the same as a radio receptor, except that in front it had a small frosted
glass square on which appeared the image that was captured and transmitted by
the battery of photocells. The
electromechanical system transmitted the generated signal in short wave (onda
corta) and the quality of the reception was poor, but even though it was
primitive, it was the only one to be found in the market and therefore was
acquired by the PNR.
At the beginning of the 1930’s successful experimentation
was done with an electronic television system that, thanks to the use of vacuum
tubes, was capable of “breaking
down” images into points of light that were converted into electric impulses,
which were transmitted to the receptor which recovered and “assembled” the
broken down images. The coexistence of two systems – mechanical and electric
– generated a debate over which was better which should be imposed as the
model. The argument seemed to end in Germany when on March 22, 1935 the first
regular television service in the world began with a mechanical system. But in
the following year, the BBC began its broadcasting under a vacuum tube system.
The quality and clarity of the broadcasts relegated the old mechanism of discs
to the rooms of museums, putting an end to the debate. In this context of
technological innovation, the system acquired by the PNR was obsolete before its
The other cause of the failure of early television in
Mexico was of a political nature. Only one month had passed after the first
public demonstration of television when the worst political crisis in
Post-Revolutionary Mexico occured. President Lazaro Cardenas decided to put an
end to the “Maximato” and, on June 15, 1935 the whole cabinet resigned at
the request of Cardenas. On June 17 a new cabinet had been named with the key
posts in the hands of followers of the President, including Silvano Barba
Gonzales as the Secretary of the Government (Gobernacion); Luis Rodriguez as the
Secretary of the Presidency (Presidencia); Francisco Mugica, who replaced the
son of Calles (“Jefe Maximo”), as the Secretary of Communications and
Transportation; and Saturino Cedillo as the Secretary of Agriculture. The
leadership of the PNR was also changed and by December of 1935, President
Cardenas had purged the followers of Calles from middle and lower levels of the
party and of the government. With the elimination of Calles, the PNR itself
stopped being a limit on the President’s ability to use the party for his own
support. (Hamilton 1983; Meyer Ibid). The promoters of television , General
Matias Ramos and Senator Angel Posada, were dismissed from their party positions
and the television project was suspended.
The possibility of having a television station was taken up
again by Cardenas’ government, but in contrast to the earlier project, it was
at the initiative of and under the direction of the Secretariat of
Communications, with the intention of removing it from the PNR. The planned
“party” television was canceled in favor of a television “of the state”.
Consistent with this new policy, President Cardenas
supported the experiments that were being done by the Mexican technician,
Guillermo Gonzales Camarena. Esquivel Puerto (1970:159) and the Encyclopedia of
Mexico (1989, T. VI:3426) sustain that from 1934 Gonzales Camarena had
constructed a television camera
from “scrap materials” but this information can be put in doubt if one
considers that the young technician was only 17 years old at the time. What is
highly probable is that Gonzales Camarena was knowledgeable about and had
improved the equipment acquired by the PNR, given that President Cardenas
ordered that the studies of Gonzales Camarena of the radio station XEFO be facilitated so that he could work with them.
CIRT (1991) La industria de la radio y la televisi˘n en Mexico.
Mexico: Camara de la Industria de la Radio yla Televisi˘n.
EZQUIVEL PUERTO, Emilio (1970) Anecdotario de radio y
televisi˘n Mexico: Publicidad Latina.
GONZALEZ Y GONZALEZ, Fernando (coord.)(1989) Historia de la
televisi˘n mexicana 1950-1985. Mexico:edici˘n del coordinador.
HAMILTON, Nora (1983) Mexico: los lˇmites de la autonomˇa
del Estado. Mexico: Editorial Era.
HERRAN DE LA, Jos‚ (1986) "Mexico: Televisi˘n en
1931", en Revista de Revistas 21-02-1986.
MEJIA BARQUERA, Fernando(1985) "50 ańos de televisi˘n
comercial en Mexico (1934-1984). Cronologˇa", en R. Trejo (coord.)
Televisa el quinto poder. Mexico: Claves Latino-americanas.
MEJIA PRIETO, Jorge (1972) Historia de la radio y la
televisi˘n en Mexico. Mexico: Octavio Colmenares.
MEZTLI (1935) "El ojo electr˘nico", en El
Nacional p.3 2¦ secci˘n.
MEYER, Lorenzo (1981) "El primer tramo del camino",
en D. Cosˇo (coord.) Historia General de Mexico. Mexico : El Colegio de