| Sumario: | The article reports on regulatory influences upon television development. In 1928 the federal radio commission, then in the second year of its existence, reported that advances which recently had been made in television were threatening to create "serious problems.'' In the circumstances, the agency seems to have been more attentive to the proposal before it and more deliberate in dealing with it than understandably it might have been, so preoccupied was it otherwise and with such strong reason to shun any course of action that might prove disruptive in the area of its preoccupation. The Radio Act of 1927, to which the commission owed its existence, had been enacted with the intention "to regulate all forms of radio transmission." Apart from this, it is clear in retrospect that the extreme crudity of television images obtainable in the mechanical scanning systems then employed would have justified summary denial of any scheme to use them as the basis of a public broadcast service. For the comprehension of television's physical laws and its perception of the technical imperatives derived therefrom, the regulatory body, having itself only very limited resources of scientific or technical expertise, of necessity had to rely largely upon the judgments of experts whose views as such could not be expected always to be altogether unaffected by the entrepreneurial impulses or corporate interests which they represented in the arena of regulation.
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