To whomever takes this desk after me —

You're holding a piece of something extraordinary. I want you to know that.

Television, this kind of television, where one camera operator and one engineer and one weatherman with a grease pencil reach forty thousand families at once — there has never been anything like it in human history. Not radio. Not the newspaper. Not the telephone. Nothing.

When Mrs. Pellican calls at seven-thirty to say her picture is clear as a bell, that is a person in Westfield, twelve miles from this building, looking at a moving image that is happening RIGHT NOW in our studio. The light of our Fresnels is, in a way, falling in her parlor. The sound of Pete's fiddle is in her ears at the same instant it leaves the bow. We are inventing a new way for human beings to be together, and it is happening this summer, in this town, with our hands on the equipment.

The networks will eventually fold us in or roll over us. I do not delude myself. But what we are doing right now — in 1952, in Hamilton, Ohio — is the part where a community talks to itself out loud, with its own faces and its own voices, before the country gets one face and one voice. That part will not last. Take care of it.

Treat every shutdown as if the next morning depends on it, because it does. And when the carrier wave goes out across the sleeping county at midnight, remember that somewhere a farmer is still sitting up, a tired mother is folding the last load, an old man cannot sleep, and our test pattern is the last warm thing they see before the lamp goes out.

It matters. All of it matters.

— Stanley Halloran
Chief Engineer, WQED-TV
Hamilton, Ohio