What REALLY happened to DuMont Labs?
 

I have always been intrigued by the early monolithic and greatly yet overly engineered sets that were built in the 40s and early 50s by DuMont. I just think this will make an interesting thread for this forum. What happened. How could something so big and so great turn to nothing in only a few years. Not just the company it's self, but the product line.

I know there are probably 1,000 Web sites that answer all of this, but we come here. Anyone ever compared a 1949 say RA-109A to a 1960(ish) whatever set by DuMont? Absolute junk in comparison. I know they were bought out at some point, or several points perhaps, but they collapsed really fast from TV pioneers having their own network and such to NOTHING.

I actually remember seeing small color DuMont sets in the 80s in "dime" stores like Rose's. I guess some Japanese company had bought the rights to the name by then like most of the rest of the old names. I wonder if they are still around somewhere on Earth?????

Yea I hear ya buddy!!!

Its sad these amazing companies went out of business.... They made some of the nicest stuff ever made!!!!!!!

I haven't researched it, but my guess is that DuMont was a poor businessman. His sets from the late 40s and early 50s were much better made that his competitors. But the pictures were not any better than say a 630. In a way, they were over-engineered, and as a result they cost much more to make. Customers weren't willing to pay more for his sets, so he probably lost money on them, or, at least, his profit margin was too low to support his business.

Also, he wasn't successful in establishing a dealer network like RCA, Philco, etc., who already had hundreds of radio dealers.

DuMont in the early years tended to focus on the high end of the market, with the largest screen sizes and the "First with The Finest in Television" marketing. Fine cabinetry, and over-engineered chassis would sell well to "early adopters" and folks who could afford the finest stuff.

But as TV sets became a commodity, and prices started falling by the mid-'50s, DuMont couldn't keep up with the other major brands, as well as the dozens of smaller makes that came and went. Just like today, there isn't nearly the demand for high-end home theater quality sets as there is for cheap sets from the big box retailers.

DuMont was an early victim of "good enough" mass-market electronics, and the costs of trying to run an independent TV network to compete with the big 3 didn't help, either. The consumer TV division eventually was swallowed by Emerson, and their CRT/instrument/oscilloscope division went to Fairchild.

Bingo. I have always imagined him in the same general category as Farnsworth: an engineer at heart, who lacked the very different skills needed to compete in business at the national scale.

Phil Nelson

Ok, well said on several notes. This pretty much sums it up I guess. I never really put two and two together the way it sounds. I haven't yet looked at the link wiscojim gave us, but I will soon.

Speaking of the way the sets were more or less for the elite; my first and only DuMont set was an RA-109A that I found at an antique/junk store in the early 80s. Turns out the man running the store also opened our areas first TV sales and repair shop in the late 40s. He actually remembered unloading the set new for the president of Stanley Furniture Company which like DuMont once was a big deal for America and now sits empty in Stanleytown, VA. Seems like the older man told me that the big wheel paid around a grand for the set. I was just a high school kid taking electronics and found the dusty old thing so utterly intriguing with it's upward of 40 tube compliment, metal/glass crt and dual rectifiers. That has to have been the biggest power transformer on the heaviest chassis I ever pulled! I miss it sometimes and my skill set is a bit better for getting it going properly. I managed to get a weak raster on it with no video. There was a booster on the 19AP4 which probably lends to the weak raster and the ultimate retirement of the set to the salesman turned junk-man.

It was really to big and heavy for an average size home too, so I eventually sold it cheap to a collector in the late 90s. I did keep the 30 some tubes though......

Hi all. My experience with DuMont equipment is limited to test gear. I've owned a few early-to mid- 1950s DuMont "oscillographs" and they are truly well built pieces. The tube complements and transformer size is incredible not to mention the overdone chassis steel and the intelligent layout. On one of mine, a dual trace green crt model, most of the tubes are shockmounted on rubber and spring bases & the h.v. supply is tightly regulated.
That being said, I've also got a mid sixties DuMont Emerson b/w 19" t.v.. plastic cabinet, flimsy circuit board holding the tubes, poor soldering which I've touched up a few times already.

Sent from my SM-G360V using Tapatalk

I see it as similar to what happened with Zenith: better built sets being sold at a higher price, and it worked until it became easy to make even a cheap set perform well. By the late 50's, what could a DuMont do that an RCA or Philco couldn't? By the late 70s, what could a Zenith do that a Sanyo or a Sampo couldn't? You can coast a while on a perception of quality but unless you can deliver something the others can't, you're through. The late 50s were tough on TV sales in general (as the market had reached saturation-pretty much everybody that was ever going to buy a TV had already bought one.) The market was waiting for the next big thing, which in this case was color, but it was still half-baked. Had DuMont been able to best RCA in that regard, maybe they could have stayed alive.

The reality is much more complex and interesting.

What did in DuMont appears to have been an exceptionally poor choice of business partners—Paramount Pictures—coupled with bad decisions by the FCC to freeze VHF licenses, which restricted DuMont Television to UHF backwaters with terrible quality. All of the other mistakes are likely insignificant in comparison to these factors.

Back in 1940 Paramount bought into the DuMont because it wanted to have a stake in DuMont's fledgling TV broadcast network as a hedge against this upstart technology. Remember, nobody really understood what TV was or what it would become. For $400,000 (about ten million in today's money, depending on what metric one uses) it acquired 40% of the DuMont company, a pile of options to buy more stock, and the right to appoint three of the eight directors AND the treasurer, assistant treasurer and secretary. This looked like a great deal for DuMont and a perfect great fit of capabilities—what could be more natural than taking movies to the new TV medium—but it turned out to be a horrible decision ultimately dooming the DuMont company.

Paramount had entirely too much control over DuMont and cooperated not at all. In fact, it did what it could to obstruct DuMont left and right. For example, none of Paramounts assets (movies, actors, studios, etc.) were ever used in the TV network and Paramount prevent DuMont from raising any capital to expand the business. This slowly strangled it.

A portion of the sad saga (with gaps in the pages) is here:
books.google.com/books?id=tV7fXlQQdz4C&lpg=PA31&pg=PA31#v=onepage&q &f=false

Now there's the problem of not being able to get VHF licenses. The FCC, you may recall, froze the number of licenses in 1948 which created the cartel of CBS, NBC, and ABC. Since DuMont couldn't get a VHF license for his TV broadcasts, he had to use UHF, but TV sets of the day were not required to include UHF reception until 1964. So viewers would have to purchase an expensive adapter, which most did not, which meant he had substantially reduced revenue compared to the big three broadcast networks, which also had radio income. Given the other anti-competitive measures employed by the big three, it seems likely that FCC officials and politicians were paid off (in the usual ways for the 1940s and 1950s) to keep DuMont out of the TV business.

Here's some more detail:
I hope that explains some of what did in DuMont.

I've been amazed at how industry (particularly RCA) was able to brazenly manipulate the FCC to block competitors, etc. Not just in this case, but also the saga of Armstrong and FM comes to mind as well. Interesting to speculate on how things might have been different if a bit more fair play had been enforced.

Industry still manages to manipulate regulations to their interest today, but they are even more brazen about it. You know, work a few years for (Insert government regulatory agency here) and be rewarded with a cushy 7-8 figure job at one of the companies you used to regulate. Assuming , of course, that you voted the correct way while in office...

Except that bribery and obstruction continues to the present day. (Campaign contributions and hiring former regulators for high-paying jobs in the private sector as rewards for beneficial rulings are nothing more than legalized bribery.)

Two years ago when a portion of the TV frequency spectrum was about to be auctioned for cellphone use, the Obama administration cited legitimate antitrust concerns about the bidders. The problem was that the (monopoly) giants AT&T and Verizon together control more than three-quarters of the spectrum, and have deeper pockets than T-Mobile and Sprint, and so would gobble up the new frequencies, allowing them to become even bigger and more powerful.

The proposal was to allow T-Mobile, Sprint, and new companies to acquire more frequencies as competition benefits the consumer. AT&T and Verizon allow T-Mobile and Sprint to remain in business, but weakened and not a threat, so as to avoid being broken up like AT&T was decades ago, and Standard Oil back in 1911. Nothing besides Standard Oil (or perhaps Amazon and Apple) comes close to describing the power of AT&T and Verizon, and it's why cellphone pricing is both expensive and static. Trying to increase competition, however, was decried as "socialism" because "qualified" bidders wouldn't be allowed to bid.

Technological revolutions are subject to manipulation, and the situation is not so different from the days when Sarnoff's RCA prevented the establishment of FM radio by (literally) using bribery and corruption to warp federal policy and destroy Armstrong and Farnsworth.

So it isn't accurate to say that these inventors were unskilled and incompetent in business. One might say they, being scientists and engineers, were honest and honorable, and had too much integrity to engage in bribery and corruption, and that ultimately doomed their businesses.

I suspect that newer companies such as HP and Tektronix took much of the instrument market away from Dumont with modern designs of more capable instruments during the same time period. This also was likely a contributing factor to the decline of DuMont.

jr

It was not until the mid 1950s, when DuMont was being dismantled by Paramount, that HP and Tektronix were finally able to match DuMont's quality at its price point. But it was all over for DuMont by then. The TV network was sold to Metromedia, the TV division to Emerson, and the remainder to Fairchild Camera.

The TV business costs, and potential, were huge compared to the tiny equipment business, and DuMont was losing piles of money creating its own programming because it couldn't make the ad dollars and Paramount wouldn't provide any movies or talent (which were under contract).

Remember: if DuMont can't raise capital because of (a) obstruction by its business partner, and (b) bribery of the FCC to keep DuMont out of the profitable VHF TV sector, it won't be able to compete in ANY market sector, and that's what happened. So it wasn't the small upstarts of HP and Tek that ate its lunch and smashed its ricebowl.

The cause of DuMont's demise is Paramount's attempt to slow down the introduction of TV and bribery of the FCC by CBS/NBC/ABC, not what DuMont was able to do with its limited resources to compete against much smaller business rivals in the small test-equipment market.

But all the big markets DID have at least 4 and in some cases
more VHF assignment.

Indeed! but it was perhaps a contributing factor, more akin to "taking DuMont's salad" starting in the late 40s.

"The profits from the oscillographs helped him invest in television design and his DuMont TV Network. Unfortunately the time spent on his TV ventures proved to be the end of his profitable oscillograph business. In 1947 a young equipment manufacturer called Tektronix produced the model 511 Time Base Trigger and Sweep Oscilloscope for $795. The use of time instead of frequency to measure a sweep across the CRT was Tektronix's big selling point. Time measurements are easier to interpret pulses and complex waveforms. It has been mentioned informally that Allen DuMont saw the model 511 demonstrated at an electronics show. He tried it and was impressed, but commented to Howard Vollum and Jack Murdock, co-founders of Tektronix that it was too expensive and they would be lucky to sell any. Tektronix's time base trigger and time sweep generator design would become the standard in the 1950s and into the 21st century. Tektronix would replace DuMont Oscillographs as the leading selling oscilloscope brand."

from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_B._DuMont

Did DuMont actually fail to understand that he was looking at a "better mousetrap" that could demand a higher pricepoint... or was he perhaps just giving a couple of "upstarts" from the west a hard time? :scratch2:

jr

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According to the sources below the VHF assignment problem killed DuMont, and very nearly killed ABC, which surived only because of a $30 cash infusion (about $600 million in today's money) in 1953 from merging with United Paramount Theaters (UPT) which allowed it to weather the ad drought until the VHF allocation freeze ended:

If you read the excerpt I posted from the book, DuMont sounds like such a straight shooter, as well as obsessed with the delights of technology, I suspect he truly believed that the unit couldn't sell at that price.

According to this:
www.syscompdesign.com/assets/Images/AppNotes/scope-history.pdf
The Dumont 224a was $150, and the 511 was $700, almost FIVE TIMES as much. That's about $4,500 vs $21,000 today. You can imagine what bean counters at a company would say about that kind of expense.

And then we have some numbers on Tektronix's sales:
Note that 1 million then was about $30 million today, still a relatively small number.

But by that point DuMont had been dismantled by Paramount.

Finally, that tradeshow story about the exchange between Vollum and DuMont is oral Tek legend:
I can't find it anywhere else, and believe me, I looked.

So it is hard to say what really happened at that trade show. Since we don't know the full conversation, which might have been more interesting and more revealing of his state of mind, or how he said it, was it snarky or with some respect and regret, we can't really say. I can very well believe a fan of technology would say, in all seriousness, "wow, that's a nice piece of gear and I wish we could sell at that price point, too bad the market is fixated on low cost not features." So we just don't know.

So in short, bad business moves hurt the great corporation and the great and over engineered sets targeted to the lesser population of "upper class" folks ended up being junk that was targeted more to the many "working class" folks, but it was too late.

The company was bought out and fizzled though the 60s from what I have seen and gather in reading. But I wonder why I saw DuMont sets in the 80s in dime stores. Is there any fragment at all of the company still out there?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...ork_broadcasts

[/QUOTE] The DuMont Television Network was launched in 1946 and ceased broadcasting in 1956. Allen DuMont, who created the network, preserved most of what it produced in kinescope format. By 1958, however, much of the library had been destroyed to recover the silver content. Most of whatever survived was loaded onto three trucks and dumped into Upper New York Bay in the mid-1970s.[2][3] Since then, there has been extensive research on which DuMont programs have episodes exist.

Due to the possibilities that various unknown collectors may be in possession of programs and/or episodes not listed here, and that the sources below may actually hold more than what is listed (for example, through a mislabeled film can), this list is very likely incomplete.

For a list of program series aired on DuMont, see List of programs broadcast by the DuMont Television Network. [/QUOTE]

There aren't that many people in the "top 1%". And likely a good fraction of them will buy a "good enough" TV set, and not spend the extra money even though they could easily afford it. They'll probably buy the top end RCA but not the DuMont set. Might be that the rich folk won't watch that much TV anyway, instead going to the movies or plays. :scratch2: But still want a TV around to catch the news.

Ahhhh, but you're both forgetting that only the middle class and upper class could afford a TV. It cost a pile of money, many thousands of dollars in today's inflated currency.

In 1953, an RCA CT-100, a 12" console, sold for $1,000. that's about $15,000 to $20,000 in today's money. A car cost about $1,500 by comparison, and the annual salary of a professional was $5,000. A factory worker made about $1,500 to $2,000.

The fancier televisions—RCA, Stromberg-Carlson, etc.—were sold to doctors, lawyers, engineers, and other professionals. The blue-collar factory workers bought the lower-priced second and third-tier lines, and the cost was still substantial. But since there wasn't a lot else to spend money on, and rent or a mortgage was far lower percentage of salary than today (about 1/3 of what it is today) it was an acceptable purchase.

All of the 1960's DuMont's were built by Emerson; they tended to have fancier cabinets and different control panels but underneath they were Emerson. After 1970 Emerson no longer built TV sets; for a time Admiral built the Emerson & DuMont branded stuff. At some point Emerson became just a marketing company; that's what they were when they sold all those cheap VCR's and TV sets at discount stores in the '80s. I don't know if they retained the DuMont name at that point or if they sold it to somebody else in the 70s. I lean toward the latter. I think the name might have ended up belonging to whoever owned the Capehart name as I've seen similar service manuals for both brands, for cheap stereos in the mid/late 70s.

There was a very active used TV market that allowed almost everyone to be able to afford a TV set by the mid 50s.

Only a couple points to add...

1) That part about former regulators landing cushy jobs in the industries they regulated a just few years before is very true. I suspect in the 50s, it was more American company vs. American company. Once Zenith had ruined RCA's patent monopoly in the USA with the threat of a lawsuit, RCA simply moved onto licensing and tech-sharing agreements with Japanese companies. Zenith may have thought a legal remedy would work again, but it did not.

Trade policy is an executive-branch function, which means potentially every 4 years (but certainly every 8) many highly paid people (lawyers) in the Federal Trade Commission are looking for new jobs. Want a nice job working for Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. after Jimmy Carter loses his re-election? Be a good boy and foot-drag or ignore the evidence of television dumping in the USA. That's what ultimately killed Zenith and is now killing the US white-good industry, forcing consolidation, leaving Whirlpool like Zenith circa 1978... An giant in the industry, but with major storm clouds ahead.

http://www.whirlpoolcorp.com/facts/

2) I take all these inflation calculators with a grain of salt. Both my grandparents were mid-middle-class people (but not upper caste) who were very conservative about their spending. Factory jobs, kids, mortgage on a 3bdrm brick ranch, new-ish mid-price cars... But they had TV in the late 40s and by the early 60s, bought nothing but Zenith/Magnavox stuff. If TV really cut into their income as much has been claimed, they would have done without. In fact, they did without CoLoR until '68 (buying Magnavox and Zenith) at the same time. If a $600 tv was like a $10,000 item to me, I assure you they'd have done without.

It really was that expensive and simple math will proveit.

We know that a newly minted electrical engineering PhD in 1960 made about $5,000 at the time. (I've known EEs and scientists who made about that.) A skilled factory worker (car plant, say) made about $1,500 to $2,000.

So if recent graduate EE PhD makes $100,000 today, that's a factor of twenty over what they made in 1960. A skilled factory worker would make about $40,000, again, a factor of 20. Maybe even $50,000 a factor of 25.

Just simple math. The trick is to use salaries and labor costs, not goods, because we have low-cost items made by overseas slaves that depress the buying scale. How much did it cost to have a pair of shoes soled then vs. now? I can tell you that in the 1980s, it cost me $15 and now runs me $75, a factor of 5. How much was rent then vs. now? But when you compare the cost of a TV then vs now the numbers don't work because technology drops the price.

So the inflation factors are real. $600 in 1950 was like $12,000 today because if you make $2,000 per year in 1950 that $600 would be 1/3 of your income! It just has to be, as it was a percentage.

I just did a quick Google of UAW wage, 1960 and came up with this:

http://www.detroityes.com/mb/showthr...e-wage-history

X 52=$5990

If you extrapolate Henry Ford's famous $5 per day wage (1914!) into 5 days a week x 52 (they actually worked 6 days back then) it equates to $1300 annually. That's 46-years removed from 1960.

Granted, these were probably the best industrial wages in the US, but hardly paying more than an EE PhD circa 1960. An average new car in 1960 was probably $2500, less than a year's wage. If today's average car is $30k, it's still well under a year's wages for the average autoworker.

I know that there's more to inflation than what the CPI calculators take into account, but $600 does represent about 10 months worth of mortgage payments for the average American in 1950.

That isn't a good metric. Try this one, instead. It uses a basket of indicators (labor, housing, commodities, etc.) to form an accurate valuation:
http://www.measuringworth.com/uscomp...ativevalue.php

For example, using your example of a $600 TV price from 1950:
The further back in time one goes, the more obvious the inflation is:
Errr, that isn't correct. Can't be. Again, using the above calculator:
My point about wages wasn't this:
But to compare the relative power of highly trained and educated people who bought the fancy TVs and HiFis of the 1950s and 1960s.

That was my point. We can easily extrapolate just back-of-the-envelope, and the better calculators show the severe devaluation of the currency, even if it does not yet rise to Weimar Republic levels.

Yes. Your reply was made while I was creating my reply. This is an good metric to use, but we need to discount for the faster runup in housing which dramatically outpaced the increase in labor and commodity costs.

That is a HUGE sum of money. Today, at roughly $3,500 for a mortgage payment FOR THE SAME HOUSE! we'd have $35,000.

That's because housing has risen roughly 3x faster than the other commodities. Scaling that back we end up with about $12,000 for a TV which pretty much what I'd previously cited.

Just to go back to my point that DuMont didn't fail because DuMont (the man) didn't understand oscilloscope pricing, we can see that my numbers were correct. And I still believe that the oral history from Tek may not be accurate or fully reflect the entire story.