What REALLY happened to DuMont Labs?

[Tubejunke]

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?????

[Dude111]

Yea I hear ya buddy!!!

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

[Steve McVoy]

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.

[WISCOJIM]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuMont_Television_Network

[N2IXK]

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.

[Phil Nelson]

Originally Posted by Steve McVoy

my guess is that DuMont was a poor businessman.

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

[Tubejunke]

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......

[zenith2134]

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

[bgadow]

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.

[Retrovert]

Originally Posted by Phil Nelson

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.

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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuMont_Television_NetworkAdding to DuMont's troubles was the FCC's 1948 "freeze" on television license applications.[26] This was done to sort out the thousands of applications that had come streaming in, but also to rethink the allocation and technical standards laid down prior to World War II. It became clear soon after the war that 12 channels ("channel 1" had been removed from television broadcasting use due to the fact that storms and other types of interference could severely affect the quality of signals on this channel) were not nearly enough for national television service. What was to be a six-month freeze lasted until 1952, when the FCC opened the UHF spectrum. The FCC, however, did not require television manufacturers to include UHF capability. In order to see UHF stations, most people had to buy an expensive converter. Even then, the picture quality was marginal at best. Tied to this was a decision to restrict VHF allocations in medium- and smaller-sized markets. Television sets were not required to have all-channel tuning until 1964.

Forced to rely on UHF to expand, DuMont saw one station after another go dark due to dismal ratings. It bought small, distressed UHF station KCTY (channel 50) in Kansas City, Missouri in 1954, but ran it for just three months before shutting it down at a considerable loss after attempting to compete with three established VHF stations.

The FCC's Dr. Hyman Goldin said in 1960, "If there had been four VHF outlets in the top markets, there's no question DuMont would have lived and would have eventually turned the corner in terms of profitability."

I hope that explains some of what did in DuMont.

[Tom Albrecht]

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.

[N2IXK]

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...

[Retrovert]

Originally Posted by Tom Albrecht

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.

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.

[jr_tech]

Originally Posted by zenith2134

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.

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

[Retrovert]

Originally Posted by jr_tech

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.

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.