PUBLISHED SCHEDULE. After about a year, W9XAP broadcast according to a regular schedule. Programming included news and entertainment fare, such as live music, drama and comedy shows. From the start, program listings appeared in the Chicago Daily News. AM radio station WMAQ provided coordinated television sound as well as performers.

W9XAP STUDIOS occupied the 25^th floor of the landmark Chicago Daily News building. Today, we know this location as 2 North Riverside Plaza. The famous, Art Deco building still stands on Chicago’s northwest side, blocks from Chicago’s Loop. Chicagoans are most familiar with this edifice. A bridge over Canal Street connects it to the Metra train terminal. Commuters pass through the building and exit where Madison Street crosses the Chicago River.

SISTER STATION. W9XAP / WMAQ had a Chicago sister station in W9XAO / WIBO. WIBO provided W9XAO's sound. W9XAO / WIBO started transmitting television in 1930. By 1931, the cooperative stations were providing three hours of programming daily. A building on Chicago's north side housed W9XAO’s studios. Unfortunately, W9XAO's 6312 North Broadway home is gone today. It once stood a few doors south of Devon Avenue, near the Loyola University campus.

SEQUENTIAL VS. INTERLACED. These earliest Chicago television pictures used 48 lines. The scanning was sequential, rather than interlaced. Only a year later, Sanabria patented his interlaced, 45-line system. This interlaced system was what Western Television used so effectively at W9XAO and W9XAP. Interlacing eliminated much of television's annoying flicker. At last mechanical television became pleasant to watch! For this reason the NTSC eventually adopted interlaced pictures for all US television. Other worldwide systems such as SECAM and PAL also employ interlacing.

WHIZ KID. Sanabria, an Oak Park native, conceived of television as a high school freshman. Sanabria's television epiphany occurred about the same time as Philo Farnsworth's. Some four years later, Sanabria demonstrated his working television system. Bill Parker was the engineer who built much of W9XAO and W9XAP. Bill's reminiscences trace Sanabria's television invention back to October, 1925.

ECHOPHONE. Soon thereafter, Western Television acquired Echophone, and manufactured mechanical television sets at Echophone's Waukegan, Illinois plant. The two most famous models are the Visionette and the Model 41. With the Visionette in 1929, Western launched an industry. The Visonette was the first commercial television receiver. The much improved Model 41 came out in 1932. Both models displayed orange-red pictures from their neon kine tubes. For a black-and-white TV, the lamp color might seem strange. Yet neon orange-red imparts very natural flesh tones for all races.

THE VISIONETTE contains a 17-inch aperture disc that builds a three-inch picture. (The largest picture available from the neon tube inside is about 1.5 inches. A lens enlarges the image, but also narrows the angle of view. Only one person can comfortably watch.) The set contains no electronics. A plug at the rear of the Visonette scanner allows connection to a shortwave (picture) receiver.

THE MODEL 41 uses a crater tube and an eight-inch lens disc. The set provides bright, 4.5-inch pictures for more than one viewer. The picture receiver is an eight-tube superhet. The set has no sound receiver, but any AM (MW) radio will do.

DEPRESSION. Unfortunately, the Great Depression made these elegant sets a luxury purchase. Precious few could afford a Western set. Fortunately, many stores and bars bought sets, and entertained customers with the early TV programs. For venturesome, but less well-heeled souls, Western Television sold a TV scanner kit for $59.50. The scanner kit would connect to a shortwave radio that could pick up the police and TV band. Most people couldn't afford the kits, either. Besides, product promotion was difficult. The Federal Radio commission (predecessor of the FCC) prevented television broadcasters from advertising their products. In fact, The FRC then prohibited any form of TV advertising.

TV STANDARDS. The clarity of W9XAP's telecasts proved the superiority of Sanabria's patented, interlaced scanning method. This method eliminated the flicker produced by competing systems from John Baird and Charles Jenkins. W9XAP's picture also provided twice the detail of Baird's pictures. Eventually, 24 stations adopted Sanabria's Western Television technology. Today, all major world television systems employ interlaced scanning.

TOURING SHOWS. Sanabria's projection television and picturephone demonstrations toured this country and Canada. The projection shows often took place at the B.S. Moss Broadway Theater in New York. In 1932, British television journalist Alfred Dinsdale witnessed one of these projection shows. Dinsdale wrote that the projected television images were “better than anything I'd ever seen.” (See First Principles of Television, p. viii.) Eventually Sanabria's projection pictures reached 30 feet across. The ultra-bright television lamp for these pictures was the spectacular Taylor tube, probably a Sanabria exclusive. The Taylor tube is a water-cooled, hot-cathode arc lamp.

HIGH TECH. Sanabria and his associates experimented with methods of lineless, infrared, 3-D and color TV. As a Sanabria employee, Lee de Forest patented a system of field-sequential color TV. Sanabria also invented and tested a system of cable TV with 150-line pictures. In this system, all electronics reside at the TV studio. Only the scanner is in the home. The pictures have a ten-to-one interlace. In 1938, Sanabria's Collaborator journal (an ATI publication) included his description of a new weapon. This weapon is the “Television Torpedo,” a television-guided cruise missile. A wire antenna across its twin tales receives control signals from the mother plane. An iconoscope tube in the nose of the missile allows the remote pilot to spot the target. In World War II, RCA actually manufactured such a missile for the US Army. At the time when Sanabria published, the Television Torpedo was already a proven technology.

AMERICAN TELEVISION became the largest private school in the country. At its peak, the school enrolled 6,000 students in a four-year B.S. program. Unlike many technical schools, ATI offered residency. Campus locations included Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles. The Pearl Harbor bombings upstaged the opening of a New York campus.

NTSC. Sanabria and his brother John served on the National Television System Committee (NTSC). This committee designed the analog television standard that served the United States for the next 60 years. A digital standard replaced NTSC in 2009.