Why Channel 37 Doesn't Exist (And What It Has to Do With Aliens)

[Celerity]

Since the advent of analog TVs, channel 37 has always been static. Here's why.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/dy8by7/why-channel-37-doesnt-exist-and-what-it-has-to-do-with-aliens




I’m endlessly fascinated by stories of the quirks that were built into the TV system where the well-laid plans of the system simply fell apart because it was asked to do too many things. Nearly five years ago, I wrote about one of them, the tale of how radio broadcasters were able to shoehorn an additional FM station into the radio because of the proximity of TV’s channel 6 to the rest of the radio feed. So when I was informed that there was another oddity kinda like this involving the TV lineups, I decided I had to take a dive in. It’s a tale that centers around channel 37, which was a giant block of static in most parts of the world during the 20th century. The reason for that was simple: it couldn’t fend off its scientific competition.

1952

The year that the U.S. Federal Communications Commission opened up the television system to use UHF, or ultra high frequency signals. The practical effect of this addition of bandwidth was that the total number of potential TV stations increased dramatically, from 108 to 2,051, overnight. The first UHF applications were granted on July 11, 1952, according to The History of UHF Television, a site dedicated to the higher-frequency television offerings.



The radio telescope that became a headache for the television industry

Within a 600-mile radius of the city of Danville, Illinois, population 31,246, are numerous major cities—among them Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Toronto, and Washington, DC. Nearly the entire length of the Mississippi River fits into that radius. If Danville was located just a little farther to the east, the radius would also include Philadelphia and New York City. For all intents and purposes, a 600-mile radius from Eastern Illinois covers basically the entire East Coast except the state of Florida and the Northeast. (Importantly to this story, New Jersey generally does not fall into this 600-mile radius.) But there was something located in Danville that was important enough to scientists that they didn’t want to share it with anyone else.

And that thing was a 400-foot-wide radio telescope, operating along the 610 MHz frequency. It was something of a monster of astronomy at the time, operating 12 to 16 hours per day, and researchers at the University of Illinois aimed to keep it that way. The research that led to the creation of the radio telescope was, basically, an accident—but a fundamental one that taught us more about the universe than we might have learned with a mere optical telescope. In 1931, a radio engineer and Bell Laboratories employee named Karl Jansky was trying to uncover the source of static that was interfering with radio waves … and found it had an extraterrestrial source, particularly at the center in the Milky Way galaxy. Jansky wasn’t an astronomer, but an engineer, and despite discovering a new field of astronomy, his position at Bell Labs did not allow him to pursue it further.

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