Country Ingenuity

A little bit of country ingenuity is bringing television to the mountains to the good people of Hazard, Kentucky. Despite the community's location in a natural bowl, a situation which normally hinders TV reception, local initiative found the answer to the knotty problem in a combination of hill-top antennae and house-to-house coaxial lead-ins. This gave Hazard (population 10,000), reception of two stations in Cincinnati and one in Huntington, West Virginia. The nearest of these beams its programs from a distance of ninety airline miles. Ordinarily, a receiver has its own large tower, which will do the work of many small aerials, on top of a 1000-foot mountain. They carved a road to within two hundred feet of the peak. From the roadway, materials for the tower and antennae were toted the rest of the way by hand. The TV cables were run down the mountainside from the tower, strung along poles of the local power and light company, and fed into the houses of set owners. TV had come to Hazard! 1951