Lo-Res, 6 mb - Making Connections - Time Warner Cable

Martin Malarkey founded the cable system in Pottsville,
Pennsylvania, and also led the creation of the National
Community Television Association (NCTA), serving as the
industry group’s first leader. “Cable” was later substituted
for “community.”
14 Making Connections : Time Warner Cable and the Broadband Revolution
Shapp subsequently used the Lansford system
as a testing ground for new equipment design.
Articles about the close working relationship
between the television system and the equipment
maker appeared in The New York Times, Wall
Street Journal, Time, and Newsweek in late 1950
and early 1951. The publicity helped trigger a burst
of construction of community antenna systems
and raised awareness of the new industry. 22
Martin Malarkey, who managed his family’s
Pottsville, Pennsylvania, store selling musical
instruments, radios, and the occasional television
set, got the idea for a community antenna system
after watching television in a room at the Waldorf-
Astoria Hotel in Manhattan in 1949. Building on a
model widely used for radio, the hotel had con-
structed an antenna on its roof and delivered
The NCTA held its first meeting in 1951 in the Necho Allen
Hotel in Pottsville, Pennsylvania.
television to individual guest rooms. A handful
of apartment building complexes in New York
and Chicago had taken similar master antenna
approaches to distributing television to tenants
by this time as well.
Malarkey met with the hotel’s chief engineer
and later engineers at RCA who had designed the
system. He had his own system up and running
using RCA equipment by 1951 and worked as a
consultant to other system owners, including Bill
Daniels. He also served as the first president of
the industry trade group, the National Community
Television Association (NCTA), which he and a hand-
ful of other early cable industry builders formed
that same year in Pottsville’s Necho Allen Hotel. 23