Infrequently Answered Question #25: Why is there no channel one on broadcast tv? Why does it start at two?

      A: For the answer we must go back in the mists of ancient history before cable tv, before color tv, before UHF tv, when everything was analog and tvs were the size of a jukebox and packed with glowing vacuum tubes. In other words before most of us were born.

      At first there was a channel one. Then UHF came along and they needed a place on the dial to switch the tv's receiver to UHF which had its own separate knob. They wedged that into the channel one spot and whatever was there before moved up the VHF dial to another number. In many cases this was NBC going from channel one to four.

      On tv sets these days there are no separate dials for UHF and VHF, or dials with fine tuning rings around them at all. With our push-button remotely controlled modern tvs we really don't know we change from one spectrum to the other past channel 13. On cable there's no difference at all. And with DTV we can get several signals on the same frequency if the broadcaster compresses the signal. So you can have channels 2.1 and 2.2 and 2.3.

      All the same there still won't be a channel 1, or 1.1 or 1.2...