"Television didn't attract much public notice until Bell Telephone demonstrated its new system in New York in April 1927. Shown on a screen two inches high by three inches wide--roughly the dimensions of a modern credit card--the broadcast consisted of a brief speech of encouragement from Washington by Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, followed by some entertainment from the AT&T studio in Whippany, New Jersey--a vaudeville comic who first told some Irish jokes and then changed into blackface and told some "darky" jokes."