30 Hoover starred in America’s first long-distance television transmission
Before he became president Herbert Hoover was a highly successfully mining engineer, a self-made man who had been a member of the first graduating class of Stanford University. He became internationally famous for his humanitarian work feeding refugees in the aftermath of World War 1 (an act he would repeat following World War 2). As Secretary of Commerce under Coolidge, Hoover was the subject of the first television transmission, with him speaking in Washington DC and the image and sound sent to an audience of reporters and others in New York City. “Human genius has now destroyed the impediment of distance”, he said.