This paper examines the early history of television reception in Graubünden through the villages of the Surselva and the municipalities of Chur, Bonaduz, Flims, and Thusis. It uses these Alpine “global villages” to reconsider basic assumptions about broadcasting and globalization in the second half of the twentieth century. Histories of television transmission are often written within a center-periphery framework: as the planned expansion of national networks, the construction of transmitters far from broadcasting studios, and the gradual provision of a national TV program to an entire population. In this standard narrative, remote places like Swiss mountain valleys are being eaten up by an unstoppable force of technological globalization.
The case of Graubünden allows us to challenge this perspective. It shows that the integration of local places into television broadcasting did not simply dissolve peripheries into a homogeneous communicative space. Rather, the self-description as a communicative periphery could become a practical resource. The very familiar language of Alpine supply problems helped transform highly specific reception difficulties into a recognizable field of action. The region therefore provides a useful framework for understanding a more general feature of early television: reception was not primarily a matter of signal availability, but of local awareness, interpretation, and implementation.
After the Swiss PTT had integrated the north-eastern part of the country into the national television supply with the Säntis transmitter in 1958, large parts of Graubünden still lacked a reliable signal. In Chur, a weak signal could sometimes be received. In Thusis and Bonaduz, even a test image remained unstable. In Flims, Laax, Ilanz, and Disentis, useful reception was still largely absent. These differences did not simply reflect distance from a transmitter. They resulted from small-scale combinations of topography, line of sight, field strength, antenna placement, weather, available electricity, and local willingness to invest in technical installations. The paper follows two private television associations that emerged from this situation. In 1958, a Chur association built a frequency converter near the village of Says, which received the Säntis signal and retransmitted it for the city. At about the same time, merchants, hoteliers, and local actors from Ilanz, Flims, and Thusis formed Televisium Surselva. Their first plan was to receive the Uetliberg signal directly from a mountain site, using a battery-powered television set, a broadband antenna, and car batteries during laborious high-altitude expeditions. When a change in the Uetliberg transmitter pattern reduced the measured field strength at the chosen site from roughly 400 to less than 70 microvolts, the project had to be reinterpreted. Instead of treating Uetliberg as the “mother” transmitter, the Surselva group turned the frequency converter at Says into the starting point of its own relay chain. By summer 1960, shortly before the Rome Olympic broadcasts, converters at Feldis, Trans, Ruschein, and Luven carried Swiss television into valleys that were not yet part of the PTT’s intended supply. Villages as far as Disentis could now receive the national programme, although practically every locality depended on its own channel and technical arrangement.
The argument is that such installations were not merely local supplements to a national infrastructure. They reveal a structural feature of early television. Sender-side planning could calculate probable coverage areas, but it could not fully account for the concrete conditions under which reception became possible in individual places. These conditions were often more effectively interpreted and stabilized by actors on the reception side: dealers, hotel owners, associations, installers, and households.
Graubünden made this general problem legible earlier than many other regions because it could draw on an already familiar self-description: the Alpine region as a difficult space of infrastructure and supply. This language transformed heterogeneous local reception problems into a recognizable field of action. The Chur/Surselva case therefore shows how a supposedly peripheral region became a privileged site for learning what television broadcasting actually required: not only transmitters, but locally organized reception.