Spring - The CBS staff engineer Peter Carl Goldmark devised a system for color television that CBS management hoped would leapfrog the network over NBC and its existing black-and-whiteRCA system.[2][3] The CBS system "gave brilliant and stable colors", while NBC's was "crude and unstable but 'compatible'".[4] Ultimately, the FCC rejected the CBS system, because it was incompatible with RCA's. CBS had already moved to secure many ultra high frequency (UHF), not very high frequency (VHF), and television licenses, leaving them flatfooted in the early television age. Shortly after ruling in favor of NBC, the FCC chairman Charles Denny resigned from the FCC to become vice president and general counsel of NBC[5]
March 10 – The Metropolitan Opera broadcast for the first time from NBC studios at Rockefeller Center an abridged performance of the first act of Pagliacci, along with excerpts from four other operas.
March 15 – RCA reduces the price of television sets.
May 21 – Bell Telephone Laboratories transmits a 441-line video signal, with a bandwidth of 2.7 MHz, by coaxial cable from New York to Philadelphia and back.
August 1 – W2XBS goes out of commission from 1 August 1940 until the 27th of October 1940 while the transmitter is adjusted from 441-line picture to 525-line picture.[6][7]
September 3 – CBS resumes its television transmissions with the first demonstration of high definition color TV, by W2XAB, transmitting from the Chrysler Building.
November 5 - First televised Presidential election coverage is carried by W2XBS (NBC) and W2XWV (DuMont).
Erik Barnouw (1966). A Tower in Babel: A History of Broadcasting in the United States to 1933. New York City: Oxford University Press. ISBN978-0-19-500474-8.
