Truly Trivial: When was the first 3D television broadcast, and what program was shown?

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For those of us fortunate enough to attend the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, it has become glaring apparent that every major television manufacturer is desperate to shove 3D TV down our throats -- whether the consumer likes it or not. If you're among the millions of movie-goers (or Golden Globes judges) that saw James Cameron's Avatar, you know that Hollywood has also suddenly decided that 3D is the technology that will once again get consumers lining up at cinemas rather than queuing up on bittorrent. Piling on, ESPN and the Discovery Channel are committed to creating 3D HD television channels this year, and pretty much every major PC video game has a 3D expansion or sequel in the works (you couldn't throw a rock at CES without hitting a 3D version of Batman: Arkham Asylum).

Hope you like wearing dorky 3D glasses for several hours a day.

What's lost in all this sudden 3D hoopla is that 3D photography, motion pictures and television have been around for decades and that, while each has enjoyed a brief spark of popularity, the public has always swung back to familiar, comfortable two-dimensional media as its preferred viewing format. Some of this has been due to limitations in technology, some of it has been due to the paucity of good 3D content, but for this author's money the problem that killed 3D in the past remains the one that neither Silicon Valley nor Tinseltown have yet solved -- nobody wants to wear 3D glasses to watch TV. (Yes, there are 3D screens that don't require glasses, but those models demand a direct viewing angle; step a few degrees left or right of center and the image blurs, which is equally if not more inconvenient.)

Three-dimensional stereoscope photography dates back at least to the 1840s with Charles Wheatstone and David Brewster inaugurating the technology. A 3D photograph of Queen Victoria was displayed at the Great Exhibition in 1851. In 1855 the Kinematoscope 3D movie camera was produced, and by 1935 3D films started appearing in theaters. This technology didn't achieve a major commercial groundswell until the 1950s when classic films like Bwana Devil and the original House of Wax delighted movie-going audiences. But by the 1960s, the insatiable craze for 3D films had died out, partly because moviehouses couldn't afford, maintain, or properly operate the dual-projector systems required to show the films, and partly because the public fad of 3D movies had passed on.

That same fad reached television in the 1990s, when major networks offered special 3D episodes of primetime television programs -- including a particularly memorable episode of 3rd Rock from the Sun, "Nightmare on Dick Street" -- but again the craze died out by the end of the decade. This time, the passing couldn't be laid at the feet of the technology, as 3D TV was proven feasible over forty years earlier.

So, when was the first 3D television broadcast, and what program was shown?