The Emmy takes its name from an early camera tube
Early television cameras relied on an image orthicon tube, nicknamed the Immy by engineers. When the young television academy needed a name for its prize, engineer Harry Lubcke suggested that word, and it was softened to Emmy to suit the statuette: a winged woman holding up an atom.
The first choice had been Ike, slang for the iconoscope tube, but that was already the famous nickname of Dwight D. Eisenhower. The design came from engineer Louis McManus, who modelled the figure on his wife, and the academy picked it in 1948 after rejecting 47 other proposals. The wings stand for the muse of art and the atom for the electron of science.
The first ceremony, on 25 January 1949 at the Hollywood Athletic Club, honoured only programmes made and shown around Los Angeles, and Shirley Dinsdale took the first award, for Most Outstanding Television Personality. In the 1950s the prize went national, and in 1955 a sister academy formed in New York. Daytime television got its own ceremony in 1974, and an international competition for shows made outside the United States began in the early 1970s. The two American academies split in 1977 but agreed to share the statue and its trademark. Cable shows became eligible for the Primetime Emmys in 1988.
Each Primetime statuette weighs a little over 3 kilograms, is made of copper, nickel, silver and gold, and takes five and a half hours to produce. Makers handle them with white gloves to avoid fingerprints, and R.S. Owens of Chicago builds them. Trademark rules are strict: the figure must always face left, and even winners need permission to use its image in promotion.
The Primetime ceremony usually falls on a Sunday in mid-September, just ahead of the autumn season, with ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox each airing it once every four years. Craft categories such as costume design and casting are handed out days earlier at separate Creative Arts ceremonies. Alongside the Grammy, Oscar and Tony, the Emmy counts among America's four major entertainment awards.
Source: Emmy Awards
