Emmy Awards History

The Emmy Awards started off on the West Coast as a small awards show in 1949. In the 1950s, the show began to include the East Coast as well. In the late 1950s, the Emmy Awards show began to be broadcast across the nation. The Emmy Awards took on another change in the 1960s when the daytime Emmy Awards show joined the ranks. They were broadcast as two different awards shows.

The statue that represents the Emmy Award is a winged woman holding an atom. The word Emmy derives from the original words emmy, which is a nickname for the image orthicon tubes, used in early television cameras. The Emmy Award statue is representative of the television academy's goal of uplifting and supporting art and science where television is concerned. The wings on the woman of the statue are to represent art, and the atom is to represent the electron of science. The statue is a full hybrid to represent the goals in visual form of the television academy.

Originally, the first Emmy Awards ceremony was to honor the shows locally broadcast in the Los Angeles area. As time went by, the East Coast was added and concentrated solely on shows broadcasted in the New York area. Shortly thereafter, each state began to broadcast shows for their individual areas. Eventually by the 1960s, there was one national awards show that represented all the areas and television shows in the nation. Then there was the addition of the daytime Emmy Awards show to include shows shown outside of primetime, such as soap operas.