September 18, 1950: Brazil Turns On Its First Television Station

Today in 1950 · Monday, September 18, 1950

An early television studio camera at NBC's Chicago station WNBQ, 1951

An early television studio camera at NBC's Chicago station WNBQ, 1951 · NBC press photo, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

On this day in 1950, television came to Brazil — and to South America. TV Tupi of Sao Paulo, callsign PRF-3 on channel 3, went on the air as the continent's first television station, the creation of press magnate Assis Chateaubriand, whose Diarios Associados empire of newspapers, magazines and radio stations was among the most powerful media groups in the country.

The launch had a very Chateaubriand problem: almost nobody in Sao Paulo owned a television set. His solution, recorded in Fernando Morais's biography of the tycoon, was to hastily import around 200 American-made receivers so the premiere would have an audience. By Brazilian accounts, the first broadcast opened at 5:30 in the afternoon with a young girl announcing to whoever was watching that Brazilian television was on the air.

Three weeks after Mexico's XHTV and on the heels of experimental broadcasts across the hemisphere, TV Tupi's sign-on completed television's arrival as a Latin American medium. The station's surviving news archive, held today at the Cinemateca Brasileira, is where researchers now go to watch Brazil's earliest television history.

Also on this day

  • The US Eighth Army pressed its breakout from the Pusan Perimeter as North Korean resistance began to crumble.
  • Colombia committed a naval frigate to the Korean War — the only Latin American nation to send forces.

🎵 On the radio that week: America’s No. 1 song was “Goodnight Irene” by Gordon Jenkins and The Weavers (Billboard best sellers) — a folk song adapted by Lead Belly, who died broke in December 1949 — one year before it became the biggest hit of 1950. That sound never really left — we recreate 1950s doo-wop and slow-dance ballads every week: read the stories behind our songs or listen on the lovesong1950s channel.
🎬 At the movies: Betty Grable and Dan Dailey opened in “My Blue Heaven” — radio stars jumping to the brand-new medium of television, 1950's biggest showbiz anxiety set to music — and it shot straight to No. 1.
⚾ In sports: The AL race was a dead heat for the ages — Yankees 90-53, Red Sox and Tigers both 89-53 — while the Phillies reached their high-water mark: 7.5 games clear with two weeks to play.

Sources: Pesquisa FAPESP: 100 years of TV · Wikipedia: TV Tupi Sao Paulo · Click Petroleo e Gas: Brazilian TV history · Wikipedia: September 1950 · Billboard best-seller charts, 1950 (issue scans) · Variety National Boxoffice Survey, 1950 (Lantern scans) · Retrosheet 1950 game logs and box scores. Every fact above is drawn from the records linked here — no dramatization, no invented details.

More from this series: Today in 1950 — the daily archive · every post from September 2026

More history from 1950

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