The Cedar Grove home where Allen B. DuMont helped make television history hit the market this month.
Located at 9 Bradford Way near the Montclair border, the 1928 Tudor-style home was where the television pioneer and scientist lived when he started a home business developing and manufacturing cathode ray tubes, or CRTs, a key component of the earliest televisions.
Put on the market earlier this June for $710,000 by listing agent Robert Clark with Berkshire Hathaway Home Services Fox & Roach Realtors, DuMont’s former home has since gone under contract.
The four-bedroom, two-bathroom home exists as an ode to DuMont, the original owner who ushered in what he called the “teletronic age.” Dubbed the “father of television” by The Montclair Times and other local newspapers in his heyday, DuMont among many firsts in the industry sold the first all-electronic television receivers during his storied career.
The basement at 9 Bradford Way still holds the desk where DuMont worked on the business end of his early enterprise. The garage holds the original electrical outlets he installed to conduct his groundbreaking work.
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On the main level, DuMont’s former home features a sizeable living room with beamed ceilings and a stone fireplace flanked by built-in louvered cabinets. The ensuite master bedroom is on the third floor. A finished attic under the original slate roof offers a secluded lookout.
The residence was both home and laboratory for DuMont, who started building cathode ray tubes there in 1931 with glassblower Stanley Koch and welding expert John Hink. Born in January 1901, DuMont took an interest in radio technology at a young age.
The Brooklyn native taught himself Morse code and studied wireless communication while quarantined with polio as a pre-teen. At 14, he became the nation’s youngest licensed first-class commercial radio operator. Before he turned 16, he had a summer job manning the radio on a steamship that worked off the Atlantic coast.
After graduating from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1924, DuMont worked for the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company radio tube production before leaving for a similar post at the De Forest Radio Company. From there, DuMont went solo.
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From his home just a short walk away from the Upper Montclair train station, he started what in 1935 became DuMont Laboratories, Inc. His company specialized in durable, cost-effective cathode ray tubes and cathode ray oscillographs. Within two years, he would move the company to a larger facility in Passaic. Two years after that, he marketed the first home television receiver and showcased it at the New York World’s Fair.
His innovations made commercial television possible and made him enough money to launch his own network, the first to gain a license from the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities. The DuMont Television Network, a rival to NBC, ABC, and CBS and the predecessor to the Fox television network, was the first to air “The Honeymooners” sketches and spark Jackie Gleason’s television career.
The network was eventually sold off, as were various parts of the television receiver business. Then well-established as a millionaire, DuMont was living on an estate about 150 feet away from his old home. Listed by Christie’s International Real Estate for private sale, that home at 275 East Bradford Avenue is being marketed alongside a sister mansion at 271 East Bradford Avenue for an undisclosed price.
A holder of more than 30 patents who spent his leisure time competing in national powerboat races, DuMont called that nearby estate home when he died in November 1965.
