This week we take a break from your regularly scheduled programming and peek at the nutsy/boltsy side of television. From why we have the Emergency Broadcast System to who started Closed Captioning, these are all the TV questions that weren’t answered by your instructional manual.

1. Why do we have the Emergency Broadcast System? (And why’s it always testing us?)

The United States was fretting over the possibility of a sneak attack by those pesky Soviets in 1951, so President Truman announced the launch of CONELRAD, or the Control of Electromagnetic Radiation system of emergency notification. The fear was that Russia might hone in on American radio signals and use them as beacons for their atomic missiles. Under CONELRAD, all radio stations would cease broadcasting after an alert from the White House. Listeners were then urged to tune in to either 640 or 1240 on their AM dials for further information. By 1963, the Soviet Union had switched to ballistic missiles, so CONELRAD was retired and replaced by the Emergency Broadcast System. The EBS was a relay system, with a primary station receiving an official alert from Washington, which would then pass it on to secondary stations. The primary station sent the Alert Tone, which consisted of sine waves of 853 and 960 Hz, and then TV and radio stations across the U.S. automatically stopped local broadcasting and re-broadcast the emergency information being sent from the source. By FCC law, all radio and television stations were required to perform a random “Weekly Transmission Test Of The Attention Signal and Test Script” (“This is only a test. Had this been a real emergency…”).

The EBS was replaced in 1997 by the Emergency Alert Service, which allows broadcast stations, satellite radio, cable systems, DBS systems, participating satellite companies, and other services to receive emergency information automatically, even if their facilities are unattended.