Beginning his career at AT&T-Bell Laboratories, Al Protzman became one
of the first radio broadcast engineers at age twenty in 1922, working
with the AT&T stations WEAF and WJZ, and with the National Broadcasting
Company after its founding in 1926.
From 1930 to 1936 Protzman worked in Hollywood as a sound engineer for
Fox Film and its successor 20th Century-Fox. Among his screen credits
were several "Charlie Chan" films and "The Power and the Glory",
starring Spencer Tracy.
In 1936 NBC, then beginning television program tests, approached
Protzman to become their first TV cameraman. He accepted and eventually
became one of TV's earliest Technical Directors (TDs). In 1939,
Protzman presented a paper, "Television Studio Technic," to the Society
of Motion Picture Engineers which described NBC's TV experiments in
great detail.
Al Protzman retired in 1966 as Director of Technical Operations for
NBC. He died in 1981 in Bronxville, New York, aged 79.