Pat Sajak

Table of Contents

References & Edit History Quick Facts & Related Topics

Images

Discover

Ahura Mazda - relief of the Zoroastrian god Ahura Mazda at the ancient ruins of Persepolis in Iran. Also known as Ormazd Zoroastrianism,

Which Religion Is the Oldest?

airplane in flight (plane, aircraft, flying)

7 Puzzling Plane Disappearances

Do Lemmings Really Commit Mass Suicide?

San Francisco, California/USA-1/18/20: Womens March at Civic Center marching with signs of political protest regarding equality also embracing 2020 presidential candidates and celebrating equality

How Does the U.S. Government Define the Difference Between a Protest and a Riot?

Close up of praying mantis walking on stone ground against a blurred background in Japan

6 Animals That Eat Their Mates

Granary Burying Ground, in Boston, Massachusetts.

9 Cemeteries to Die For

Are the Middle East and the Near East the Same Thing?

Pat Sajak

American television personality

Also known as: Patrick Leonard Sajak, Patrick Leonard Sajdak

Written by Adam Zeidan

Fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Article History

Quick Facts

In full:: Patrick Leonard Sajak, Sajak formerly spelled Sajdak

Born:: October 26, 1946, Chicago, Illinois, U.S. (age 78)

See all related content

Pat Sajak (born October 26, 1946, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.) is an American television personality best known as the four-decade-long host of the television game show Wheel of Fortune (1981–2024).

Early life and career

Can you solve this puzzle? (Category: Person).

P A _ R _ _ K
_ A _ _ A K

You might be thrown off by the extra letter in Sajak, but it was no mistake! Sajak’s last name was once Sajdak, a Polish surname that reflects his family background. He grew up on the west side of Chicago with two Polish American parents, although he was not particularly close to his father, Leonard Sajdak, or his paternal grandparents. His parents divorced when he was young, and his mother, Joyce (née Brandecki) Sajdak, married Walter Backal in 1956. After Sajak’s father died in 1961, he lost contact with his father’s side of the family.

Sajak’s interest in broadcast entertainment began in his childhood, when he watched Jack Paar on The Tonight Show. “I would sneak out of bed at night not to go out with the guys or grab a beer but it was to turn on The Tonight Show and see what Jack was up to,” Sajak recalled in a 2012 interview with the Hoover Institution, a public policy think tank at Stanford University. Sajak’s early adulthood paralleled that of his idol: he began his career doing small jobs for a local radio station in 1966. He then enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1967, and, when he was deployed to Vietnam, he eventually became a disc jockey for the army’s radio station in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City).

After Sajak was discharged in 1970, he struggled to find a regular gig. He eventually joined NBC’s Nashville affiliate, WSM, where he worked as a disc jockey on its radio station and a staff announcer on its television channel. He often filled in as a substitute for regular newscasters, and so, when the weekend weatherman left the station, Sajak was an obvious choice to take his place. By then he had dropped the d from his stage name, since the Anglicized pronunciation of Sajdak did not include any d sound and had frequently caused people to stumble when reading his name aloud.

Sajak’s sense of humor caught the attention of Los Angeles’ NBC affiliate, KNBC, which in 1977 brought in Sajak as one of its weathermen. With Sajak presenting the weather report for the West Coast’s epicentre of television entertainment, his talent was noticed by industry heavyweights (including Paar, who sent him a letter of praise).

Host of Wheel of Fortune

Sajak was also noticed by Merv Griffin, the creator of Jeopardy! (original run, 1964–75) and Wheel of Fortune (1975– ). When in 1981 Wheel of Fortune needed a new host, Griffin persuaded NBC to hire Sajak. Despite some initial pushback because Sajak was not widely known, Sajak was offered the position. He hosted Wheel of Fortune for the first time on December 28. That same day a new gimmick—the Bonus Round—was introduced in which the winning contestant could supplement their prize by solving an additional puzzle.

Read about other famous game shows, including Jeopardy!, Twenty One, and The Gong Show.

In his role as the show’s host, Sajak, often off-camera, provided instructions to the game’s contestants and offered commentary for the audience. He joined a cohost, initially Susan Stafford, who appeared throughout the game next to the letter board, revealing each letter as they were announced by the contestants. After Stafford left the show in 1982 to pursue a career in clinical psychology, she was replaced by Vanna White. White became such an integral and iconic part of the program that, in 1988, The New York Times quipped that Sajak was “perhaps best-known as Vanna White’s sidekick.”

In September 1983 Wheel of Fortune went into nighttime syndication (while continuing its daytime run on NBC) in an attempt to broaden its viewership. But only a handful of local stations initially picked up the show; because it filled half of a one-hour time slot, stations were left to figure out how to fill the other half. To complement Wheel of Fortune in the slot, Griffin pushed a revival of Jeopardy! (with Canadian presenter Alex Trebek as its new host) and offered the show for syndication in 1984. The tactic worked: by 1986 the two shows had become the first and second most popular programs, respectively, in syndication.

Sajak’s fame across the country rose rapidly with Wheel of Fortune’s syndication, and he was tapped for appearances elsewhere. He cohosted the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade from 1984 to 1986. In 1989 he was offered The Pat Sajak Show, a late-night show on CBS that lasted until 1990; among the myriad of guests in the show’s short run was Jack Paar, who had retired from late-night television in 1965. In order to join CBS, however, Sajak had to leave NBC, ending Wheel of Fortune’s daytime run as well as Sajak’s affiliation with the network where he began his television career. Taking on a new show and leaving NBC were hardly the only major changes in Sajak’s life in 1989: he also adopted his stage name, Sajak, as his legal name and married Lesly Brown, with whom he later had two children.

In the 1990s Sajak ventured further into the business of broadcast entertainment, although he opted to invest in media that were more close to his heart than they were lucrative. In 1998 he purchased the broadcasting license for WNAV, an amplitude-modulated (AM) radio station in Annapolis, Maryland, and it became one of the central components of his company, Sajak Broadcasting Corporation. In 2005 the company also attained the license for another AM radio station, WTTR, in Westminster, Maryland. Several years after that purchase, Sajak moved to sell both licenses. The company ultimately sold WTTR’s license in 2013 for $325,000; WNAV’s license was sold in 2021 for a mere $1,000, with Sajak contributing $100,000 for the station to relocate from land that he was seeking to sell. Sajak also founded P.A.T. Productions and BoJak Records, small production companies that offer concepts and content for the television and music industries, respectively.

Much of Sajak’s activity outside of Wheel of Fortune has reflected his conservative values. He has spoken critically about the culture of the entertainment industry and has been notably vocal about his political stances. In 2015 he told the The Wall Street Journal: “[E]ven a game-show host has as much right as anyone to babble about anything he wants to. My only objection is the bait and switch. It just kills me when someone’s on a talk show to promote a movie, and I’ve got to sit through saving the whales first. I like whales as much as the next guy—especially filleted. They’re really tasty.” In 2003 he joined the board of trustees for Hillsdale College, a classical liberal arts institution that regards its complete financial independence from taxpayer subsidies as the hallmark of its reputation. In 2019 Sajak (who never completed an academic degree) became the board’s chair.

In 2023 Sajak announced that the 2023–24 season of Wheel of Fortune would be his last. Apart from holding the record for longest-serving game show host in American television, he has won numerous accolades for his work, including the People’s Choice Award (1987) as well as the Daytime Emmy Award for outstanding game show host (1993, 1997, and 1998) and the Daytime Emmy Lifetime Achievement Award (2011). He also received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1994.

Adam Zeidan

television

Table of Contents

References & Edit History Related Topics

Images

John Logie Baird with television transmitter

production line for the RCA CT-100 television

picture tube aspect ratios for SDTV and HDTV

interlaced scanning for standard television display

wave form of vertical synchronization signal

For Students

television summary

television

Written by David E. Fisher, Donald G. Fink•All

Fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Last Updated: May 14, 2025 • Article History

Related Topics:: mechanical television system; TV remote control; television picture; standard-definition television; digital television

See all related content

television (TV), a form of mass media based on the electronic delivery of moving images and sound from a source to a receiver. By extending the senses of vision and hearing beyond the limits of physical distance, television has had a considerable influence on society. Conceived in the early 20th century as a possible medium for education and interpersonal communication, it became by mid-century a vibrant broadcast medium, using the model of broadcast radio to bring news and entertainment to people all over the world. Television is now delivered in a variety of ways: “over the air” by terrestrial radio waves (traditional broadcast TV); along coaxial cables (cable TV); reflected off of satellites held in geostationary Earth orbit (direct broadcast satellite, or DBS, TV); streamed through the Internet; and recorded optically on digital video discs (DVDs) and Blu-ray discs.

The technical standards for modern television, both monochrome (black-and-white) and colour, were first established in the middle of the 20th century. Improvements have been made continuously since that time, and television technology changed considerably in the early 21st century. Much attention was focused on increasing the picture resolution (high-definition television [HDTV]) and on changing the dimensions of the television receiver to show wide-screen pictures. In addition, the transmission of digitally encoded television signals was instituted to provide interactive service and to broadcast multiple programs in the channel space previously occupied by one program.

Despite this continuous technical evolution, modern television is best understood first by learning the history and principles of monochrome television and then by extending that learning to colour. The emphasis of this article, therefore, is on first principles and major developments—basic knowledge that is needed to understand and appreciate future technological developments and enhancements. Because American TV programs, like American popular culture in general in the 20th and early 21st centuries, have spread far beyond the boundaries of the United States and have had a pervasive influence on global popular culture, see also "television in the United States," which deals with the history and development of TV programs.

A. Michael Noll

The development of television systems

Mechanical systems

The dream of seeing distant places is as old as the human imagination. Priests in ancient Greece studied the entrails of birds, trying to see in them what the birds had seen when they flew over the horizon. They believed that their gods, sitting in comfort on Mount Olympus, were gifted with the ability to watch human activity all over the world. And the opening scene of William Shakespeare’s play Henry IV, Part 1 introduces the character Rumour, upon whom the other characters rely for news of what is happening in the far corners of England.

For ages it remained a dream, and then television came along, beginning with an accidental discovery. In 1872, while investigating materials for use in the transatlantic cable, English telegraph worker Joseph May realized that a selenium wire was varying in its electrical conductivity. Further investigation showed that the change occurred when a beam of sunlight fell on the wire, which by chance had been placed on a table near the window. Although its importance was not realized at the time, this happenstance provided the basis for changing light into an electric signal.

In 1880 a French engineer, Maurice LeBlanc, published an article in the journal La Lumière électrique that formed the basis of all subsequent television. LeBlanc proposed a scanning mechanism that would take advantage of the retina’s temporary but finite retainment of a visual image. He envisaged a photoelectric cell that would look upon only one portion at a time of the picture to be transmitted. Starting at the upper left corner of the picture, the cell would proceed to the right-hand side and then jump back to the left-hand side, only one line lower. It would continue in this way, transmitting information on how much light was seen at each portion, until the entire picture was scanned, in a manner similar to the eye reading a page of text. A receiver would be synchronized with the transmitter, reconstructing the original image line by line.

The concept of scanning, which established the possibility of using only a single wire or channel for transmission of an entire image, became and remains to this day the basis of all television. LeBlanc, however, was never able to construct a working machine. Nor was the man who took television to the next stage: Paul Nipkow, a German engineer who invented the scanning disk. Nipkow’s 1884 patent for an Elektrisches Telescop was based on a simple rotating disk perforated with an inward-spiraling sequence of holes. It would be placed so that it blocked reflected light from the subject. As the disk rotated, the outermost hole would move across the scene, letting through light from the first “line” of the picture. The next hole would do the same thing slightly lower, and so on. One complete revolution of the disk would provide a complete picture, or “scan,” of the subject.

This concept was eventually used by John Logie Baird in Britain (see the photograph) and Charles Francis Jenkins in the United States to build the world’s first successful televisions. The question of priority depends on one’s definition of television. In 1922 Jenkins sent a still picture by radio waves, but the first true television success, the transmission of a live human face, was achieved by Baird in 1925. (The word television itself had been coined by a Frenchman, Constantin Perskyi, at the 1900 Paris Exhibition.)

The efforts of Jenkins and Baird were generally greeted with ridicule or apathy. As far back as 1880 an article in the British journal Nature had speculated that television was possible but not worthwhile: the cost of building a system would not be repaid, for there was no way to make money out of it. A later article in Scientific American thought there might be some uses for television, but entertainment was not one of them. Most people thought the concept was lunacy.

Nevertheless, the work went on and began to produce results and competitors. In 1927 the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) gave a public demonstration of the new technology, and by 1928 the General Electric Company (GE) had begun regular television broadcasts. GE used a system designed by Ernst F.W. Alexanderson that offered “the amateur, provided with such receivers as he may design or acquire, an opportunity to pick up the signals,” which were generally of smoke rising from a chimney or other such interesting subjects. That same year Jenkins began to sell television kits by mail and established his own television station, showing cartoon pantomime programs. In 1929 Baird convinced the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) to allow him to produce half-hour shows at midnight three times a week. The following years saw the first “television boom,” with thousands of viewers buying or constructing primitive sets to watch primitive programs.

Not everyone was entranced. C.P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian, warned: “Television? The word is half Greek and half Latin. No good will come of it.” More important, the lure of a new technology soon paled. The pictures, formed of only 30 lines repeating approximately 12 times per second, flickered badly on dim receiver screens only a few inches high. Programs were simple, repetitive, and ultimately boring. Nevertheless, even while the boom collapsed a competing development was taking place in the realm of the electron.