The relatively brief era of 1950s big-money, isolation-booth quiz shows began here with contestants testing their knowledge in a single category. The first question was worth $64, and the value of those that followed doubled, up to a grand prize of $64,000. This was an immediate sensation (its first year, it displaced `I Love Lucy' as the top-rated series), but its fall was equally famous, a casualty (like so many others) of the game-show scandals that dominated headlines in the fall of 1958.
