First conceived in 1953 and debuting in September 1955 as Chicago's first non-commercial educational television station, WTTW began to experience growing pains by the early 1960s. Gradually moving away from its original mission of providing classroom instructional courses as more and more of its broadcast day was filled first with programming from National Educational Television (NET) and later PBS and those distributed by other member stations, the idea of a second station seemed like the perfect answer to provide additional sources for the displaced educational programming. In October 1962, the FCC, at the request of WTTW's owner, the Chicago Educational Television Association, changed channel 20's status to reserved noncommercial.