Lucille Désirée Ball was born on August 6, 1911 into a family of meager means in rural upstate New York. Ambitious and looking for a way out of small town life, Ball worked her way up from fashion model, to chorus girl, to B movie star, to comedy icon.

I Love Lucy merchandise was and still is a big business. In 1953, Desi Arnaz put out a hit record of him signing the I Love Lucy theme on one side and “There's a Brand New Baby in Our House” on the other. The record was released in conjunction with the birth of Ball and Arnaz's real and on-screen babies, Desi Jr. and Little Ricky.

The I Love Lucy show was the first comedy to be filmed in front of a live studio audience, a practice that is now standard in many of today's TV sitcoms. Lucille Ball's daughter, Lucie Arnaz, wrote that her mother's “clowning and comedy talent thrived on the sound of real people laughing uproariously at her antics.”

Dann Cahn, editor of I Love Lucy, showed Studio 360 around the original soundstage where the show was filmed in Los Angeles, California. Standard convention in the early 1950s was to broadcast television shows live from New York, but Ball and Arnaz insisted on filming in LA. I Love Lucy's original soundstage, now part of Hollywood Center Studios, is still in use today.

Dann Cahn was the head editor of I Love Lucy and one of the first people to cut for multiple cameras using a custom made machine he called “the monster.” Cahn said, "When I had signed up for the I Love Lucy job and arrived in my cutting room, two guys came in wheeling this new edit thing and I said to my assistant, 'What are we going to do with this monster? It won’t even fit in the cutting room.' So we put it in the prop room and used it there. It was a Moviola with four heads — three for picture and one for sound. Its new name — The Monster — stuck."

The I Love Lucy heart is an iconic image with a global reach.  Even today, you can still buy hats, T-shirts, posters, lottery scratch tickets, dolls, iPhone apps, and just about anything else emblazoned with the Lucy logo. It is Lucy lore that Desi gave Lucy a diamond-encrusted heart-shaped lapel watch on her 29th birthday. It was supposedly Lucy's first gift from Desi and was used as the model for the logo.

Dann Cahn sits amongst the many chairs set up on the original I Love Lucy soundstage. Rehearsals for I Love Lucy would begin with a read-through of the script every Monday morning. Jess Oppenheimer, the show's creator and head writer, said that if anyone saw the cast doing their first read-through they'd say, everything's great, but "ditch the red head. She doesn't know what's she's doing.” But by showtime, Ball's performance was nothing short of perfection. (Also pictured: Gregg Oppenheimer, Jess's son.)

Another view of the original I Love Lucy soundstage. Karl Freund, the Oscar-winning cinematographer, convinced Desi Arnaz that I Love Lucy needed to be filmed on a soundstage, not on a theater stage, as was the convention at that time. A soundstage allowed Freund to set up the necessary infrastructure — including a hanging light grid and crab dollies — to successfully accomplish the innovative technique of three cameras shooting simultaneously. The techniques “Papa” Freund invented for I Love Lucy are still used to make sitcoms today.

This archival photo shows how long rows of bleachers were erected in the soundstage for the live audience to watch the filmings of the I Love Lucy show. During filming, Jess Oppenheimer, the creator and head writer of I Love Lucy, would sometimes pace up and down behind the bleachers to hear if the audience was laughing at the jokes. Oppenheimer's background was in radio, so he was accustomed to using his ears, not his eyes, to tell if the show was working or falling flat.

A seat to watch a live filming of I Love Lucy was one of the hottest tickets in town — brought to you by Phillip Morris, I Love Lucy's official sponsor.

Shooting I Love Lucy was a huge production involving three cameras, a live audience, set and costume changes, and live music. Because many of the show's creators had experience in live radio, they initially didn't realize that music could be later edited into the show after filming. It was the Wild West of TV and I Love Lucy was on the frontier.

Filming I Love Lucy with three cameras was just one of the show's many monumental innovations. Television historian Thomas Schatz explains, “I Love Lucy shaped the style, the technique, the veritable 'grammar' of the sitcom. And beyond the series' impact on the genre, there was Desilu itself, which affected the institutional, economic, and even the technological practices of the TV industry.”

Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz continually blurred the lines between their personal lives and their on-screen personas.  This resulted in the occasional unpleasant side-effect, such as when Confidential Magazine wrote in 1955 about Arnaz's alleged dalliances with prostitutes. Susan Sontag wrote that the success of I Love Lucy was based on “the confusion and mixture of televised fantasy and voyeuristically apprehended reality. A dose of fantasy. And the insinuation that we might be watching something real. Which has turned out to be television's perennial, still winning formula.”

A page of the script for the famous episode titled “Lucy is Enceinte,” in which Lucy tells Ricky that she's pregnant. Months before Lucy Ricardo was with (scripted) child, Ball found out she was pregnant in real life. Ball and Arnaz assumed that the pregnancy would mean an end to I Love Lucy because pregnant women were verboten on television. But Jess Oppenheimer, the show's creator, decided to write the pregnancy into the Lucy scripts. He soothed the nerves of the network by having a priest, a rabbi, and a minister vet every pregnancy-related script to make sure it wasn't in any way offensive. And, famously, the word pregnant was never said on the I Love Lucy show.