Milton Berle, America's legendary "Uncle Miltie" -- the rubber-faced comic who rose from the ranks of vaudeville entertainers to become television's first big-time star and who is credited with helping transform television into a seemingly indispensable commodity -- died during a nap at his Beverly Hills home Wednesday. He was 93 years old.

With his slapstick stage routines and rapid-fire one-liners, Berle was the prat-falling, mugging, seltzer-squirting grand old man of comedy. His career, which spanned more than eight decades, included success in radio, stage and film and television. He also wrote about 400 published songs, according to CNN. But it was on television that Berle was most legendary.

"From the first days of my career, he was one of my comedic heroes. He was always a great mentor. His style of comedy will never be replaced," comedian Don Rickles told the Associated Press.

Berle "was a pioneer," film critic Roger Ebert told CNN. "That's why my family wanted to get a TV set because all the kids at school were talking about what Uncle Miltie said last night and we didn't have a TV."

Ebert's family was not alone. Berle dominated TV's formative years with his Texaco Star Theater, a live variety show that debuted in 1948. That year, the show drew 75 percent of the burgeoning television audience and is widely credited with the massive adoption of TV by Americans at the time. By the end of the Texaco show's first year on the air, the number of sets in the U.S. had risen from 175,000 to 750,000.

The show was a Tuesday-night fixture, with families all over the country glued to their new black-and-white sets at 8 p.m. It was so popular that two months after its debut, it was the only show not canceled in favor of coverage of the presidential election when Harry Truman beat Thomas Dewey, The New York Times reported. Berle's unprecedented popularity earned him the nickname "Mr. Television."

"In Detroit, an investigation took place when the water levels took a drastic drop in the reservoirs on Tuesday nights between 9 and 9:05," The Times quoted from Berle's 1974 autobiography. "It turned out that everyone waited until the end of the Texaco Star Theater before going to the bathroom."

Berle ventured into the new medium at a time when radio was king and few of the leading entertainers of the day thought TV would prove successful. The networks also were skeptical.