The thing is that "television" seemed like a thing but really it was a system that required a variety of connected, compatible parts, like the Internet.
Different pieces of what became TV existed in 1900, the challenge was putting them together. And that required a consensus among powerful players.
I think it would be pretty uncontroversial from the technological point of view, but then, the first "real" TV broadcast would be the 1936 Olympic games...
Analogue interlaced-scan TV systems like PAL and SECAM were actually ''higher'' definition in relation to NTSC by visual line count, although the former's 25Hz refresh rate was noticeable for flickering compared to NTSC's ~30Hz, which was much closer to the human eye's comfort level.
There was a prototype 819-line analogue ''high definition'' system used to record The T.A.M.I. Show in 1964, with excellent results, but the recordings were committed to film for distribution since there was no apparatus for broadcasting it:
There were also experiments by NHK of Japan with analogue HD broadcasting, but digital TV was so close on the horizon that it was mooted.
''High definition'' has been a relative term in the professional TV world all along, but became consumer buzzwords with the advent of digital TV in the early 2000's. Nowadays we know it to mean 720, 1080, or higher lines, usually in progressive scan.
And 100 years ago my great-aunt and grandmother (both RIP) were little kids and my great-grandmother, born in the 19th century and which I knew very well for she lived until 99 years old, was filming them playing on the beach using a "Pathe Baby" hand camera.
And we converted some of these reels to digital files (well brothers and I asked a specialized company to "digitalize" them).
100 years ago people already had cars, tramways (as a kid my great-grandmother tried to look under the first tramway she saw to see "where the horses were hiding"), cameras to film movies, telephones, the telegraph existed, you could trade the stock market and, well, it's knew to me but TV was just invented too.
It did always strike me as funny that Cronenberg had a movie about "what if TV was evil and made people murderous and the studio execs had to pay", and a movie about "what if video games were evil and made people murderous and their creators had to pay", but never a movie about "what if movies were evil and made people murderous and film directors had to pay". Obvious bias aside I wonder if it would work as a story - movies don't seem as hypnotic in the public consciousness, I believe.
The Baird vs Farnsworth debate reminds me of similar discussions in tech. The first demo rarely becomes the dominant standard.
What strikes me is how fast the iteration was. Baird went from hatboxes and bicycle lenses to color TV prototypes in just two years. That's the kind of rapid experimentation we're seeing with AI right now, though compressed even further.
> Television, he notes, has introduced the phrase "now this", which implies a complete absence of connection between the separate topics the phrase ostensibly connects.
This idea is why I always take media with a grain of salt. The decontexualization makes it easy for people to be reactive towards something, that isn’t logical
Eg “now this is why <insert person or group> is good/evil”
People call me the devils advocate when I point out these nuances but I just think we need to be much more critical when forming and holding opinions.
Isn't "now this" just a synonym for "moving on" or "next order of business" or "apropos of nothing"? I don't think the concept of jumping to a completely new topic is something TV introduced.
In interesting plot point in the novel/movie Contact (early, so not much of a spoiler):
> […] This puts her at odds with much of the scientific community, including Drumlin, who pushes to defund SETI. Eventually, the project detects a signal from Vega, 26 light-years away, transmitting prime numbers.[a][b] Further analysis reveals a retransmission of Adolf Hitler's 1936 Olympic speech, the first TV signal to escape Earth's ionosphere.[1]
> It’s entirely possible that my plangent noises about the impossibility of rebelling against an aura that promotes and vitiates all rebellion say more about my residency inside that aura, my own lack of vision, than they do about any exhaustion of U.S. fiction’s possibilities. The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naïve, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows. Today’s most engaged young fiction does seem like some kind of line’s end’s end. I guess that means we all get to draw our own conclusions. Have to. Are you immensely pleased.
- David Foster Wallace, E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction
In a way television was kind of cool. I loved it as a child, give or take.
Nowadays ..... hmmm. I no longer own a TV since many years. Sadly youtube
kind of replaced television. It is not the same, quality-wise I think
youtube is actually worse than e. g. the 1980s era. But I also don't
really want to go back to television, as it also had low quality - and
it simply took longer, too. On youtube I was recently watching old
"Aktenzeichen XY ungelöst", in german. The old videos are kind of cool
and interesting from the 1980s. I watched the new ones - it no longer
made ANY sense to watch it ... the quality is much worse, and it is
also much more boring. It's strange.
The broadcast nature of it is something that I missed just last night. I was walking past several bars as the Seahawks won a big football game, but of course each spot was on a different stream delay so instead of one full-throated simultaneous cheer echoing across the neighborhood it was three or four quieter, distinct cheers spread over 20-30 seconds. Not really a big deal but still, it felt like a lesser experience to this aging millennial.
On the one hand I look at some tech lifecycles and feel everything moves so slow (cars, energy and train infrastructure etc..). And then I look at other stuff and I cannot phantom that someone who was born 100 years ago saw a TV (or media electronic screen) from conception to modern miracle. As someone in his 20s I can't imagine what I'll see in the next 80 years!
> As someone in his 20s I can't imagine what I'll see in the next 80 years!
All of these rapid technological advancements are a function of tremendous increases in energy available .
We passed peak conventional oil years ago and only see proven reserves increase because we redefined 'shale oil' as included under proven reserves. But shale oil has much lower EROEI than traditional oil. We can already see geopolitics heating up before our eyes to capture and control what remains, but to continue to advance society we need more energy.
On top of this we are just now starting to feel the impacts of the effects of the byproducts of this energy usage: climate change. What we are experiencing now is only a slight hint of what is to come in recent years.
In the next 80 years we'll very likely see an incredible decline in technology as certain complex systems no longer have adequate energy to maintain. The climate will continue to worsen and in more extreme ways, while geopolitics melts down in a struggle for the last bits of oil and fossil fuels (interestingly these combine in the fight for Greenland because a soon-to-be ice free arctic holds lots of oil, not enough to advance civilization the way it has been going, but enough to keep yours running if you can keep everyone else away).
I sincerely suspect within the next 80 years we will see the full collapse of industrial civilization and very possibly the near or complete extinction of the human race. You can see the early stages of this beginning to unfold right now.
CRTs are peak steam punk technology. Analog, electric, kinda dangerous. Just totally mindblowing that we had these things in our living rooms shooting electric beams everywhere. I doubt it's environmentally friendly at all, but I'd love to see some new CRTs being made.
funny story - I had a job recently that installed DirecTV setups for mostly retirement communities. On almost every service call, I'd show up and 95% of the time, without fail, they'd either be watching Fox News, CNN, or CNBC. It was quite depressing to see 24/7 news stations had completely consumed their lives and became the majority of topics of conversation while I was there.
I eventually quit the job. I decided I didn't want to be a part of making our society worse by installing these devices that were causing manufactured outrage, hate, and selective truth telling.
Soon after I left, I found a book while thrifting that came out in 1978 called "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television" by Jerry Mander. I laughed at the title and couldn't believe someone was already arguing for the detriments of TV before I was born. It's very well written and the points he makes are still relevant today.
Mander believes that "television and democratic society are incompatible" due to television removing all of society's senses except for seeing and hearing. The author states that television makes it so that people have no common sense which leads to...being "powerless to reject the camera's line of sight, reset the stage, or call on our own sensory apparatus to correct the doctored sights and sounds the machine delivers".
Mander's four arguments in the book to eliminate television are:
1. that telecommunication removes the sense of reality from people,
2. television promotes capitalism,
3. television can be used as a scapegoat, and
4. that all three of these issues negatively work together.
I saw TV first time in 1957. Finland had no TV transmitters, so programs came from Soviet Estonia. I distinctly remember watching romantic Russian film with a catching tune. Perhaps named "Moscow Lights"?
How this is even possible that I remember all this, because I was 4 yrs old?
Gemini knows:
The Film: In the Days of the Spartakiad (1956/1957)
The song "Moscow Nights" was originally written for a documentary film called "In the Days of the Spartakiad" (V dni spartakiady), which chronicled a massive Soviet sports competition.
The Scene: In the film, there is a romantic, quiet scene where athletes are resting in the countryside near Moscow at night.
The Music: The song was sung by Vladimir Troshin. It was intended to be background music, but it was so hauntingly melodic that it became an overnight sensation across the USSR and its neighbors.
The Finnish Connection: In 1957, the song became a massive hit in Finland and Estonia. Since you were watching Estonian TV, you likely saw a version where the dialogue or narration was dubbed into Finnish—a common practice for broadcasts intended for Finnish-speaking audiences across the Gulf of Finland.
I don't care to start a debate about who first invented television when, but I remember hearing (conformed by wikipedia [1]) that Leon Theremin, inventor of the musical instrument named after him, demonstrated mechanical television at roughly the same time.
60 comments
[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 72.8 ms ] threadPhilo Farnsworth demonstrated a competing technology a few years later, but every TV today is based on his technology.
So, who actually invented Television?
Different pieces of what became TV existed in 1900, the challenge was putting them together. And that required a consensus among powerful players.
There was a prototype 819-line analogue ''high definition'' system used to record The T.A.M.I. Show in 1964, with excellent results, but the recordings were committed to film for distribution since there was no apparatus for broadcasting it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.A.M.I._Show
There were also experiments by NHK of Japan with analogue HD broadcasting, but digital TV was so close on the horizon that it was mooted.
''High definition'' has been a relative term in the professional TV world all along, but became consumer buzzwords with the advent of digital TV in the early 2000's. Nowadays we know it to mean 720, 1080, or higher lines, usually in progressive scan.
Video has a strange hypnotic power over most people and messages seem to bypass normal mental defenses.
I still have the reels, they look like this:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Films_Path%C3%A9-Bab...
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path%C3%A9-Baby
And we converted some of these reels to digital files (well brothers and I asked a specialized company to "digitalize" them).
100 years ago people already had cars, tramways (as a kid my great-grandmother tried to look under the first tramway she saw to see "where the horses were hiding"), cameras to film movies, telephones, the telegraph existed, you could trade the stock market and, well, it's knew to me but TV was just invented too.
I am the Slime
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiCQcEW98OY
I am gross and perverted
I'm obsessed and deranged
I have existed for years
But very little has changed
I'm the tool of the Government
And industry too
For I am destined to rule
And regulate you
I may be vile and pernicious
But you can't look away
I make you think I'm delicious
With the stuff that I say
I'm the best you can get
Have you guessed me yet?
I'm the slime oozin' out
From your TV set
You will obey me while I lead you
And eat the garbage that I feed you
Until the day that we don't need you
Don't go for help, no one will heed you
Your mind is totally controlled
It has been stuffed into my mold
And you will do as you are told
Until the rights to you are sold
That's right, folks
Don't touch that dial
Well, I am the slime from your video
Oozin' along on your livin' room floor
I am the slime from your video
Can't stop the slime, people, look at me go
I am the slime from your video
Oozin' along on your livin' room floor
I am the slime from your video
Can't stop the slime, people, look at me go
Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: Frank Zappa
I'm The Slime lyrics © Munchkin Music Co
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
What strikes me is how fast the iteration was. Baird went from hatboxes and bicycle lenses to color TV prototypes in just two years. That's the kind of rapid experimentation we're seeing with AI right now, though compressed even further.
This idea is why I always take media with a grain of salt. The decontexualization makes it easy for people to be reactive towards something, that isn’t logical
Eg “now this is why <insert person or group> is good/evil”
People call me the devils advocate when I point out these nuances but I just think we need to be much more critical when forming and holding opinions.
https://paleotronic.com/2018/09/15/gadget-graveyard-bairds-m...
> […] This puts her at odds with much of the scientific community, including Drumlin, who pushes to defund SETI. Eventually, the project detects a signal from Vega, 26 light-years away, transmitting prime numbers.[a][b] Further analysis reveals a retransmission of Adolf Hitler's 1936 Olympic speech, the first TV signal to escape Earth's ionosphere.[1]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_(novel)
- David Foster Wallace, E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction
Nowadays ..... hmmm. I no longer own a TV since many years. Sadly youtube kind of replaced television. It is not the same, quality-wise I think youtube is actually worse than e. g. the 1980s era. But I also don't really want to go back to television, as it also had low quality - and it simply took longer, too. On youtube I was recently watching old "Aktenzeichen XY ungelöst", in german. The old videos are kind of cool and interesting from the 1980s. I watched the new ones - it no longer made ANY sense to watch it ... the quality is much worse, and it is also much more boring. It's strange.
All of these rapid technological advancements are a function of tremendous increases in energy available .
We passed peak conventional oil years ago and only see proven reserves increase because we redefined 'shale oil' as included under proven reserves. But shale oil has much lower EROEI than traditional oil. We can already see geopolitics heating up before our eyes to capture and control what remains, but to continue to advance society we need more energy.
On top of this we are just now starting to feel the impacts of the effects of the byproducts of this energy usage: climate change. What we are experiencing now is only a slight hint of what is to come in recent years.
In the next 80 years we'll very likely see an incredible decline in technology as certain complex systems no longer have adequate energy to maintain. The climate will continue to worsen and in more extreme ways, while geopolitics melts down in a struggle for the last bits of oil and fossil fuels (interestingly these combine in the fight for Greenland because a soon-to-be ice free arctic holds lots of oil, not enough to advance civilization the way it has been going, but enough to keep yours running if you can keep everyone else away).
I sincerely suspect within the next 80 years we will see the full collapse of industrial civilization and very possibly the near or complete extinction of the human race. You can see the early stages of this beginning to unfold right now.
I eventually quit the job. I decided I didn't want to be a part of making our society worse by installing these devices that were causing manufactured outrage, hate, and selective truth telling.
Soon after I left, I found a book while thrifting that came out in 1978 called "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television" by Jerry Mander. I laughed at the title and couldn't believe someone was already arguing for the detriments of TV before I was born. It's very well written and the points he makes are still relevant today.
From the wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Arguments_for_the_Elimina...
Mander believes that "television and democratic society are incompatible" due to television removing all of society's senses except for seeing and hearing. The author states that television makes it so that people have no common sense which leads to...being "powerless to reject the camera's line of sight, reset the stage, or call on our own sensory apparatus to correct the doctored sights and sounds the machine delivers".
Mander's four arguments in the book to eliminate television are:
1. that telecommunication removes the sense of reality from people,
2. television promotes capitalism,
3. television can be used as a scapegoat, and
4. that all three of these issues negatively work together.
How this is even possible that I remember all this, because I was 4 yrs old?
Gemini knows:
The Film: In the Days of the Spartakiad (1956/1957)
The song "Moscow Nights" was originally written for a documentary film called "In the Days of the Spartakiad" (V dni spartakiady), which chronicled a massive Soviet sports competition.
The Scene: In the film, there is a romantic, quiet scene where athletes are resting in the countryside near Moscow at night.
The Music: The song was sung by Vladimir Troshin. It was intended to be background music, but it was so hauntingly melodic that it became an overnight sensation across the USSR and its neighbors.
The Finnish Connection: In 1957, the song became a massive hit in Finland and Estonia. Since you were watching Estonian TV, you likely saw a version where the dialogue or narration was dubbed into Finnish—a common practice for broadcasts intended for Finnish-speaking audiences across the Gulf of Finland.
[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Theremin
I think that LCD screens, huge digital bandwidth, and CCD sensors, have turned video ("television"), into a vast new landscape.
I'm old enough to remember putting foil on the rabbit-ears...