4 ms·

Oldest recovered TV images (2013)

80 points by marcodiego 5y ago

yesenadam 5y ago
There's another fascinating page on that site with some modern recreations of what 30-line TV at 12.5 frames per second can look like - surprisingly good! http://www.tvdawn.com/other-projects/tvtests/ http://www.tvdawn.com/other-projects/tvtests/
- 8bitsrule 5y ago
  The video! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3CFkK5OORw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3CFkK5OORw
  - yesenadam 5y ago
    I can't make out what you meant by those two words, but that one looks surprisingly bad.
doggodaddo78 5y ago
Well, it's a good thing it wasn't reruns of Gilligan's Island. It's a shame though that it wasn't the Harlem Globetrotters.
dang 5y ago
Those are much earlier than I expected. I've often had that reaction to the earliest photographs / daguerrotypes too - from the 1840s!
- woleium 5y ago
  It's often said that "the future is already here, it's just not well distributed yet"
  - vidarh 5y ago
    Specifically, that's a quote from William Gibson, though variants on the theme predates his quote: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/01/24/future-has-arrived/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/01/24/future-has-arrived/
- vidarh 5y ago
  I like to point out to people that a lot of the things in Jules Verne books that seems futuristic were contemporary. People might be aware that submarines predates 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (the first submarine named Nautilus dates to 1800), though a surprising number aren't. In general, mechanical things seems to be the things people are most likely to believe are that old. But when he described a fax-like thing in his story Paris in the Twentieth Century, people tend to be sure it was a fantastic prediction. Only the book was written in 1863, and the first commercial fax-like service - the Pantelegraph - went into commercial operation between Paris and Lyon in 1863, and the invention happened many years before. Becquerel, Rossini and Napoleon III all were involved in demonstrations. Outside of Jules Verne, my other favourite tech that people think is more modern than it is, is video telephony. But when you think about it, the crudest version you can build of video telephony is "just" a pair of TV cameras and a pair of screens. Hence the video-telephony network set up in Germany in the 1930's (but people are often surprised at how old "real" video-telephony is too; people are even surprised to hear about CU-SeeMe these days; then again my son is surprised I had electricity when I grew up given I predate Youtube) I think a lot of it is because we think in terms of the modern conception of what something is. But as you can see if you look up the Pantelegraph, you can do "fax-like" fairly easy: The early variants tended be variants over the theme of breaking a current (like the Pantelegraph) or using magnetic ink with a simple scanning device that caused the resulting current to directly drive the rendering on the other side. And video-telephony a la Skype or Zoom is complex, but video-telephony a la the most basic camera and screen is simple once you have the cameras and screens. We see the same with photographs. If you look at modern cameras, they're of course complex and it's easy to imagine them as modern (imagine what it will seem like to kids growing up without having seen mechanical cameras...) but look back at the processes and the simplest cameras and simplest photographic processes are almost literally a science experiment for kids now that we know how to do it, and the genius lay in figuring out the concept.
  - Steve44 5y ago
    > the first submarine named Nautilus dates to 1800 It's possibly not what we'd call a submarine today but the first recorded use of one in warfare is from 1776. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/worlds-first-submarine-attack https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/worlds-first-sub... > On September 7, 1776, during the Revolutionary War, the American submersible craft Turtle attempts to attach a time bomb to the hull of British Admiral Richard Howe’s flagship Eagle in New York Harbor. It was the first use of a submarine in warfare. > > Submarines were first built by Dutch inventor Cornelius van Drebel in the early 17th century, but it was not until 150 years later that they were first used in naval combat
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  The works of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky might interest you, if you haven't seen them yet (I bet they have been on HN): his color photographs (using color separation) look like they're at least 60-70 years newer than they are.
  - dang 5y ago
    Thanks! I thought I remembered something about that, and indeed they have: Russia in color, a century ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4491766 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4491766 - Sept 2012 (187 comments) Russia in color a century ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1621517 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1621517 - Aug 2010 (25 comments) There may have been other threads too...
marcodiego 5y ago
Ironically, oldest surviving discs can't be shown on the page because adobe flash didn't survive to this day: http://www.tvdawn.com/earliest-tv/phonovision-experiments-1927-28/surviving-discs/ http://www.tvdawn.com/earliest-tv/phonovision-experiments-19... It would be nice if the author released the audio from those discs.
- th0ma5 5y ago
  After way too much googling, decompiling the swf, and finding a python v2 snippet to decode them, here are the urls for the audio files from that page. They seem to just be clips however? http://www.tvdawn.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/SWT515-4-extract.mp3 http://www.tvdawn.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/SWT515-4-ex... http://www.tvdawn.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/RWT620-4-extract.mp3 http://www.tvdawn.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/RWT620-4-ex... http://www.tvdawn.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/RWT620-6-extract.mp3 http://www.tvdawn.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/RWT620-6-ex... http://www.tvdawn.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/RWT620-11-RTS-extract.mp3 http://www.tvdawn.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/RWT620-11-R... http://www.tvdawn.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/RWT115-3-extract.mp3 http://www.tvdawn.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/RWT115-3-ex... I found the code here: "sixbitdecode" and "sixbitencode" and it is ported from the actionscript you can find in the SWF file. https://forums.mydigitallife.net/threads/sixbitencode.52185/ https://forums.mydigitallife.net/threads/sixbitencode.52185/
  - smackeyacky 5y ago
    Awesome work!
taylorfinley 5y ago
It's quite interesting that he has asserted copyright over his restorations of the original content. Could I claim copyright over a public domain audio recording from the same time period, if I reproduced it from a wax disk to an mp3? What about early software recovered from a stack of punch cards, could I decode the format, put it up as a binary, and copyright it?
- zarzavat 5y ago
  In the US at least, a mechanical conversion is not copyrightable. If there is a creative act e.g. colorizing an old photo by hand then that could be copyrightable.
- foobarthrowaway 5y ago
  > It's quite interesting that he has asserted copyright over his restorations of the original content. Derivative work is a foundation of open source software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work. You can likewise take the Linux Kernel source, make a small but significant chance to it, and claim copyright over your additions to the original content. Whether his work meets the bar for such work I don't know. Anybody can claim copyright on anything of course. Something that might be relevant is that he's not changing the work to something of his own expression so much as trying to restore it to close to the original. Seems like there could be an argument there is less creative work there. I don't mean the creative process of doing the restoration, I mean the piece of work that comes out the other end. > Could I claim copyright over a public domain audio recording from the same time period, if I reproduced it from a wax disk to an mp3? What about early software recovered from a stack of punch cards, could I decode the format, put it up as a binary, and copyright it? As the other reply said, you can (generally) only copyright original creative work.
- Mindwipe 5y ago
  In Europe, potentially yes. There is some precedent for a fresh (though limited) copyright in previously unpublished manuscripts for example, and it is common for museums to control the copyright for the only high quality photograph of otherwise out of copyright art works and as such charge for it.
Saint_Genet 5y ago
People wring their hands about media being harmful to children these days. Meanwhile back in 1927 they were expected to sleep after watching Stookie Bill.
Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
How is the video signal on the discs modulated? Because I assume they would need to be modulated on a carrier since the tonearm itself would otherwise act like a low pass filter. Edit: meant high pass filter
- gugagore 5y ago
  I don't have a direct answer. I'm not sure how the signal is synchronized. But I will say that the tonearm of a record player exhibits the same behavior, yet the signal on a record is not modulated.
  - Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
    Yes, but audio records don’t have to encode frequencies below the human hearing range, whereas a video one should be capable of showing multiple consecutive black or white frames. The pickup doesn’t detect groove depth, it detects change in groove depth. My guess is that they used AM since all you’d have to do was amplify it and send it straight to the lightbulb, no demodulation necessary.
throw0101a 5y ago
In addition to old images, there are very few old televisions floating around: > To put this special set in some context, there are more 18th century Stradivarius violins in existence than pre-World War II TVs and, to make it that bit rarer, this TV has only had two owners. “I’ve handled 38 pre-war tells and this is the finest and even comes with the original invoice,” said Bonhams specialist Laurence Fisher. “It cost a huge amount and the owner must have had wealth and means…It is a very rare thing and there are collectors who would love to have it.” * https://newsfeed.time.com/2011/04/05/do-not-adjust-your-set-oldest-working-television-to-be-sold-at-auction/ https://newsfeed.time.com/2011/04/05/do-not-adjust-your-set-... Post-pandemic, if you're ever in Toronto, you may want to visit the MZTV Museum of Television: > In the heart of Liberty Village lives one of the rarest televisions on the planet. This 82-year-old Lucite-encased TRK-12 upends what a TV should look like, thanks to its see-through body and screen-reflecting mirror. > Only one of this exact model was made, for the 1939 World Fair, and the collector who owns it has been sharing its journey, among many others, at a museum devoted to his passion for the fascinating history of television sets. * https://www.thestar.com/life/together/people/2021/03/14/moses-znaimer-revolutionized-tv-and-the-way-we-watch-it-makes-sense-that-he-collects-the-coolest-tv-sets-on-the-planet.html https://www.thestar.com/life/together/people/2021/03/14/mose... * https://archive.is/4X17C https://archive.is/4X17C
- malexw 5y ago
  Incredible, thank you for sharing this. I live within walking distance of this museum and have a small collection of various early radio and television pieces, yet I had never heard of this place before.
tigerlily 5y ago
I wonder if we can get old TV shows by listening for the radio waves bouncing off distant reflective objects in space? I'd wager Claude Shannon would laugh at the notion. Too much attenuation and not enough signal power reflected. Still it intrigues me, has anyone got the math?
- _joel 5y ago
  It'd be like trying to use pluto for moonlight, just a lot worse.
amelius 5y ago
These are also the first images which aliens will receive from us in the future.
- Koshkin 5y ago
  I'm afraid they may already have.
- Mindwipe 5y ago
  All we have to do to get the lost Doctor Who episodes is invent FTL drives, fly far enough away and wait for them to reach us!
major505 5y ago
Of course, is creepy as hell. not many things are as creep as a ventriloquist dummy
8bitsrule 5y ago
The telediagraph was used in 1895. https://web.archive.org/web/20030804213322/http://homepage.ntlworld.com/forgottenfutures/fax/fax.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20030804213322/http://homepage.n... The first FAX was sent (Arthur Korn) in 1906. Western Union transmitted a halftone photograph in 1921. In my mind's eye, I see inventors' minds spinning all over the place. Transmitting pictures. Transmitting -moving- pictures. I Must Do That.

80 points by marcodiego 5y ago

There's another fascinating page on that site with some modern recreations of what 30-line TV at 12.5 frames per second can look like - surprisingly good! http://www.tvdawn.com/other-projects/tvtests/ http://www.tvdawn.com/other-projects/tvtests/

8bitsrule 5y ago
The video! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3CFkK5OORw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3CFkK5OORw
- yesenadam 5y ago
  I can't make out what you meant by those two words, but that one looks surprisingly bad.

doggodaddo78 5y ago

Well, it's a good thing it wasn't reruns of Gilligan's Island. It's a shame though that it wasn't the Harlem Globetrotters.

dang 5y ago

Those are much earlier than I expected. I've often had that reaction to the earliest photographs / daguerrotypes too - from the 1840s!

woleium 5y ago
It's often said that "the future is already here, it's just not well distributed yet"
- vidarh 5y ago
  Specifically, that's a quote from William Gibson, though variants on the theme predates his quote: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/01/24/future-has-arrived/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/01/24/future-has-arrived/
vidarh 5y ago
I like to point out to people that a lot of the things in Jules Verne books that seems futuristic were contemporary. People might be aware that submarines predates 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (the first submarine named Nautilus dates to 1800), though a surprising number aren't. In general, mechanical things seems to be the things people are most likely to believe are that old. But when he described a fax-like thing in his story Paris in the Twentieth Century, people tend to be sure it was a fantastic prediction. Only the book was written in 1863, and the first commercial fax-like service - the Pantelegraph - went into commercial operation between Paris and Lyon in 1863, and the invention happened many years before. Becquerel, Rossini and Napoleon III all were involved in demonstrations. Outside of Jules Verne, my other favourite tech that people think is more modern than it is, is video telephony. But when you think about it, the crudest version you can build of video telephony is "just" a pair of TV cameras and a pair of screens. Hence the video-telephony network set up in Germany in the 1930's (but people are often surprised at how old "real" video-telephony is too; people are even surprised to hear about CU-SeeMe these days; then again my son is surprised I had electricity when I grew up given I predate Youtube) I think a lot of it is because we think in terms of the modern conception of what something is. But as you can see if you look up the Pantelegraph, you can do "fax-like" fairly easy: The early variants tended be variants over the theme of breaking a current (like the Pantelegraph) or using magnetic ink with a simple scanning device that caused the resulting current to directly drive the rendering on the other side. And video-telephony a la Skype or Zoom is complex, but video-telephony a la the most basic camera and screen is simple once you have the cameras and screens. We see the same with photographs. If you look at modern cameras, they're of course complex and it's easy to imagine them as modern (imagine what it will seem like to kids growing up without having seen mechanical cameras...) but look back at the processes and the simplest cameras and simplest photographic processes are almost literally a science experiment for kids now that we know how to do it, and the genius lay in figuring out the concept.
- Steve44 5y ago
  > the first submarine named Nautilus dates to 1800 It's possibly not what we'd call a submarine today but the first recorded use of one in warfare is from 1776. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/worlds-first-submarine-attack https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/worlds-first-sub... > On September 7, 1776, during the Revolutionary War, the American submersible craft Turtle attempts to attach a time bomb to the hull of British Admiral Richard Howe’s flagship Eagle in New York Harbor. It was the first use of a submarine in warfare. > > Submarines were first built by Dutch inventor Cornelius van Drebel in the early 17th century, but it was not until 150 years later that they were first used in naval combat
formerly_proven 5y ago
The works of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky might interest you, if you haven't seen them yet (I bet they have been on HN): his color photographs (using color separation) look like they're at least 60-70 years newer than they are.
- dang 5y ago
  Thanks! I thought I remembered something about that, and indeed they have: Russia in color, a century ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4491766 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4491766 - Sept 2012 (187 comments) Russia in color a century ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1621517 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1621517 - Aug 2010 (25 comments) There may have been other threads too...

marcodiego 5y ago

Ironically, oldest surviving discs can't be shown on the page because adobe flash didn't survive to this day: http://www.tvdawn.com/earliest-tv/phonovision-experiments-1927-28/surviving-discs/ http://www.tvdawn.com/earliest-tv/phonovision-experiments-19... It would be nice if the author released the audio from those discs.

th0ma5 5y ago
After way too much googling, decompiling the swf, and finding a python v2 snippet to decode them, here are the urls for the audio files from that page. They seem to just be clips however? http://www.tvdawn.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/SWT515-4-extract.mp3 http://www.tvdawn.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/SWT515-4-ex... http://www.tvdawn.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/RWT620-4-extract.mp3 http://www.tvdawn.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/RWT620-4-ex... http://www.tvdawn.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/RWT620-6-extract.mp3 http://www.tvdawn.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/RWT620-6-ex... http://www.tvdawn.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/RWT620-11-RTS-extract.mp3 http://www.tvdawn.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/RWT620-11-R... http://www.tvdawn.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/RWT115-3-extract.mp3 http://www.tvdawn.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/RWT115-3-ex... I found the code here: "sixbitdecode" and "sixbitencode" and it is ported from the actionscript you can find in the SWF file. https://forums.mydigitallife.net/threads/sixbitencode.52185/ https://forums.mydigitallife.net/threads/sixbitencode.52185/
- smackeyacky 5y ago
  Awesome work!

taylorfinley 5y ago

It's quite interesting that he has asserted copyright over his restorations of the original content. Could I claim copyright over a public domain audio recording from the same time period, if I reproduced it from a wax disk to an mp3? What about early software recovered from a stack of punch cards, could I decode the format, put it up as a binary, and copyright it?

zarzavat 5y ago
In the US at least, a mechanical conversion is not copyrightable. If there is a creative act e.g. colorizing an old photo by hand then that could be copyrightable.
foobarthrowaway 5y ago
> It's quite interesting that he has asserted copyright over his restorations of the original content. Derivative work is a foundation of open source software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work. You can likewise take the Linux Kernel source, make a small but significant chance to it, and claim copyright over your additions to the original content. Whether his work meets the bar for such work I don't know. Anybody can claim copyright on anything of course. Something that might be relevant is that he's not changing the work to something of his own expression so much as trying to restore it to close to the original. Seems like there could be an argument there is less creative work there. I don't mean the creative process of doing the restoration, I mean the piece of work that comes out the other end. > Could I claim copyright over a public domain audio recording from the same time period, if I reproduced it from a wax disk to an mp3? What about early software recovered from a stack of punch cards, could I decode the format, put it up as a binary, and copyright it? As the other reply said, you can (generally) only copyright original creative work.
Mindwipe 5y ago
In Europe, potentially yes. There is some precedent for a fresh (though limited) copyright in previously unpublished manuscripts for example, and it is common for museums to control the copyright for the only high quality photograph of otherwise out of copyright art works and as such charge for it.

Saint_Genet 5y ago

People wring their hands about media being harmful to children these days. Meanwhile back in 1927 they were expected to sleep after watching Stookie Bill.

Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago

How is the video signal on the discs modulated? Because I assume they would need to be modulated on a carrier since the tonearm itself would otherwise act like a low pass filter. Edit: meant high pass filter

gugagore 5y ago
I don't have a direct answer. I'm not sure how the signal is synchronized. But I will say that the tonearm of a record player exhibits the same behavior, yet the signal on a record is not modulated.
- Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
  Yes, but audio records don’t have to encode frequencies below the human hearing range, whereas a video one should be capable of showing multiple consecutive black or white frames. The pickup doesn’t detect groove depth, it detects change in groove depth. My guess is that they used AM since all you’d have to do was amplify it and send it straight to the lightbulb, no demodulation necessary.

throw0101a 5y ago

In addition to old images, there are very few old televisions floating around: > To put this special set in some context, there are more 18th century Stradivarius violins in existence than pre-World War II TVs and, to make it that bit rarer, this TV has only had two owners. “I’ve handled 38 pre-war tells and this is the finest and even comes with the original invoice,” said Bonhams specialist Laurence Fisher. “It cost a huge amount and the owner must have had wealth and means…It is a very rare thing and there are collectors who would love to have it.” * https://newsfeed.time.com/2011/04/05/do-not-adjust-your-set-oldest-working-television-to-be-sold-at-auction/ https://newsfeed.time.com/2011/04/05/do-not-adjust-your-set-... Post-pandemic, if you're ever in Toronto, you may want to visit the MZTV Museum of Television: > In the heart of Liberty Village lives one of the rarest televisions on the planet. This 82-year-old Lucite-encased TRK-12 upends what a TV should look like, thanks to its see-through body and screen-reflecting mirror. > Only one of this exact model was made, for the 1939 World Fair, and the collector who owns it has been sharing its journey, among many others, at a museum devoted to his passion for the fascinating history of television sets. * https://www.thestar.com/life/together/people/2021/03/14/moses-znaimer-revolutionized-tv-and-the-way-we-watch-it-makes-sense-that-he-collects-the-coolest-tv-sets-on-the-planet.html https://www.thestar.com/life/together/people/2021/03/14/mose... * https://archive.is/4X17C https://archive.is/4X17C

malexw 5y ago
Incredible, thank you for sharing this. I live within walking distance of this museum and have a small collection of various early radio and television pieces, yet I had never heard of this place before.

tigerlily 5y ago

I wonder if we can get old TV shows by listening for the radio waves bouncing off distant reflective objects in space? I'd wager Claude Shannon would laugh at the notion. Too much attenuation and not enough signal power reflected. Still it intrigues me, has anyone got the math?

_joel 5y ago
It'd be like trying to use pluto for moonlight, just a lot worse.

amelius 5y ago

These are also the first images which aliens will receive from us in the future.

Koshkin 5y ago
I'm afraid they may already have.
Mindwipe 5y ago
All we have to do to get the lost Doctor Who episodes is invent FTL drives, fly far enough away and wait for them to reach us!

major505 5y ago

Of course, is creepy as hell. not many things are as creep as a ventriloquist dummy

8bitsrule 5y ago

The telediagraph was used in 1895. https://web.archive.org/web/20030804213322/http://homepage.ntlworld.com/forgottenfutures/fax/fax.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20030804213322/http://homepage.n... The first FAX was sent (Arthur Korn) in 1906. Western Union transmitted a halftone photograph in 1921. In my mind's eye, I see inventors' minds spinning all over the place. Transmitting pictures. Transmitting -moving- pictures. I Must Do That.