14 ms·

Television is 100 years old today

• jedberg 8mo ago
  This is interesting. John Logie Baird did in fact demonstrate something that looked like TV, but the technology was a dead end. Philo Farnsworth demonstrated a competing technology a few years later, but every TV today is based on his technology. So, who actually invented Television?
  • AndrewDucker 8mo ago
    There were a great many small breakthroughs over time. Where you draw the line is up to you.
  • armadsen 8mo ago
    For what it’s worth, Philo Farnsworth and John Logie Baird were friendly with each other. I was lucky to know Philo’s wife Pem very well in the last part of her life, and she spoke highly of Baird as a person. David Sarnoff and RCA was an entirely different matter, of course…
    • bovermyer 8mo ago
      The article has a photo of a plaque putting Baird's death in 1946, less than 40 years old. What happened?
      • roarcher 8mo ago
        He was 57, born in 1888. Died of a stroke. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Logie_Baird#Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Logie_Baird#Death
        • ggm 8mo ago
          One of his electro-mechanical units was on display in Victoria, Australia. Most amazing assemblage, you can sort-of get the idea from things. I read online that at his end, Baird was proposing a TV scan-rate we'd class as HD quality, which lost out to a 405 line standard (which proceeded 625/colour) There is also a quality of persistence in his approach to things, he was the kind of inventor who doesn't stop inventing.
  • chasil 8mo ago
    I had a communications theory class in college that addressed "vestigal sideband modulation," which I believe was implemented by Farnsworth. I think this is a critical aspect to the introduction of television technology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-sideband_modulation#Suppressed_carrier_(SSB-SC),_double-sideband_suppressed_carrier_(DSB-SC),_and_vestigial_sideband_(VSB) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-sideband_modulation#Sup...
    • drmpeg 8mo ago
      VSB came later. From https://www.tvtechnology.com/opinions/hdtv-from-1925-to-1994 https://www.tvtechnology.com/opinions/hdtv-from-1925-to-1994 In the United States in 1935, the Radio Corporation of America demonstrated a 343-line television system. In 1936, two committees of the Radio Manufacturers Association (RMA), which is now known as the Consumer Electronics Association, proposed that U.S. television channels be standardized at a bandwidth of 6 MHz, and recommended a 441-line, interlaced, 30 frame-per-second television system. The RF modulation system proposed in this recommendation used double-sideband, amplitude-modulated transmission, limiting the video bandwidth it was capable of carrying to 2.5 MHz. In 1938, this RMA proposal was amended to employ vestigial-sideband (VSB) transmission instead of double sideband. In the vestigial-sideband approach, only the upper sidebands-those above the carrier frequency-plus a small segment or vestige of the lower sidebands, are transmitted. VSB raised the transmitted video bandwidth capability to 4.2 MHz. Subsequently, in 1941, the first National Television Systems Committee adopted the vestigial sideband system using a total line rate of 525 lines that is used in the United States today.
  • tehwebguy 8mo ago
    Farnsworth…
    • kridsdale3 8mo ago
      Wernstrom!
  • reactordev 8mo ago
    Baird did. Farnsworth invented the all-electric version (sans mechanical parts). A kin to Ed Roberts, John Blakenbaker and Mark Dean invented the personal computer but Apple invented the PC as we know it.
    • msla 8mo ago
      You're skipping a few steps (like the Altair 8800) if you say that Apple invented the PC as we know it. Apple didn't even invent the GUI as we know it.
      • reactordev 8mo ago
        No, I mentioned Ed Roberts. Up until Apple, you had to solder your own or buy one that was put together for you.
  • MoonWalk 8mo ago
    You should read about the invention of color television. There were two competing methods, one of which depended on a spinning wheel with colored filters in it. If I remember correctly, you needed something like a 10-foot wheel to have a 27-inch TV. Sure enough, this was the system selected as the winner by the U.S. standard-setting body at the time. Needless to say, it failed and was replaced by what we ended up with... which still sucked because of the horrible decision to go to a non-integer frame rate. Incredibly, we are for some reason still plagued by 29.97 FPS long after the analog system that required it was shut off.
    • eternauta3k 8mo ago
      Why is an integer frame rate better?
      • zoky 8mo ago
        For one thing, it’s much easier to measure spans of time when you have an integer frame rate. For example, 1 hour at 30fps is exactly 108,000 frames, but at 29.97 it’s only 107,892 frames. Since frame numbers must all have an integer time code, “drop-frame” time code is used, where each second has a variable number of frames so that by the end of each measured hour the total elapsed time syncs up with the time code, i.e. “01:00:00;00” falls after exactly one hour has passed. This is of course crucial when scheduling programs, advertisements, and so on. It’s a confusing mess and historically has caused all kinds of headaches for the TV industry over the years.
      • MoonWalk 8mo ago
        In addition to the other poster's on-point remarks, film cameras have always run at integer frame rates. We have generations of motion pictures shot at 24 FPS. Many TV shows (all, before video tape) were shot on film too, but I'm not sure if they were at an even 30 FPS.
    • iso1631 8mo ago
      Originally you had 30fps, it was the addition of colour with the NTSC system that dropped it to 30000/1001fps. That wasn't a decision taken lightly -- it was a consequence of retrofitting colour onto a black and white system while maintaining backward compatibility. When the UK (and Europe) went colour it changed to a whole new system and didn't have to worry too much about backward compatibility. It had a higher bandwidth (8mhz - so 33% more than NTSC), and was broadcasting on new channels separate to the original 405 lines. It also had features like alternating the phase of every other line to reduce the "tint" or "never twice the same color" problem that NTSC had America chose 30fps but then had to slow it by 1/1001ths to avoid interference. Of course because by the 90s and the growth of digital, there was already far too much stuff expecting "29.97"hz so it remained, again for backward compatibility.
  • cultofmetatron 8mo ago
    > but every TV today is based on his technology. Philo Farnsworth invented the cathode ray tube. unless you're writing this from the year 2009 or before, I'm going to have to push back on the idea that tv's TODAY are based on his technology. They most certainly are not.
    • shellac 8mo ago
      No, Braun invented the cathode ray tube.
    • _nub3 8mo ago
      1897 Ferdinand Braun invents the Cathode Ray Tube dubbed "Braunsche Röhre" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenjiro_Takayanagi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenjiro_Takayanagi 'Although he failed to gain much recognition in the West, he built the world's first all-electronic television receiver, and is referred to as "the father of Japanese television"' He presented it in 1926 (Farnsworth in 1927) However father of television was this dude: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manfred_von_Ardenne https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manfred_von_Ardenne Better resolution, wireless transmission and Olympics 1936
    • jedberg 8mo ago
      He invented electronic rasterization, a form of which is still in use today.
  • zwischenzug 8mo ago
    Whatever we all television now, television then was literally "vision at a distance", which Baird was the first to demonstrate (AFAIK). The TV I have now in my living room is closer to a computer than a television from when I grew up (born 1975) anyway, so the word could mean all sorts of things. I mean, we still call our pocket computers "phones" even though they are mainly used for viewing cats at a distance.
  • joe_the_user 8mo ago
    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.
  • gtoubassi 8mo ago
    "The Last Lone Inventor: A Tale of Genius, Deceit, and the Birth of Television" is a great book detailing the Farnsworth journey.
  • throwaway_20357 8mo ago
    Wasn't all this early TV experimentation based on Nipkow disks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nipkow_disk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nipkow_disk)?
  • deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  • accidentallfact 8mo ago
    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...
• tosti 8mo ago
  High definition is nearly 90 years old? I guess their definition of high is quite low by more modern standards.
  • ronsor 8mo ago
    Going from 30 lines to 300 lines is a big leap!
  • anthk 8mo ago
    Cinema was "HD" by design. So, in some way, 35mm movies are HD quality and predate PAL and NTSC standards.
    • tosti 8mo ago
      Sure, but that's not TV.
  • cf100clunk 8mo ago
    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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.A.M.I._Show 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.
    • account42 8mo ago
      > 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. Yet motion pictures are still stuck at 24 FPS to this day and there are even people who have strong opinions about this being a good thing. Also just because NTSC was 29.97 Hz doesn't mean that the video content actually was - almost everything shot on film was actually effectively 23.97 Hz - telecined to 59.94 fields per second but that doesn't actually change the number of unique full frames.
• racl101 8mo ago
  Thank you Mr. Farnsworth.
  • a3w 8mo ago
    And in Futurama, a man with the same family name invents a universal remote. The [drumroll] longer finger!
  • goda90 8mo ago
    Philo Farnsworth did make considerable contribution to television with his image dissector, but he didn't make the first TV. He was the first TV patent holder in the US though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television#History
• bilsbie 8mo ago
  Odd we never adapted to it. Video has a strange hypnotic power over most people and messages seem to bypass normal mental defenses.
  • Geste 8mo ago
    I'd say we did, you need more and more for the same effect. Here is the first ad ever, for a watch : https://youtu.be/ho2OJfXkvpI https://youtu.be/ho2OJfXkvpI For comparison, here is the latest ad for the best selling watch as of today : https://youtu.be/kdMTc5WfnkM https://youtu.be/kdMTc5WfnkM
    • andai 8mo ago
      Everyone's trying too hard to stand out, but honestly the first one would stand out more today, despite being a still image!
      • chwtutha 8mo ago
        My thoughts exactly. Apple could probably go viral with the original style of ad today.
    • derektank 8mo ago
      In case anyone accuses you of not comparing like to like, even a contemporary Bulova commercial is much more similar to the latter than the former: https://youtu.be/trp7p634qAU?si=fGvyxHp_cayuw5xa https://youtu.be/trp7p634qAU?si=fGvyxHp_cayuw5xa
    • wat10000 8mo ago
      Wow, I haven't watched any ads for a while and that was pretty jarring.
    • vulcan01 8mo ago
      I'm not sure it is valid to use the first ad ever as a basis for comparison. At this time it was a novelty to even have a television – of course an incredibly basic ad would work. And how much do you think they had to pay for an ad on a very new technology? I doubt much.
• TacticalCoder 8mo ago
  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. I still have the reels, they look like this: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Films_Path%C3%A9-Baby.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Films_Path%C3%A9-Bab... https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path%C3%A9-Baby 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.
  • TeMPOraL 8mo ago
    On the one hand, it's fascinating to know just how much of what shapes our lives was already there a hundred years ago in some form. On the other hand, it's just as fascinating to realize that all that, and ~everything that shapes modern life, did not exist until ~200 years ago. Not just appliances, but medicines and medicine, plastics and greases and other products of petrochemical industry and everything built on top of it, paints and cleaners and materials and so on...
• jakedata 8mo ago
  Inspired one of my absolute favorite Zappa grooves. I am the Slime https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiCQcEW98OY 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
• morkalork 8mo ago
  Long live the new flesh
  • Edman274 8mo ago
    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.
    • account42 8mo ago
      The game one being eXistenZ? Only recently got to see Videodrome and quite liked it so will check it out.
• ofrzeta 8mo ago
  Neil Postman's theory still holds up and is extended to the Internet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
  • willturman 8mo ago
    > In the introduction to Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman said that the contemporary world was better reflected by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, whose public was oppressed by their addiction to amusement, rather than by Orwell's work, where they were oppressed by state violence. And modern America asked itself, why can't it be both?
• fuzzfactor 8mo ago
  My buddy has an old Portacolor, but it's only 60.
• augusteo 8mo ago
  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.
• wglass 8mo ago
  Related to discussion on Baird vs. Farnsworth, there's a plaque honoring Farnsworth on Green Street in San Francisco. https://noehill.com/sf/landmarks/cal0941.asp https://noehill.com/sf/landmarks/cal0941.asp
  • afrnswrth 8mo ago
    There is also a statue in the Presidio https://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/27928 https://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/27928
• throw4847285 8mo ago
  Really? But Marquee Moon isn't even 50 years old yet. What were they doing for the first 50?
• Deanallen 8mo ago
  > 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.
  • masfuerte 8mo ago
    What are you quoting?
    • criddell 8mo ago
      Sounds like something from Neil Postman’s excellent book Amusing Ourselves to Death.
  • hnlmorg 8mo ago
    Your example isn’t what your quote is referring to. “Now this” is just a segue between unrelated topics. Eg “and now a word from our sponsors”.
  • burkaman 8mo ago
    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.
    • hackerdood 8mo ago
      It’s been a bit since I’ve read Amusing Ourselves to Death but I believe in the book the phrase ”Now this” is used disparagingly to refer to the fact that with tv you can go from a horrific news story like a local family being murdered to a completely unrelated story, both in content and emotion in the span of seconds. This doesn’t allow ample time for the viewer to process the former and essentially forces them to turn their brain off as the cognitive dissonance of holding both stories (and more) simultaneously would be impossible.
• empressplay 8mo ago
  Related: Baird's Mechanical Television https://paleotronic.com/2018/09/15/gadget-graveyard-bairds-mechanical-television/ https://paleotronic.com/2018/09/15/gadget-graveyard-bairds-m...
  • UncleSlacky 8mo ago
    Also this site, which shows how the recorded Phonovision broadcasts were eventually recovered: http://www.tvdawn.com/earliest-tv/phonovision-experiments-1927-28/ http://www.tvdawn.com/earliest-tv/phonovision-experiments-19...
• maximgeorge 8mo ago
  [dead]
• throw0101a 8mo ago
  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] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_(novel)
• willturman 8mo ago
  > 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
• shevy-java 8mo ago
  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_af 8mo ago
    > It is not the same, quality-wise I think youtube is actually worse than e. g. the 1980s era Is it though? I of course watched TV as a kid through the 80s and have some feelings of nostalgia about it, but is it true that YouTube today is worse? I mean, YouTube is nothing in particular. There's all sorts of crap, but Sturgeon's Law [1] applies here. There is also good stuff, even gems, if you curate your content carefully. YouTube can be delightful if you know what to look for. If you don't filter, yeah... it's garbage. ---- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
    • sodapopcan 8mo ago
      Definitely good stuff on YouTube, but I do miss the curation and, as was talked about here recently I believe, shared experiences that brought. I'm also crazy addicted to YouTube in a way that I wasn't to TV, but that's another issue.
    • b00ty4breakfast 8mo ago
      There is many times more things on youtube than were ever on TV over it's entire lifetime up to the YT era, even discounting old TV show content on Youtube. But it also feels like the ratio of of good-to-shit has not remained constant between the two.
    • k4rli 8mo ago
      Same as reddit pretty much. 98% is trash but good parts do exist. Diving into new topics on YT is delightful. The site becomes much better with sponsorblock+ublock origin+hide shorts/trending (unhook or blocktube)+replace clickbait titles+replace thumbnails (dearrow)+return youtube dislike.
• josalhor 8mo ago
  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!
  • jibolash 8mo ago
    Unfortunately technological progress is not always exponential. An human landed on the moon 56 years ago and people back then thought space travel would be a routine thing today so it'll be interesting to see how things go
    • sodafountan 8mo ago
      It's certainly not routine, but I'd say the privatization of the space industry that's unfolded over the last few decades is significant progress. When I get depressed and look out at the world, I'm actually amazed at what I'm living through—the internet, space travel, electric and autonomous cars, smartphones. It's really amazing.
      • account42 8mo ago
        "Progress" towards what? The average dystopian sci-fi story where the galaxy is ruled by mega-corporations?
        • sodafountan 8mo ago
          SpaceEx has made a ton of progress in space travel, granted it's not an ideal situation with it being a mega corp, but it moved a hell of a lot faster than NASA could have. Perhaps someday we'll have individualized space flight like we have ownership over our cars and private planes. Don't know what you're getting at by saying the galaxy will be ruled by mega-corps. Seems pretty democratic so far, and most of the things achieved couldn't have been without organization.
• sosomoxie 8mo ago
  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.
  • fecal_henge 8mo ago
    Extra dangerous aspect: On really early CRTs they hadn't quite nailed the glass thicknesses. One failure mode was that the neck that held the electron gun would fail. This would propell the gun through the front of the screen, possibly toward the viewer.
    • cf100clunk 8mo ago
      Likewise, a dropped CRT tube was a constant terror for TV manufacturing and repair folks, as it likely would implode and send zillions of razor-sharp fragments airborne.
      • thomassmith65 8mo ago
        My high school science teacher used to share anecdotes from his days in electrical repair. He said his coworkers would sometimes toss a television capacitor at each other as a prank. Those capacitors retained enough charge to give the person unlucky enough to catch one a considerable jolt.
        • freedomben 8mo ago
          Touching one of those caps was a hell of an experience. It was similar in many ways to a squirrel tap with a wrench in the auto shop (for those who didn't do auto shop, a squirrel tap with a wrench is when somebody flicks your nut sack from behind with a wrench. Properly executed it would leave you doubled over out of breath).
        • NL807 8mo ago
          lol I did this with my mates. Get one of those 1 kV ceramics, give it some charge and bob's your uncle, you have one angry capacitor.
• marcd35 8mo ago
  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. From the wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Arguments_for_the_Elimination_of_Television 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.
  • 0PingWithJesus 8mo ago
    Reminds me of Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death" (1985), in which he argues that TV as a medium is fundamentally incapable of producing anything other than entertainment. So things like news, political discussion, or any other type of educational programming can only exist on TV as a nutrition-less pantomime of the real thing.
    • mjevans 8mo ago
      Education, real education, can be made entertaining. Mythbusters and Connections (I believe it was called) both qualify. As do some historic documentaries.
• timonoko 8mo ago
  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.
  • therein 8mo ago
    I easily have many memories from age 4. I think I even remember the first time that I started forming memories. It was a few years before that, I had come out of my room and saw some toys I was playing with the night before. I realized they were at the same spot I left them, which made me realize the world had permanence and my awareness had continuity. I could leave things at a certain spot and they would be there the next day, that I could build things and they would stay that way. I realized I could remember things, in a way like "homo sapiens sapiens" being thinking about thinking, I realized I remember that I could remember.
    • tgtweak 8mo ago
      Definitely have some memories from 3 years old - some people claim earlier and I wouldn't doubt that, although it's very rare for memories before 2 to be recalled episodically.
      • rubslopes 8mo ago
        I have one memory that I can place between late 2 and early 3: my mum telling me I was going to have a brother. When he was born, I was 3 years and 6 months old.
• JoeDaDude 8mo ago
  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. [1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Theremin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Theremin
  • robotmachine 8mo ago
    Funny you bring Leon Theremin up. I just showed a friend of mine The Thing[0] today. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)
• ChrisMarshallNY 8mo ago
  Love the name of the blog! 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...
• Kye 8mo ago
  Blogger was new when TV was 75 years old. Glad to see it's still around.
• Avalaxy 8mo ago
  Does anyone here still have television? Ever since I moved out of my parents house (15 years ago), I never had a TV subscription. I did own a TV screen, but only to run apps like Netflix and Youtube. I'd rather have a simple monitor without the TV options to do so, but strangely that never existed or was too expensive. Edit: to make it clear, I absolutely did not miss having TV for even a second in all of those years.
  • testing22321 8mo ago
    Colloquially called “the idiot box” in Australia. I remember asking as a teenager if that because there are idiots on the box, or because you turn into one when you watch it. The answer is “yes” Have not had or watched one in well over 20 years.
  • mghackerlady 8mo ago
    My mom still pays for cable, so since I live with her I suppose I have it by proxy. When I move out I'll still be buying one of those digital OTA antennas because I don't watch enough tv to justify a streaming service or cable, and sometimes it's nice to just watch something that's on without much of a choice
  • nabbed 8mo ago
    I have some sort of old flat screen TV, which I bought before there were "smart" TVs. But I don't have cable or over-the-air reception. Instead I have a Roku soundbar with Netflix, Apple TV+, and Youtube apps (plus some other apps that I don't use, like Tubi and Pluto). I haven't had cable or over-the-air reception for ~18 years. I can't watch anything live unless Youtube is showing some live event (which it sometimes does). I could probably watch some live news using Pluto, but I never do.
  • nephihaha 8mo ago
    I got rid of mine. Predictable mind numbing content. I do stream occasionally but I have not paid a TV licence in over twenty years.
  • talla_unica 8mo ago
    Over here in some European countries TV license fee is mandatory even if you don't own a set. The licence funds watchable content, so it makes sense to have one. (I kind-of pity the US and other countries without a strong public TV system). Actually I have access to three TV markets via satellite (which includes UK with the BBC) and the amount of good content free to receive and record it much better than what Netflix offers. (Of course, nothing can match youtube) BTW, I also still have a CRT in constant use - but the sources are now digital (It's my kitchen background TV - I feed it from a Raspberry PI with Kodi). On great thing about CRTs is that there's no computer inside monitoring what you watch.
• mrbluecoat 8mo ago
  Inventor status is a bit murky: https://farnovision.com/wp/no-iconoscope-in-1923/ https://farnovision.com/wp/no-iconoscope-in-1923/
  • gcanyon 8mo ago
    The interesting question (to me) is how directly a line can be drawn from the original invention to what we in modern times think of as “the thing”? As an example, the Wright brothers built a biplane that had wing warping instead of ailerons and a canard design. That bears little resemblance to most modern airplanes, but people have little trouble crediting it as “the invention of the airplane” —- questions of whether the Wrights were first or not notwithstanding. Can ”TV” be thus simplified so that an electromechanical device with spinning discs qualifies?
    • WalterBright 8mo ago
      The invention of the "airplane" is just a simplified term for "controlled and sustained powered flight". Which the Wrights did with both controlled and powered in the 1903 Flyer. (The Wrights invented the first 3-axis control system, and designed & built the first aviation engine capable of sustained flight.) While the Wrights were first, by several years, its invention was inevitable.
      • gcanyon 8mo ago
        > The invention of the "airplane" is just a simplified term for "controlled and sustained powered flight" Maybe? But most people think of it as "invented the airplane," and the two terms have different connotations in common use. Likewise, the title here says "television," not "real-time capture, transmission, and display of moving images" -- and similarly, I think the terms have different connotations.
        • WalterBright 8mo ago
          People who do not have a technical education tend to have a less precise definition of things. There's not a great deal of point to arguing semantics. There were precursors to Edison's light bulb, and people use that to denigrate Edison's achievement. But the technical reality of the Edison bulb is his bulb was practical, and the precursors were just curiosities.
• banku_brougham 8mo ago
  for every episode of the A-Team, for Saturday morning cartoons, for I Love Lucy, and for Miami Vice, I give thanks. Edit: And Star Trek, and Cosmos
  • nephihaha 8mo ago
    Diamonds on a dung heap. For every good series which we love there are dozens of terrible/forgettable ones. A shame since TV has so much potential as a medium.
    • HelloMcFly 8mo ago
      I think this is likely to be true for every artistic creation that requires lots of capital and widespread human coordination. Ultimately for a TV show to be great many, many things have to go right, and much of what could go wrong happens after the money is spent and the air date is already assured. I'm grateful we've had so many great things, certainly far more than I'll have time to watch in my life. But I'm not a heavy TV viewer.
      • nephihaha 8mo ago
        I think the problem nowadays is that there are so many channels and so much space to fill. TV runs 24/7 now on hundreds of channels. In many cases, it isn't worth the while of a small channel to make an expensive programme as they would lose money. Sometimes, the "wrong" programme is the hit. I know the History Channel started off with serious documentaries (some of them excellent quality) which not enough people watched. They then tried Nazis and Ancient Egypt, but it seems to be "Ancient Aliens" which is their biggest hit. Its version of history is questionable, to say the least.
        • account42 8mo ago
          How many people even watch TV "channels" these days? Seems most people have moved to a la carte streaming services. I don't really like either myself and prefer local copies of films but seem to be in a very small minority there.
• tibbydudeza 8mo ago
  Watching Dallas on a Tuesday evening with the entire family gathered in our parents' bedroom with me and brother and sister at the end of the bed on the floor watching the latest schemes of JR Ewing and poor hapless brother Bobby. We never had the TV set in the lounge - it was meant for special occasions like tea and cake for family gatherings. We still have a TV but it hardly used - everybody has iPads in the house.
• nephihaha 8mo ago
  I have mixed feelings about television and no longer have one. Some great series but also tonnes and tonnes of forgettable and insulting trash. I think television has had a negative effect on community and social interaction.
• rexpop 8mo ago
  Television, arguably, can be blamed for the near-total degradation of civic life and, subsequently, human liberty. By substituting the unilateral flow of images for the dialogue of the community, television enforces a banking concept of reality where we are reduced to passive receptacles, stripping us of the bridging social capital necessary to resist domination. This privatization of leisure generates a vicious circle of isolation, transforming the active citizen into a member of a lonely crowd. In this atomized state, we lose our mētis—the practical, situated knowledge essential for self-governance—and become vulnerable to the high-modernist state's imposition of simplified, legible grids upon our lives. Furthermore, the media inundates us with the myths, preventing us from naming the world for ourselves. To break this cycle, we must move from submissiveness to a liberating praxis that reclaims our time to build alternative social institutions and counterhegemony through direct, face-to-face cooperation. Why, even here on Hacker News we've corroborated my position regarding the necessity of breaking the "spectacle" through direct, generative action. On a recent thread about the "loneliness epidemic," HN folks argued that the epidemic is not merely an individual failing but a structural byproduct of a "death spiral" where digital convenience and "behavior modification schemes" have cannibalized the "real world". The community identifies that the privatization of leisure—manifested in car-centric suburban sprawl and the erasure of "third places"—has stripped us of the capacity for spontaneous encounter, leaving us waiting for "nicely packaged solutions" rather than facing the "great unknown" of human connection. Consequently, the proposed remedy aligns precisely: individuals must transition from passive consumers to active "Hosts", building "alternative social institutions" like non-profit event platforms that reject "dark patterns", organizing "physical social networks" on street corners, or reclaiming public spaces through guerilla cleanup efforts, effectively proving that we must "stop waiting for someone else" to reconstruct the civic dialogue.
• roysting 8mo ago
  [dead]
• lr1970 8mo ago
  Another important person in creation of the TV technology was Vladimir Zworykin [0]. He developed cathode-ray tube based TV transmission devices that he patented in 1923 and 1925. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_K._Zworykin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_K._Zworykin
• mrandish 8mo ago
  Early television was a hotbed of hacker/hobbyist DIY experimentation much like early radio and early personal computers. The first issue of "Television Magazine" from 1928 (https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=37097 https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=37097) has a remarkably similar vibe to 1970s computer zines (https://archive.org/details/kilobaudmagazine-1977-01/ https://archive.org/details/kilobaudmagazine-1977-01/). For example, page 26 has directions on how to pop by the local chemist to pick up materials to make your own selenium cell (your first imager) and page 29 covers constructing your first Televisor, including helpful tips like "A very suitable tin-plate is ... the same material out of which biscuit tins and similar light tinware is made. It is easily handled and can readily be cut with an ordinary pair of scissors. It is sold in sheets of 22 inches by 30 inches. Any ironmonger will supply these."
• rmason 8mo ago
  My late father told me the first time he saw a TV. He was in Ann Arbor, Michigan making a sales call in 1947. When he drove in he noticed there was a huge crowd around a store window but couldn't see what was going on. After making the call he noticed the crowd was still there so he parked his car and decided to investigate. There was a black and white TV broadcasting a Detroit Tigers game in the window of a radio repair shop. He told me that he came away impressed.
  • dwe3k 8mo ago
    I remember a similar story from my father, of people in the small town he was in crowding standing in the front yard of a neighbor, crowding around a picture window to look in at the first TV in town in the mid-1950's.
    • rmason 8mo ago
      When I was born my parents bought a TV. Back then it was sold as a way of enhancing the education of children. I remember the early days of the web when the same case was made. Pretty sure you could have predicted it would descend to the lowest common denominator ;<). The family stayed with black and white until the late seventies. I remember the entire family watching the first moon landing. For the longest time I didn't know whether NASA was recording in color or not ;<).
• fyrn_ 8mo ago
  Only 100 years old. Wow. I mean you know the world has changed rapidly but it's hard to get perspective enough to really feel that change. Something about it only having been 100 years since televsion really does that for me.
• tzs 8mo ago
  I've sometimes wondered how things would have been different if the TV pioneers had went with circular CRTs instead of rounded rectangles. Circles would have had a couple of advantages. First, I believe they would have been easier to make. From what I've read rectangles have more stress at the corners. Rounding the corners reduces that but it is still more than circles have. With circles they could have more easily made bigger CRTs. Second, there is no aspect ratio thus avoiding the whole problem of picking an aspect ratio. Electronically the signals to the XY deflectors to scan a spiral out from the center (or in from the edge if you prefer) on a circle are as easy to make as the signals to to scan in horizontal lines on a rectangle. As far as I can tell that would have been fine up until we got computers and wanted to use TV CRTs as computer displays. I can't imagine how to build a bitmapped interface for such a CRT that would not be a complete nightmare to deal with.
  • rhplus 8mo ago
    I would guess that even at the time a circular viewport would have seemed a bit weird and so rectangular was preferred. After all, theater stages, most windows, photographs and books - all common place - aren’t circular either.
    • account42 8mo ago
      Futurism of the time was all about round shapes though.
  • bobthepanda 8mo ago
    Circles don’t pack together well. And they need a different solution for standing up.
    • hahahahhaah 8mo ago
      Circle tube, rectangle case.
      • bobthepanda 8mo ago
• ngcc_hk 8mo ago
  Only 100 years. Less than even Leica ? Wow!
• G_o_D 8mo ago
  I still only have CRT, No matter how much i browse shopping sites or visit showrooms, i cannot make up my mind buying newer tv, lcd, led, plasma, oled etc, so much new technologies have arrived but i have'nt tried them for TV Yet as of today My tv's have gone through real stress test in real life unlike factories During childhood, we had our tv Switched on in morning 4:00 till 22:00 at night, constantly being watched 16-18 hrs a day during weekends and vacations (45 days), while least 10hrs a day during weekdays , for last 22 years I only had 2 crt in my 30yrs of lifetime, Sansui and Samsung, channel broadcasters being changed from Tetrestrial Channels --> FTA Antenna --> Cable Tv --> Satellite Dish from time to time Newer tv cannot cope up with such lenghty watchtimes, Still RCA Only, no HDMI, Tv still have its Radio Antenna port on top
  • GoatInGrey 8mo ago
    CRTs are a very interesting display technology with their refresh rate and clarity. I'd like to see an "HD" CRT someday, and however many tons it would weigh!
    • jen20 8mo ago
      Until very recently I had a Bang and Olufsen CRT, and it was by far the best picture I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately “small” (32”) yet simultaneously weighed a ton.
    • RASBR89 8mo ago
      There’s some that have high resolution. There were some consumer 1080i sets I think.
    • pezezin 8mo ago
      PC monitors were already HD. If you have the chance, watch a HD video on a big enough PC monitor, the picture quality is quite impressive.
  • zapataband2 8mo ago
    [dead]
  • 8mo ago
• 6510 8mo ago
  Thanks to TV you will no longer have to travel around the world to attend lectures. From the comfort of your home you can watch professors talk about cutting edge developments. It will be a revolution in education. Everyone will embrace the sciences! We will progress into the information age! It's not their exact words and I also forgot who said it. It's probably better for them we don't remember.
• hackerdood 8mo ago
  It’s been a bit since I’ve read Amusing Ourselves to Death but I believe in the book the phrase ”Now this” is used disparagingly to refer to the fact that with tv you can go from a horrific news story like a local family being murdered to a completely unrelated story, both in content and emotion in the span of seconds. This doesn’t allow ample time for the viewer to process the former and essentially forces them to turn their brain off as the cognitive dissonance of holding both stories (and more) simultaneously would be impossible.
• grishka 8mo ago
  Having just finished my software-defined analog video decoder[0], I've gotta say, my mind is thoroughly blown by just how much of an engineering achievement television must've been at the time when it was invented. It must have also been the first ever communication system to have backwards compatibility. [0] https://github.com/grishka/miscellaneous/blob/master/AVDecoder/README_en.md https://github.com/grishka/miscellaneous/blob/master/AVDecod...
  • account42 8mo ago
    Cool project. Anything in particular that you use it for? There are some great films or TV series that were never released in digital form and some more where the digital releases were butchered in some way (e.g. cropped) compared to the original analog broadcast / VHS / Laserdisc releases.
    • grishka 8mo ago
      I made this to teach myself about digital signal processing and scratch an itch I had for a long time, starting back when these technologies were still current.
• BradK 8mo ago
  [dead]
• smithza 8mo ago
  Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman is the book that comes to mind with this article link. 2 years ago my wife and I took the TV off the wall. My kids don't have Bluey or the latest Disney cartoon to keep them company. I am not going back... It has been the most blissful time. Amazing that the TV is not required to lead a thriving life despite what the incessant sales-industrial-complex will tell you.
  • briantoknowyou 8mo ago
    Ew. Reeks more of a paranoid victim complex than true embodied virtue. I’d consider therapy there uh bud
• oscord 8mo ago
  1897 Boris Rosing of Russia showed moving image using cathode ray tube.
• metalman 8mo ago
  I owned a TV for aproximatly 30 seconds, when an obnoxtious roomy sold me theres for $20, thinking they could still watch there horrid shit, but I promptly threw it off the balcony. Obviously doing this with a screen, but I have zero "accounts" for social media that are not text based, and block everything by default. My basic practice is to resist and avoid asymetric situations that are not defined by a negotiated contract or agreament, up or down.