Slashdot Mirror
1936 Perspective on Television
An Anonymous Coward writes "The New Yorker is running an article from their archives from 1936. In it, E.B.White (author of Charlotte's Web) discusses a demonstration he attended of the current state of television, which didn't impress him at all."
Lately I've found my real life to be more interesting than what's on broadcast television. Occasionaly, cable brings about something interesting. :)
I promote dumber TV shows! It only drives people to interact with the real world, or at least get on the web
-- Creativity knows no medium
Times don't change, 63 years later and still nothing is worth watching on tv.
"It ain't all that great." And now, 66 years later, I can say the same thing about network television.
;)
HBO, on the other hard, well...it's not TV, it's HBO!
E.B. White was also a co author of Elements of Style. A book so many of us in these forums should spend more time with.
Oddly enough, EB white had been known to do significant work in Alan Turing in the development of a perfect AI model. As noted, EB white brought, "creativity and imagination to mathematics", in light of the little known fact that White WAS a physics major, and an expert in syllogistic systems.
Apparently Turing also shared many of the same political beliefs as him as well.
Just a strange little fact i guess that would indirectly affect us in the internet community.
I'm not to impressed with it either. :)
Black and grey are both shades of white.
From the article:
"Mr. Sarnoff next gave a little talk, in which he cheerfully, and with enormous self-effacement, admitted that the real problem of television was not its mechanical vagaries but finding programs for it when it finally gets ironed out."
Sixty-six years of progress, and there is *still* no good programs on television!
Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon
augment your senses: http://sensebridge.net/
Television in the united states is akin to a company providing a free email service so that they can spam you relentlessly and regularly. You think it's about the email service or the television program, but the spam and the commercials are what it's all about!
"Mr. Sarnoff next gave a little talk, in which he cheerfully, and with enormous self-effacement, admitted that the real problem of television was not its mechanical vagaries but finding programs for it when it finally gets ironed out."
It seems to me that this is the very same problem facing us today with HDTV. History has shown us that this hurdle can be overcome (obviously). My only question is, why is it taking so long these days?
With the increase of the pace of technological change, why is the transition from TV to HDTV taking as long as the transition from radio to TV?
The web didn't impress me much when I saw a demonstration of it in a computer lab. My friend said, "Hey, Matt, check this out! You can throw a snowball at these scientists when you click on this link!"
I'm waiting for special internet keyboards that can send a shock to people to say something stupid. Now that would be cool.
Yeah, and it was actually on-topic. But mine was for a noble cause.
The thing that I came away with was not so much how lame tv must have looked back then (and as others so gleefully point out, looks now), but how unimaginative the author was. True, the technology must have been a bit underwhelming, but my goodness, being one of the first members of the general public to witness the ability to send pictures real time across the ether. I would have thought his mind would be reeling at the possibilities of the technology, vs the un-impressive state that it was currently in.
I just have to say that it's enheartening that the idea of critical disappointment in reviews is not some aspect of a cynical new age, but because the human race hase always been cynics. It gives some hope that the world isn't getting crappier, it's just as crappy as it seemed to people in the past.
I also wanted to say that the tone of this review strikes me exactly as describing the plot to (and LucasFilms' hyping of) Episode One. But then, I think I was E.B. White in a past life.
This now concludes our broadcast day.
I loved the Job #4704 routine. The times really change. I can't imagine mainstream papers these days getting away with having the reporter typing how much he wanted to rush out to "really bang-up look at" some woman.
Everything will be taken away from you.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered TV community when the New Yorker confirmed that TV market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all households. Coming on the heels of a recent survey which plainly states that TV has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. TV is collapsing in complete disarray.
From the article:
"First there had to be a moving picture. Then there had to be the business of iconoscoping it, or whatever the hell it's called. Then it had to be sent by direct wire to the Empire State Building, and back by megacycle to R.C.A., where it appeared in a television set which IN TURN had to be itself iconoscoped, or scooped, and the image sent to the Empire State, and then back again by megacycle to R.C.A., where it hit us squarely between the eyes."
"iconoscoping", "direct wire", "megacycle", when the hell are we gonna get stuff that sounds this cool.
I really hate Dan Patrick.
... when i have /.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
1 million and 1 comments about how "the more thing change the more things stay the same. There are no good shows on yada, yada, yada."
There are good shows on tv you just have to be more selective.
I know I'm going to hell, I'm just trying to get good seats.
"The web didn't impress me much when I saw a demonstration of it in a computer lab. My friend said, "Hey, Matt, check this out! You can throw a snowball at these scientists when you click on this link!"
I'm waiting for special internet keyboards that can send a shock to people to say something stupid. Now that would be cool. "
I'm disappointed that the above post was modded off-topic. It was quite obviously a satirical poke at the article that was mentioned.
Could a moderator please read the parent post and generate a second opinion? (even if I'm wrong?)
"Derp de derp."
FUCK his sister-in-law, FUCK her I say
I've recently gotten into anime and I'm really, really loving it. I've never been an avid TV watcher but lately I've been doing several hours of anime a day. I ask myself what it is I love about anime and it's not the visuals or the cuteness or the different-ness, it's the simple fact that they have stories. A series of 26 episodes is about 8 hours of viewing, and in that time you can pack in a seriously good story and excellent character development. Good stories are just not found in (my local) australian tv anymore.
Here's the state of TV in Australia, I don't think it's majorly different to america apart from the fact that cable has relatively low penetration here. Most of the prime time shows are:
There are no regular shows which tell a decent story!Star Trek is probably comes closest. DS9 and Voyager are gone, just a single episode of Enterprise weekly, late on wednesday nights. I haven't been watching much though. DS9 and Voyager particularly suffered overly from the hit-the-reset-button-at-the-end-of-every-episode syndrome. Despite, they have far more continuity and return appeal (for me) than most other shows around.
So, where have all the decent stories gone? All this hurrah about "Spiderman rocks because everybody relates to it!" is a crock to me. The recent blockbusters (Ep2, Spiderman, LOTR) have been successes because they are uncommon good stories told well. Visuals and action and romance put together do not make a good show. It's the story which captures your imagination and takes you away for a few hours.
Back to the anime, episodes often finish on a cliffhanger note, and I'm excited in the few seconds it takes to change directories and load up the next divx. Can you imagine what it must be like to see this episode and have to wait a whole week to see it resolved? GUARANTEED VIEWERS.
This is related to how Harry Potter is lauded as making it "cool for kids to read again". I hope Hogwart's is as real to today's kids as Kirrin Cottage (don't laugh!) was to me as a kid...
Good storytellers have always been hard to find but unfortunately it seems the TV networks have given up the search in favour of DIY handymen.
i wonder if this is kind of like the segway... not accepted much when it first came out, but is embraced later on.
just a thought.
Also, since this was the 1930's when he viewed television, he may have been viewing the predecessor to the modern cathode-ray tube based tv's we have now. What he was probably looking at was a crude device that reproduced images using spinning wheels much like a strobe tuner. Multiple layers of wheels all spun and their relative speeds is what reproduced the picture, so when the cathode-ray tube became feasable to be used with television, everyone switched to that method.
At the start of the Afghanistan campaign recently I watched a live broadcast by the BBC correspondent John Simpson perched somewhere up a mountain in Afghanistan who was using a satellite video link.
The video was a bit jumpy and flaky and I was initially critical of the quality and thought "why can't the BBC do better?".
A little while later, however, I suddenly realised the significance of what I was seeing:-
Here we have a man, perched on a mountain in the middle of nowhere, in a country with no electricity and being bombed by an overwhelming force, actually making a live broadcast with sound and colour video! I'm sitting in the comfort of my living room witnessing events as they happen several thousand miles away.
Isn't that truly amazing? It's easy to criticize the defects of new technology. Sometimes it needs a real leap of imagination to spot the virtues.
Thank God they shit-canned that idea.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Porn already far surpassed that expectation for most of us slashdotters when we first got nntp access and were downloading HOT LESBIAN ACTION PATRY C00L C00L.zip. May I kindly suggest that you hook yourself up to a porn expierence worthy of the 21st century. Single's clubs have meta searched live video convergences that rival the size of small cities. You can find 30 women that will take their clothes off for you for 2-3 minutes if you'll do the same. It is sort of the ultimate safe sex routine borne out of the lingering fears of such things as aids and babies. I'm certain when sex suits become more popular we will all have them, and we will see all the poor 40 year old trolls dissapear forever into masturbatory bliss and a new generation will arise to take their place with new pictures of new sexual animals that they have created in their vicariously-lived psuedo life where they have become sexual predators.
Don't waste your money...I hear that there are these new things called 'orthicons' that are gonna sweep the industry...
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
Is it only me, or is the English in that article really hard to read? I can understand 19th century British English with ease, but this is full of fad-slang, which can not be understood by me.
I know each country likes to believe they invented Radio, TV, the lightbulb etc, however by 1936 the BBC already had a mature 405 line service up and running in England, they were doing this sort of experimental stuff with Baird equipment in the late 20's.
After all, black and white television. I **would** be impressed though if you could run Linux on it. j/k! ;-)
soul daddies in a firewire tumble dryer
Infinite Jest, a novel by David Foster Wallace, details a time when broadcast TV is replaced by ordering specific shows, which are then physically delivered daily to your household. Missing the TV advertisement revenue, companies started to buy the rights to entire years, which became known as Subsidized Time. Instead of numbered years, years became designated by the company who purchased the rights, like The Year of the Whopper, The Year of Glad, or The Year of the Depend Adult Under-garment.
when he wrote this. As he says: "It was 1931 that we last reported on television, and our readers must be wondering how things are shaping up. Not any too good. Engineers are working like beavers, but it appears that our homes are in no immediate danger. The cost of sending and receiving even the sappiest image is terrific; twenty-five miles is still considered a good hop; and a facial expression, however rapt, is often damaged en route."
In short, technology had not progressed enough in the past 5 years to make this a practical application for the home. The exitement of the concept and the idea that this might one day be commonplace technology, had probably already worn off.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
we will see all the poor 40 year old trolls dissapear forever into masturbatory bliss
damn your perspicacity!
something in me is protesting that the true spirit of trolling though is independent of sexual satiety, and there may be a few of us who would remain true to the trolling spirit even into old age, even with more efficient masturbatory technology.
It really is amazing how the more things change, the more they stay the same - even back then, American revisionism was alive and well: the inventor of Television wasn't an American, it was a Brit (a Scotsman actually): John Logie Baird.
OK, that was the only on-topic bit, now for my rant:
I know this looks like flamebait, but this level of shoddy journalism (not checking facts) is rife, and seeing it in the NYT infuriates me. I've lived in both countries (US, UK) and it is amazing how culturally insular the US is - many otherwise very intelligent citizens grow up thinking that inventions and discoveries that were originally from or made abroad (Chinese, Arabic, or European mostly), were made by Americans. Give me a break! This attitude is so in-grained that Hollywood has regularly rewritten whole wars (normally to make America look far more noble than it is - if you want to see how noble a country really is, look at how they treat their poor and needy) in the name of "entertainment" - when really it is just to pandar to primative notions of patriotism in order to sell more.
That said, the NYT (WP, LAT) are still far superior to the majority of UK trash that gets labelled as newspapers. I just wish they (and slashdot) would get their facts right.
Dan
Replying to my own post, but here's something that explains J.L.Baird's significant contributions and gives dates:
John Logie Baird
Dan
http://newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/?020527crat_a tlarge
Philo T. Farnsworth was born in 1906, and he looked the way an inventor of that era was supposed to look: slight and gaunt, with bright-blue exhausted eyes, and a mane of brown hair swept back from his forehead. He was nervous and tightly wound. He rarely slept. He veered between fits of exuberance and depression. At the age of three, he was making precise drawings of the internal mechanisms of locomotives. At six, he declared his intention to follow in the footsteps of Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. At fourteen, while tilling a potato field on his family's farm in Idaho, he saw the neat, parallel lines of furrows in front of him, and it occurred to him--in a single, blinding moment--that a picture could be sent electronically through the airwaves in the same way, broken down into easily transmitted lines and then reassembled into a complete picture at the other end.
The part about them transmitting the signal back on a "megacycle" caught my attention. I took this to mean they sent the television picture back over the airwaves at a frequency of 1mHz (1 Hz = 1 cycle), or a wavelength of 300m. That's a pretty low end of the spectrum to send a complex signal like television, given that most television signals are now between 150 and 200mHz. You can send a signal at ~15mHz, albeit at a slow scan rate. Does anyone know what frequency they likely used for this transmission?
The quote mediating on the irony of shooting a signal that represents a picture of a television around New York is pretty amazing to me.
I remember the first time I streamed audio to a shoutcast rebroadcaster half way across the country and then received it back on a second computer. Thousands of miles and an arsenal of human technology just so I create a 3 second delay and lose some audio quality. It's been 70 years, the battle continues.
I was surprised by the language. It sounds quite modern; if I had read the text without knowing it was from 1936, I'd never have guessed from the style alone (althought the _contents_ might have given me a clue, and I might have started to suspect something when seeing the word "thence").
;)
And could they really print "hell" in 1936?
Can you hear me, Major Tom? I'm not the man they think I am at home...
...of the current state of television was presented in my family room this morning. I wasn't impressed either. Not much has changed on the past 70 years.
Luckily I have a stack of books that I haven't gotten around to reading yet.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
It is simply more prone to encouraging big jumps in infrastructure rather than incremental ones. However, individuals are generally more likely to be part of incremental changes if they can do so without losing legacy support... such as with consoles (I'd submit PS1 to PS2 is an incremental change), cars, and computers.
What we have is a country filled with first adopters, but only wanting to upgrade "if it's worth it." This usually encourages larger changes, unless the perceived value of an incremental change outweighs the cost.
It's up to you to decide whether this is good or not.
More interesting, I think, is the ever-thoughtful Malcolm Gladwell's review of two books about Philo T. Farnsworth. Contrary to the expected take of how small genius inventors are destroyed by large credit-stealing corporations, Gladwell argues that corporations are the safest and sanest way to let genius inventors concentrate on inventing. Worth reading.
mahlen
"In Trash Tango, the human race has become so feeble that the alien invasion of Earth occurs by means of a memo." -- Steve Aylett, _slaughtermatic_
The above poster is correct. John Logie Baird was the first inventor of television.
(* "iconoscoping", "direct wire", "megacycle", when the hell are we gonna get stuff that sounds this cool. *)
This is what happens when you let the press talk to geeks. The marketing staff would have been able to say, "This is a television camera. It is just like a movie camera, but does not have to wait until the film is developed. Now we are going to use the camera to show a picture of a television screen, almost like taking a movie picture of a movie screen."
Geeks may be great at building the stuff, but DON'T let them talk to the press, unless you want your stock price to take a dive.
Table-ized A.I.
Leon Theremin (Lev Sergievitch Termen) actually developed his own version of television at about the same time, but it was appropriated by the Soviet government for surveillance purposes.
No, really. Read this book. Theremin was an interesting guy.
I believe it was in 1990. My campus did not have direct access to the Internet, but it had a Vax, and a 9600 bps leased line to Western Michigan University, which had some limited access to the Internet via a bizarre customized terminal server hookup. If I entered the right incantations at the terminal server prompt I could telnet out of the system, to anywhere - well, at least a certain percentage of the time, and it seemed many sites where not reachable.
I had a friend from high school who had somewhat less resitricted access to the Internet in California. Luckily I was able to telnet into his account and gain access to all sorts of wonderful things. Usenet, chat, and MUDs... I think I lost a year to a wonderful little place at MIT called "The End of the Line".
A year later we got dialup access and a Unix system and I was able to enjoy all of this, plus line noise at 1200 bps.
I guess my point (if I have one) is that things are accelerating. I now sit at the end of my own dedicated 1.5 Mbps pipe on a laptop which is probably something like 100 times faster than that Vax I used to access the Internet. This after only 12 years. TV hasn't changed much in 50.
-josh
Mr. White also wrote many outstanding essays. In his 1948 Here Is New York, he extols the city's resilience and eerily predicts what a few airplanes could do to it.
It seems to me that E.B. was impressed with the idea of television, just not the (flawed) execution of the idea that he was a witness to. Surely anyone from back then would be able to guess how ubiquitous this device would potentially become...
Palaces, barricades, threats, meet promises
I can't stand the merciless drone of the inane things on television these days myself but how many of you currently have cable television in their home? Probably most of you. Television does have it's good points: * Jeopardy * the news (even though it is only what the media wants us to know) * visual confirmation of current on-goings * movies * and it has been known to appease the whiney child
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources - A. E.
... and it's been down-hill ever since!
I remember looking at an old Scientific American, I think it was somewhere between 1890 to 1900. The front cover has a facsimile (though not a very good one) of the face of the kaiser. People back then weren't completely techno-phobic.
No, it is not possible for a man or woman who is sexualy active (virtual or otherwise) to think about irrelevent things such as trolling.
n/t
[o]_O
like a Philip K. Dick short story. Brilliant guy comes up with a world-shattering invention only to get robbed by the fat cats and then loses his mind.
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
A Russian presented a paper back in 1909 that pretty well outlined how modern TV would work. Baird invented (mechanical) TV. Farnsworth got credit for electronic TV. EMI came out with 405 line TV in England in 1936; RCA topped them soon after in the US with 441 lines. The British system succeeded sooner because the British government was expecting a war and subsidized development of TV (broadcasting in England being government controlled) so that development of high-frequency + high-power RF tubes, antennas, and know-how would be accelerated to help their national defense. The British investment worked and helped development of early radar, which was very important. But the Germans, who had the worst pre-war TV system, had the best early radars, and the klystron, which made much better radar possible, was invented in the US in 1937.
"Television? the word is half Latin and half Greek. No good will come of it" - CP Scott, Editor of the Manchester Guardian