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1936 Perspective on Television

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the talkies dept.

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."

6 of 223 comments (clear)

  1. Typical revisionism by avsed · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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

    1. Re:Typical revisionism by Morky · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The article was on the development of electronic television, not mechanical television. I would, though, tend to agree that the fact that Thomas Edision (multiplexing telegraph, phonograph, electric light bulb, motion picture, and much more) was American leaves a lot of Americans with the impression that everything was invented here. Most people in the U.S. think that Alexander Bell was American, but he was a Brit who emigrated with his family to the U.S. If you run down the list of major modern inventions, you would see a pattern that most of them came from western Europe and the U.S. I would be interested in your list of modern inventions that came from the Arab world. (I'm not being provocative here. I just would like to know because I couln't find any on the Net.)

  2. The invention of TV by gargle · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  3. Megacycle by eap · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

  4. Radiation nostalgia by Gray · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  5. A more recent demonstration... by rnturn · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ...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