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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."
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 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.)
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.
...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.
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