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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."
Times don't change, 63 years later and still nothing is worth watching on tv.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
How the hell can you promote DUMBER shows? It's like trying to make something colder than absolute zero. We hit rock bottom with Springer. Everything else is trying to cash in on that kind of idiocy. Survivor, Who want's to admit they're a gold-digger, fear factor, ANY dating show, Regis. X-files is GONE, there were rumors of killing of Dateline or somesuch, 'news' shows are blately promoting products (when did a new cola flavor become news?) You want TV DUMBER? Explain to me how it is possible...
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
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
put more GWB on tv
The New York Times != The New Yorker
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
This article didn't appear in the New York Times. It appeared in the New Yorker, an entertainment magazine.
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.)
Well you'll have to wait to ask the tyke at the bottom of this page to see if he thinks Segway is a killer app....then again, maybe you won't.
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.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
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_
(* "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.
Maybe not so surprising - the advent of television "locked down" english to a greater degree, I suspect, than was the case when regional dialects could evolve and spread without everyone being aware of how funny they sounded. Now there's a standard ("broadcast english") to compare with. Not that this is going to petrify the language, but it could slow it down...
Why has the parent poster been slashed down to 0 (pissing off ammerican audience). I dont want to flame but an american did not invent the tv "Philo Farnsworth"-who?? im sorry but ill bet he was american , he did not invent the tv John Logie Baird as stated above was the inventor he was working in Dublin ( Ireland ) at the time i believe , just like americans didnt invent the Computer , no the English didnt either , a German beat them all to it just before the begining of WW11 ( google for zuze computer not suse !!).The jet fighter was the English , who were gracious enough to lend there jet tech to America , so they could share there knowledge . No Hope , the english were denied all American tech and the Americans built on the English's work.USSR was first in eveything in space EXCEPET to the moon the are building the ISS with American money ( with MIR they have a lot of exeprience ), that the only thing that prevented them from getting there first , money . Nothing againts America I still think its a great country but not everything is invented in america!.ill be moded as offtopic i presume , who cares , what i said is still true.
Shin: a device for finding furniture in the dark.
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
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..."
"Television? the word is half Latin and half Greek. No good will come of it" - CP Scott, Editor of the Manchester Guardian
I dont want to flame but an american did not invent the tv "Philo Farnsworth"-who?? im sorry but ill bet he was american , he did not invent the tv John Logie Baird as stated above was the inventor he was working in Dublin ( Ireland ) at the time i believe
You are absolutely correct that Philo Farnsworth didn't invent the concept of television. He invented the first all electronic television.
link
The other individual you mentioned invented a functional Television first, however it was mechanical.He later much improved on the electronic design, and for that deserves much credit, however Farnsworth did invent television in pretty much the form we use today.
, just like americans didnt invent the Computer , no the English didnt either , a German beat them all to it just before the begining of WW11
Gee I always thought Charles Babbage was English, and in every CS book that mentions the history of the computer, Babbage is credited as it's inventor. I also thought he invented it in the 1830's, long before the First World War, let alone the second, although it is true that Babbage may not deserve all of the credit for inventing the first real computer.
I found Konrad Zuse (not 'zuze'). His machines were rather remarkable. He had paper paper tape (although he used old movie film because paper for paper tape or punch cards was in short supply), he used binary, and considered using vaccum tubes instead of relays, but found relays to be more plentiful. His machine also predated the Harvard Mark I(IBM ASCC), however that machine was apparently invented independantly, and the fact that the Z3 had predated it was not found out until after WWII. All of this information is here.
However, several full fleged computers predated Zuse's machine, including Babbage's machines, and the Turnig machine.
The jet fighter was the English , who were gracious enough to lend there jet tech to America.
Gee, my history books always said it was Germany. They were at least the first to use them AS fighters during WWII.
From here
1939 First jet aircraft is flown, Heinkel HE 178 Heinkel Germany
1942 First operational jet, ME-262 Messerschmitt Germany
It kinda looks to me like it wasn't the British, but actually the Germans who deveoped the first Jet.
Nothing againts America I still think its a great country but not everything is invented in america!.ill be moded as offtopic i presume , who cares , what i said is still true.
It's nice of you to say that we're a great country, and that you have nothing against us, (some of your aside comments would indicate otherwise, but I'll take you at your word), but what you say isn't really true. You failed to make even the most cursory of checks using google for any of the claims you made.
There is a civil war coming in the United States. Remember which side has most of the guns