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75th Anniversary of Television

Posted by michael on from the gilligan-and-maryann-still-not-rescued dept.

SpiceWare writes "In the summer of '21, Philo T. Farnsworth was struck by an inspiration after plowing a field. He transmitted the first television image six years later on September 7, 1927."

3 of 339 comments (clear)

  1. My goal for today... by gilroy · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Blockquoth the referenced page:

    "Our goal is simple: come September 7, 2002, we want everybody who turns on a television set to know that date is the anniversary of the day the medium arrived on this planet - and to know the name of the man who delivered it."

    -- Paul Schatzkin, Author of The Boy Who Invented Television

    Well, TV has given us some nice moments. But in between all those nice moments has been a high-volume sewer hose of cultural sludge. So my personal goal today is to convince everyone to not watch TV at all, at least for this day. Let's remind the Content Cartel that there are other options...
    --
    The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
    1. Re:My goal for today... by foobar104 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Well, books have given us some nice moments. But in between all those nice moments has been a high-volume sewer hose of cultural sludge.

      You can always tell that a statement is meaningless when you can replace the key noun in it with a different word without changing the degree to which the statement is true. A statement that is always true, regardless of the subject, is dull and pointless.

  2. Re:quality television ? by foobar104 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    hey, in France and the UK we still have quality television.

    Dude, France has about 600 broadcast TV stations. The UK has about 250.

    The United States of America has more than 2,000, and that's just over-the-air stations. We also have over 9,000 local cable TV systems.

    Do the arithmetic. The United States of America broadcasts over 96 million hours of television programming every year. There's enough room in America's cultural output for greatness and crap and everything in between, in volumes that would blow your narrow little mind.

    A friend of mine just moved to the US from Australia. Not a small country, Australia. Twice the size of Europe. He and his family are bewildered by the sheer amount of everything we have in this country. Took him to a grocery store the other day. Our city is nowhere near a coastline, but we get seafood by the ton flown in every morning. The produce available in our markets comes from every corner of the world, and it's all fresh and unbelievably cheap.

    I think you foreign types often fail to grasp just how big and how affluent this country is. Our culture dominates the world not because it's better or worse, but because there's just so much of it.

    This is, of course, a good and righteous thing. Manifest Destiny is no myth, my friends.