In 1926, TV Was Mechanical

https://spectrum.ieee.org/first-tv

by jnord • 2 years ago

125 35 2 years ago

spectrum.ieee.org

Animats2• 2 years ago

There's a long history there. See the Early Television Museum.[1]

It's sad that no Scophony set survives. High resolution and 24 inch screens in 1938.

[1] http://earlytelevision.org/mechanical.html

xattt2• 2 years ago

2 mHz

TV broadcasts sure were frequency efficient.

avhon1• 2 years ago

With pictures "made up of only 30 to 60 lines", they were transmitting much less data!

alenrozac• 2 years ago

interestingly close publish date to Asianometry's video on Sony's Breakthrough Color TV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOh3jEJGynA

elpocko• 2 years ago

Not so interesting. In the video description and in the video itself it's pointed out that it's done in a collaboration with IEEE Spectrum.

burkaman• 2 years ago

Reminds me of this fully mechanical ancient Greek movie from 2000+ years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IW3uaJimMlI

taeric• 2 years ago

This reminds me of the equally interesting framing of modern computer failure rates in similar terms to mechanical parts.

This is also a very fun exploration of how many things start mechanical and move to more solid state as they age. I'm curious what major mechanical items are left to move over to solid state? My guess is most things that have changed were instruments in larger things. Gyroscope devices are a fun example.

aftbit• 2 years ago

So much was done with mechanical systems back in the day, because they were better understood and comparatively cheaper than corresponding electrics. I wonder if the engineers who designed teletypes or artillery range computers could learn to program, and if they did, would they have any unique insights?

bee_rider2• 2 years ago

Krylov (the guy the subspaces are named after) was a naval engineer. Cholesky was an artillery officer.

tway_GdBRwW• 2 years ago

I love this unique insight:

"Fire control computers ... solve ... fire control problems."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwf5mAlI7Ug

U.S. NAVY BASIC MECHANISMS OF FIRE CONTROL COMPUTERS MECHANICAL COMPUTER INSTRUCTIONAL FILM 27794

Animats2• 2 years ago

Feynman did some mechanical artillery range computer design. Read "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman". He has a few things to say about it.

0823498723498722• 2 years ago

They'd probably take a dependency, slice out the quarter they actually use, and somehow turn it into a cleverly-encoded lookup table or two?

gradschoolfail2• 2 years ago

Hopefully, you didnt miss this tangentially moored submission (was your depedendency on time constant re: [VP] sales vs engineers related to that covered therein

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41556915

WalterBright• 2 years ago

If you tour the British cruiser parked in the Thames in London, you can see the artillery computer. It's a triumph of mechanical computing.

andrehacker• 2 years ago

There is a great model kit made in England for the "Televisor". Got it years ago and it was minutes of fun. Apparently still for sale. The input is audio, got it to run from my iphone at the time (as opposed to using the supplied CD which in itself is Retro technology). I had some plans to build code a video-to-audio converter to run this (or screengrab to audio for that matter).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTSeUjvScUA

mrandish2• 2 years ago

Several years ago I came across the first issue of "Television" magazine from 1928 and reading it blew my mind in a couple ways. First, the overall tone is remarkably similar to a 1970s homebrew computer club newsletter, including defining what "television" even is (and isn't). For example, We learn on page 10 that "television is not tele-photography."

It's clear from this magazine that early television was the domain of home tinkerers and hackers. On page 26 is a detailed tutorial on how to construct your own selenium condenser cell from scratch, including which London chemist had appropriately high-quality selenium, where to buy copper sheets, mica insulator (.008 thick) and brass bars. Well worth a read: https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=37097

That analog television not only was prototyped nearly a hundred years ago but then began being deployed at vast consumer scale ~75 years ago is still just so amazing. It's worth understanding a bit about how it works just to appreciate what a wildly ambitious hack it was. From real-time image acquisition to transmission to display, many of the fundamental technologies didn't even exist and had to be invented then perfected for it to work.

dTal• 2 years ago

Although it's about wire transmission of photography - which, as pointed out, television is not - it's still well worth watching this 1937 newsreel explaining how it works, mostly because 1) they devote a LOT of time towards explaining the concept of scanning/rastering, which was clearly not widely intuited at the time, and 2) they do it with a brilliant physical analogy, with the incredible pedagogical clarity typical of such 1930s educational videos.

https://youtu.be/cLUD_NGE370?

IIAOPSW• 2 years ago

First time I watched that I forgot I had the speed set to 1.5 or something so the already fast-talking 1930s mid-atlantic radio announcer voice got exaggerated to a hilarious degree. Especially funny as the first few lines were about the importance of speed!

readyplayernull• 2 years ago

So cool, it reminded me a book I once found and never seen again on building analog computers at home with a few bits of magnetic-core memory. That magazine even shows Osram tubes, I didn't know that brand had such long history. One of my desktop toys is a $5 Osram Tungsten bulb that I bought to "watch" the highest melting-point element emitting light.

nxobject• 2 years ago

It’s sad to imagine, though how the cutting edge of TV technology was always of the reach of homebrewers - especially after the consensus dismissed mechanical scanning in favor of electron gun-based scanning (developed almost simultaneously).

UncleSlacky• 2 years ago

There were even recordings of it, though they couldn't be played back at the time:

http://www.tvdawn.com/

phkahler• 2 years ago

Also interesting is the electromechanical "tone wheel generator" used in the Hammond Organs:

https://forums.musicplayer.com/topic/155607-a-look-inside-a-...

91 metal wheels with lobes spinning past something like electric guitar pickups to produce sine waves. Their goal was to produce pure sine waves and then combine them via "drawbars" to produce an adjustable sound. 12 different gear ratios and different number of lobes (powers of two) to produce all the frequencies.

The rotating "Leslie" speaker was also cool, as is the electromechanical "vibrato scanner" on later models.

bryanmgreen• 2 years ago

Very cool. Makes me think of this wonderful scene from Sports Night where William Macy talks about Philo Farnsworth and Cliff Gardner inventing TV.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-va0tWJLTc

m463• 2 years ago

Someday they will say the same thing about music. :)

DrPimienta• 2 years ago

I wonder how much, adjusted for inflation, it cost to buy a TV in 1926.

YeGoblynQueenne• 2 years ago

> My Greek teacher hated the word “television.” He considered it an abomination that combined the Greek prefix telos (far off) with a Latin base, videre (to see).

Note "telos" which means 'goal' or 'end', but "tele-" which indeed implies distance. Words like Telegraph and Telephone that use "tele-" are modern inventions but ancient words with a "tele-" prefix are "τηλεβόας" ("televoas", a loudspeaker") and "Tηλέμαχος" (Telemachus, lit. "he who fights from a distance", metaphorically an archer or javelin-thrower; the son of Odysseus).

Edit: many more here->

https://www.greek-language.gr/digitalResources/ancient_greek...

In 1926, TV Was Mechanical

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