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Subject: Dead Media Working Note 11.4
Dead medium: Early/Mechanical Television Systems
From: kadrey_AT_well.com (Richard Kadrey)
These are excerpts from the catalog from the exhibition at
the Royal Ontario Museum, "Watching TV". The exhibition
runs through September 15, 1996.
The catalogue is available from Royal Ontario Museum
shops, CityStore 299 Queen Street, West, Ontario, Canada
or from MZTV Museum. Cost - $11.50 Cdn., $10.00 US, plus
shipping. Send email orders to mztv_AT_bravo.ca.
Credits: An excerpt from "Watching TV: Opening the Doors
of Reception" by Liss Jeffrey, Acting Director, MZTV
Museum. Technical research by Gary Borton, Consulting
Curator, and Iain Baird, Researcher, MZTV Museum.
"Mechanical TV: Pioneering Experiments"
According to Business Week in 1931, television
broadcasters admitted "that interest in their efforts is
confined almost entirely to the experimenter = the young
man of mechanical bent whose principal interest is
in how television works rather than in the quality
ofimages received." William Boddy, 1991
Fred Hammond, VE3HC, is a veteran Radio Ham who has
been on the air since 1929. During the early 1930's, he
was one of a handful of radio experimenters in Canada to
become interested in mechanical television, building his
own mechanical kit vision receiver. As an active Radio
Ham, he was able to audibly monitor the various mechanical
television signals.
Always a sensation, television was hardly an
overnight success. In 1926, New York Times radio editor
Orrin Dunlap called the new medium "an inventor's will-o'-
the-wisp." A year earlier, a Scot, John Logie Baird, and
an American, Charles Francis Jenkins, generated the first
live pictures by pairing (or synchronizing) primitive
mechanical scanning discs at transmitter and receiver
ends. These demonstrations, soon conducted at department
stores, trade fairs, and before invited audiences of
scientists and government officials, attracted the
curiosity of press and public.
Especially interested were some of the quarter-
million amateur "wireless" operators, whose numbers grew
during the early 1920s, when "radio mania" swept North
America. These hobbyists were among the original producers
and consumers of both radio and television. In 1928,
Jenkins began irregular broadcasts of the crude
silhouettes he called radiomovies.
He described the thrill for his amateur audience as
they "fished" for his signals on homebuilt contraptions:
"thousands of amateurs fascinatingly watch the pantomime
picture in their receiver sets as dainty little Jans Marie
performs tricks with her bouncing ball, Miss Constance
hangs up her doll wash in a drying wind, and diminutive
Jacqueline does athletic dances with her clever partner,
Master Fremont."
At its inception, radio "listening-in" was an active,
mainly male pastime, requiring technical know-how, and
constant adjustments to the set. "Lookers-in" to early
mechanical television patiently fished for signals.
Sometimes they caught tiny, indistinct images. A separate
radio set could be used to tune in sound with the picture.
Radio entered most households only after it was
domesticated. This meant that it came to resemble
furniture instead of a gadget, became easier to operate,
and could be enjoyed by more than one person at a time.
Television followed a similar route into the home, but its
complex and expensive assemblage dictated a lengthier
experimental period before costs came down, and before the
invention of larger screens and clearer pictures could
domesticate "seeing at a distance."
Despite these early limitations, the pioneers of
crude mechanical television demonstrated basic principles
of picture scanning and synchronization of transmission
and reception. They also glimpsed the medium's potential
for storytelling. In 1928, the first live drama broadcast,
a three-camera production called "The Queen's Messenger,"
was received on a General Electric Octagon set in
Schenectady, New York. In 1931, the Radio Corporation of
America (RCA) broadcast experimental signals from the
Empire State Building, featuring a familiar cartoon
character, Felix the Cat. The first TV star was born.
By 1935, mechanical television had reached a dead
end in North America. Image resolution remained low, at
best reaching 120 lines of picture definition.
Transmission and reception standards were nonexistent.
Available programming was unpredictably scheduled.
Lacking an audience, advertisers were reluctant to
purchase commercial time.
Richard Kadrey (kadrey_AT_well.com)
Dead
Media | 0.01-02.0 | 02.1-04.0
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08.1-10.0 | 10.1-12.0 |