Speaker 1: Give in touch of technology with tech Stuff from how
Speaker 1: stuff Works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland, senior writer for how stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com, and today I want to tackle a
Speaker 1: pretty big topic in tech television. And I'm not talking
Speaker 1: about the stuff that goes on TV, but rather TVs themselves.
Speaker 1: So where did they come from, how do they work,
Speaker 1: and how have they evolved? And this is going to
Speaker 1: be on multi part episode, y'all in fact, and just
Speaker 1: brace yourselves because spoiler alert, I am not even going
Speaker 1: to get to talk about electronic televisions in part one.
Speaker 1: That's how massive a topic this is. Now, these episodes
Speaker 1: are probably gonna be fairly similar to one I recorded
Speaker 1: with Chris Palette. You might remember him as my original
Speaker 1: co host way back in the old days. Chris and
Speaker 1: I sat down one day to record an episode about
Speaker 1: who invented the radio? And here's the problem. There's not
Speaker 1: really an easy answer to that question. You might shout
Speaker 1: out it was Nikola, Tesla, or it was Marconi, but
Speaker 1: it gets way more complicated than that. And Pallette and I,
Speaker 1: after we sat down and recorded a full episode, we
Speaker 1: found ourselves stuck we figured that the episode was a
Speaker 1: complete mess. It was a mire as we tried to
Speaker 1: explain it. We actually recorded the episode two times because
Speaker 1: right after the first attempt, we just kind of sat
Speaker 1: there staring at each other and uh, after a few moments,
Speaker 1: I said, you know, we can't release that, right and Palette,
Speaker 1: to his credit, said yeah, that was awful. So we
Speaker 1: ended up deciding that the story was just way too
Speaker 1: complicated and it jumped around in different parts of the
Speaker 1: world and in different parts of the timeline so much
Speaker 1: that we felt we made it more confusing rather than
Speaker 1: explained it. So we went outside of the little alcove
Speaker 1: we were in because it wasn't it wasn't in this
Speaker 1: building that was in a totally different part of Atlanta
Speaker 1: at the time. And uh. We went to our producer,
Speaker 1: who I believe was Tyler for that particular episode, and
Speaker 1: we told him we had to record it again and
Speaker 1: is his heart shrunk three sizes that day, but he
Speaker 1: agreed to do it. So we went back, sat down
Speaker 1: and recorded the episode a second time, and that was
Speaker 1: the version that actually published on tech Stuff, And if
Speaker 1: you want to listen to it, you need to do
Speaker 1: a search in the Tech stuff list list on the
Speaker 1: archive and look for who invented the radio. It published
Speaker 1: on April two thousand eleven, and I honestly do not
Speaker 1: know how it holds up after all those years. I
Speaker 1: haven't listened to it since we published it. Really. As
Speaker 1: for the original episode that we sat down and recorded,
Speaker 1: the one that we thought was terrible, as far as
Speaker 1: I know, that's gone forever. I think Tyler actually erased it,
Speaker 1: unless he's holding onto it in case he ever needs
Speaker 1: to blackmail me, in which case you could probably ask
Speaker 1: Tyler and he might share it. But I think it's
Speaker 1: gone anyway. The reason I'm telling that story in the
Speaker 1: first place is because it turns out that inventions in
Speaker 1: general are more complicated than they first seem. And I'm
Speaker 1: not talking about how they work. I mean the story
Speaker 1: of how they came to be tends to be more
Speaker 1: complicated than a simple so and so invented the such
Speaker 1: and such. Now, as humans, we like simplicity in our stories.
Speaker 1: We love to have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Speaker 1: So it's really easy to say something like Thomas Edison
Speaker 1: in a Lot the light Bulb, but it's also not
Speaker 1: really true, or at least it's not entirely true. The
Speaker 1: truth is more complicated. It's messy, and it involves a
Speaker 1: lot of different people researching and engineering different stuff, and
Speaker 1: then later inventors building on that work, learning from the
Speaker 1: people who came before, refining things, redefining things. So you
Speaker 1: can't really just start with so and so invented the TV.
Speaker 1: It's again, much more complicated than that. And even the
Speaker 1: version I'm going to talk about today, the one that
Speaker 1: I've had to split up into multiple episodes, even this
Speaker 1: is a simplification of the story. If I were to
Speaker 1: detail every single person who had a hand in shaping
Speaker 1: the way television works, I could do a full podcast
Speaker 1: series on that. I'm not joking. It could be ten
Speaker 1: or fifteen episodes long. But I'm obviously not going to
Speaker 1: do that to my listeners. I want to have a
Speaker 1: good variety of topics. So this one is probably gonna
Speaker 1: be I'm guessing a three parter. I'm trying not to
Speaker 1: make it go all the way to four parts. But
Speaker 1: spoiler alert, uh, I only have the research done for
Speaker 1: parts one and two, and Part two ends with color television,
Speaker 1: so we got a lot of ground to cover, all right,
Speaker 1: So for your history buffs out there. I will get
Speaker 1: around to talking about Filo T. Farnsworth, and I'll talk
Speaker 1: about Vladimir's working, and I'll talk about David Sarnoff and
Speaker 1: how he tried to get a monopoly on television manufacturing,
Speaker 1: licensing and even broadcast. But I'll also talk about other
Speaker 1: people like Paul nip Cow, I'll talk about Charles Francis Jenkins,
Speaker 1: and John Logi Baird. But I think it's safe to
Speaker 1: say the development of television was the product of the
Speaker 1: work of a lot of different people. I would argue
Speaker 1: one is perhaps more instrumental than all the others for
Speaker 1: the modern concept of TV. But I'll allow you guys
Speaker 1: to draw your own conclusions on that. Also, please keep
Speaker 1: in mind that a lot of the work I'm talking about,
Speaker 1: both in exploratory science and in engineering, was taking place
Speaker 1: during a really hectic era in history. The ninet and
Speaker 1: early twentieth centuries were marked with enormous changes and monumental conflicts.
Speaker 1: You had the Industrial Revolution, which was transforming the way
Speaker 1: we do work. You may remember I did some episodes
Speaker 1: about the Industrial Revolution. You had massive migrations of people
Speaker 1: from rural areas into urban centers and really, the birth
Speaker 1: of the modern city came in the Uh. Really, the
Speaker 1: the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I would argue, is when
Speaker 1: they were truly born. I mean, obviously you had large
Speaker 1: centers of population like London and Paris and New York,
Speaker 1: but even those really weren't modern cities until I would
Speaker 1: argue the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the United States,
Speaker 1: during the some of the work that would lead to
Speaker 1: the invention of television, you had a civil War. It
Speaker 1: was a massive event here in the US, and I
Speaker 1: would argue it didn't so much tear the country apart.
Speaker 1: Everyone says the Civil War toward the country apart. I
Speaker 1: would argue the country was already torn apart before the
Speaker 1: Civil War started. The Civil War was kind of the
Speaker 1: result of that tearing of the country apart, which ultimately
Speaker 1: boils down to the untenable position of the South maintaining slavery.
Speaker 1: And uh, yeah, that's really what the Civil War was about.
Speaker 1: Don't let anyone tell you that it was the state's
Speaker 1: rights issue. Ultimately, that's just a layer of protection. It
Speaker 1: was really about slavery when you get down to it.
Speaker 1: As someone who grew up in the South, and is
Speaker 1: a Southerner. I feel very confident saying that at the
Speaker 1: tail end of this era, I'm talking about that eighteenth
Speaker 1: and early nineteenth or nineteenth rather in early twentieth centuries. Uh,
Speaker 1: you also had the First World War, a global conflict
Speaker 1: that ended up impacting television itself. A lot was going on. Now,
Speaker 1: it might surprise you to hear that the very first television's,
Speaker 1: the ones that you could purchase before black and white
Speaker 1: TVs became a thing, were mechanical TVs, which means they
Speaker 1: actually had moving parts inside of them designed to create
Speaker 1: moving images. Not It wasn't an electron gun firing electrons
Speaker 1: a screen. It was actual mechanical elements, and I'm going
Speaker 1: to explain how those worked and what they did in
Speaker 1: this episode. Those mechanical sets preceded the electronic ones, though
Speaker 1: not by a whole lot. It was actually a pretty
Speaker 1: rapid development from mechanical sets to electronics sets. There was
Speaker 1: even a camera with mechanical elements that went to the Moon.
Speaker 1: That's how we recorded color footage of the moon landing
Speaker 1: on the Moon's surface. Really not so much the moon landing,
Speaker 1: but rather astronauts exploring the Moon once they got there because,
Speaker 1: as it turns out, no one was on the moon
Speaker 1: ahead of us to film the whole process of landing.
Speaker 1: That would have been awkward if that had happened. Anyway,
Speaker 1: before we talk about TV itself, we have to spend
Speaker 1: a little time with our brains, and for some of
Speaker 1: us this might be a little uncomfortable. I know that
Speaker 1: my brain and I aren't always on the best of terms,
Speaker 1: and sometimes it won't even return my phone calls. But
Speaker 1: you could argue that our brains are ultimately what make
Speaker 1: television and film and animation work, not just because we
Speaker 1: invented those things, but because of the way our brains
Speaker 1: work and how it allows us to interpret this information
Speaker 1: being more than what it actually is. And there are
Speaker 1: two elements, really, I would argue that are at play here,
Speaker 1: and ultimately, when we get to color television, I would
Speaker 1: argue there are three elements at work. But with your
Speaker 1: basic television picture, one of those elements is that our
Speaker 1: brains can assemble bits of information into something that is
Speaker 1: greater than itself. So with a digital photograph or a
Speaker 1: television screen, you probably know that it is made up
Speaker 1: of a series of dots, very tiny dots called pixels,
Speaker 1: whether it's a digital photograph or a TV image. And uh,
Speaker 1: I want you to just imagine that, right take the
Speaker 1: digital photograph. I'm not saying you should go out and
Speaker 1: take a selfie right now, although if you want to,
Speaker 1: that's fine, go ahead tweet it to me, that's cool.
Speaker 1: What I mean is that these digital photos that are
Speaker 1: made up of pixels, those are individual points of light
Speaker 1: or if you prefer, points of color, although ultimately color
Speaker 1: is just a representation of light. So it's kind of semantics.
Speaker 1: The size, shape, and number of pixels determines and images resolution.
Speaker 1: And if I show you a picture made out of
Speaker 1: four solid color blocks of wood, so I've got four
Speaker 1: blocks and each of them is a certain color, uh,
Speaker 1: and I have been given the task assemble these blocks
Speaker 1: so that people know it's a rep since an image
Speaker 1: of the Eiffel Tower. That's gonna be really hard to do.
Speaker 1: These four solid color blocks, even if they are gray
Speaker 1: and say blue, it's hard to arrange them in a
Speaker 1: way that is going to look like the thing I'm
Speaker 1: trying to represent. Now, if I had sixteen blocks, I
Speaker 1: might be able to do a rough estimation of a tower.
Speaker 1: You might be able to figure out that I'm trying
Speaker 1: to build some sort of structure, or an image of
Speaker 1: a structure. If I had sixty four blocks, you might
Speaker 1: be able to figure out roughly what it is I'm
Speaker 1: trying to build. Right, you might say, well, it doesn't
Speaker 1: really look like the Eiffel Tower, but I can recognize
Speaker 1: that's what you're trying to make. If I had millions
Speaker 1: of tiny blocks that I could put together, and each
Speaker 1: tiny block itself is a solid color that I can
Speaker 1: arrange those in an array so it looks like a picture,
Speaker 1: then you'd say, oh, well that's the Eiffel Tower. Well,
Speaker 1: that's because our brains are able to take those individuals
Speaker 1: a little points and assemble them into a picture that
Speaker 1: is a whole. I guess philosophically we could start getting
Speaker 1: into how we're all just a bunch of atoms that
Speaker 1: are kind of close together in the macro's scale, though
Speaker 1: if you were to get down to the sub atomic layer,
Speaker 1: you would say, oh, you're mostly empty space. But that's
Speaker 1: going a little too far. The point is our brains
Speaker 1: can see a full image based upon this representation of
Speaker 1: tiny little pixels, and modern televisions do that. They the
Speaker 1: images they show us are made up of millions of
Speaker 1: those little points of light, and our brains interpret that
Speaker 1: as the cohesive image. It's kind of like, uh, that
Speaker 1: famous painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La
Speaker 1: Grande Jat by George Serrat. You know what I'm talking about.
Speaker 1: It's the one of all the people on the banks
Speaker 1: of a river at a park, and they're all and
Speaker 1: very fancy, kind of Edwardian era dress, and it's all
Speaker 1: made up of tiny little points of paint. It's actually
Speaker 1: a technique that's called point all is um, and originally
Speaker 1: Pointillisum was used as sort of a derogatory term. Other
Speaker 1: painters were saying, oh, that's not that's Pointillism, just using
Speaker 1: the little the point of the paint brush to make
Speaker 1: little dots to make up an image. But Serat elevated
Speaker 1: this to a true art form, and from a distance
Speaker 1: it is easily recognizable as a picture of what it's
Speaker 1: supposed to be. If you're far enough back, you say, yes,
Speaker 1: it's a painting of a bunch of people by the
Speaker 1: side of a river. And as you get closer and closer,
Speaker 1: you start seeing those individual dots, and if you get
Speaker 1: close enough, the dots are all you see. You no
Speaker 1: longer see a picture of people standing at a river.
Speaker 1: You see these little dots. Same things true with televisions.
Speaker 1: If you could get close enough, if you had a
Speaker 1: powerful enough magnifying glass, you can see the individual pixels
Speaker 1: that make up the screen. Now there's a related brainy capability,
Speaker 1: which is our tendency to recognize animation as actual movement.
Speaker 1: So it's easiest to talk about this for me, at
Speaker 1: least in terms of film, and I'm talking about physical film,
Speaker 1: the art form of cinema using film. So in film,
Speaker 1: we watch a sequence of still images played back at
Speaker 1: a certain speed, and typically we're talking about twenty four
Speaker 1: frames per second, which means you're looking at twenty four
Speaker 1: separate photographs every second that goes by, and the photographs
Speaker 1: are capturing movement. So each one is a still image,
Speaker 1: but each image in succession is catching a slightly different
Speaker 1: moment of time where things are moving across the frame
Speaker 1: of the photo, and you have to use a really
Speaker 1: fast shutter to remove as much blur as possible, especially
Speaker 1: for things that are moving very very quickly across the frame.
Speaker 1: So when you played these frames at this speed, it
Speaker 1: looks like we're watching objects in motion rather than just
Speaker 1: a sequence of pictures. And if our brains didn't work
Speaker 1: this way, movies and television wouldn't work. We wouldn't see
Speaker 1: them as moving thing things. We would just witness a
Speaker 1: sequence of individual photographs or or actually we'd actually see
Speaker 1: the pixels appearing on a television screen. We lack the
Speaker 1: ability to see the transitions as anything but instantaneous. We
Speaker 1: cannot see that it's really a sequence of individual events.
Speaker 1: So to us, television looks like it's stuff showing stuff
Speaker 1: that's actually moving. And there are a lot of inventions
Speaker 1: that predate television that took advantage of this particular phenomenon. So,
Speaker 1: for example, there was a device made by Philip James
Speaker 1: de Lufferberg, whose name I have mispronounced. He was a
Speaker 1: painter of some renown, and his contribution was a curiosity
Speaker 1: called the ido Fusicon. Ido Fusicon, I'm going with that pronunciation.
Speaker 1: So the ido fusicon was actually an invention that came
Speaker 1: out in the seventeen eighties, So this is a very
Speaker 1: old invention, and it used mirrors and pulleys to create
Speaker 1: the illusion of moving images in a little theater like setting,
Speaker 1: and by this time we understood the sequence of still
Speaker 1: images that capture a moving object, when viewed sequentially at
Speaker 1: proper speed, creates that illusion in our brains of an
Speaker 1: actual object in motion. But there were a lot of
Speaker 1: others who created entertainments and curiosities that utilize this same principle.
Speaker 1: There was a Belgian physicist, Joseph Plateau. Yeah, he created
Speaker 1: the Phena kit scope or phena kissed a scope. I
Speaker 1: guess it's kissed a scope because there's an s after
Speaker 1: the eye after the k Phena kissed a scope. There
Speaker 1: was William George Horner's dead alium. There was William E.
Speaker 1: Lincoln's zoa trope. These were all rotating devices that used
Speaker 1: various means to present an image. You might have seen one,
Speaker 1: it's like a platter. Often the zoo trope is the
Speaker 1: most popular one. You can find them still today. Where
Speaker 1: I'd say, a kind of a cylinder that has slits
Speaker 1: in it, and you're supposed to lean down and look
Speaker 1: through the slits. So you're looking through the cylinder at
Speaker 1: the opposite inner edge of the cylinder, and you spin
Speaker 1: it and there is a sequence of drawings or photographs
Speaker 1: that are on the inside edge of the cylinder. The
Speaker 1: slats end up creating a shutter like effect, and you
Speaker 1: start looking at these different images and sequence and then
Speaker 1: you get the feeling that you're looking at a moving image.
Speaker 1: Typically it's something like a horse trotting. That's a famous one.
Speaker 1: In fact, that last one, the zoetrope. It was so
Speaker 1: popular that a little company called Milton Bradley got involved
Speaker 1: and started making the first commercial version of it, and
Speaker 1: in a way you could argue that that was the
Speaker 1: the commercial predecessor to television. Although you're not transmitting anything there.
Speaker 1: It's obviously you've got everything you need right in front
Speaker 1: of you. So that covers the psychological aspect of why
Speaker 1: tell of Vision works. It works because our brains allow
Speaker 1: us to construct this concept of movement and animation even
Speaker 1: when all we're really doing is looking at a light show.
Speaker 1: But then again, our entire sense of vision is based
Speaker 1: off of light. And if I go down that pathway,
Speaker 1: this series is gonna last twenty episodes instead of three.
Speaker 1: So let's get on to talking about some of the
Speaker 1: science of physics and electricity and electro magnetism, and and
Speaker 1: also about sending information over wires and some basic scientific
Speaker 1: discoveries that really made television possible. I can spend an
Speaker 1: entire episode on each of these, to be perfectly honest,
Speaker 1: but I'm gonna do my best to cover the basics.
Speaker 1: So again, I'm not going to talk about every single
Speaker 1: inventor and scientist who made discoveries that contributed to the
Speaker 1: invention of television. But I'm gonna hit some of like
Speaker 1: the greatest hits. You know this were a mixed tape
Speaker 1: of a bunch of artists that you like. These are
Speaker 1: the ones that you think really represent the music you love.
Speaker 1: It's kind of the same thing I'm doing right here.
Speaker 1: So let's begin with an important guy, Alessandro Volta. Alessandro
Speaker 1: Volto as the guy who um invented batteries, came up
Speaker 1: with this idea. I mean, apart from the ones you
Speaker 1: could argue that came from ancient times that people probably
Speaker 1: didn't even know they really were batteries, Volta is the
Speaker 1: one who scientifically went through the process of creating batteries
Speaker 1: for the first time. Now, batteries are what made it
Speaker 1: possible to create a source of continuous electric current. Before batteries,
Speaker 1: if you were creating current, you were doing so in
Speaker 1: a sporadic and uncontrollable way, it was hard to create
Speaker 1: a steady current. So Volta's invention of batteries where it
Speaker 1: was one of those things that made it easier for
Speaker 1: future inventors to have kind of a baseline to work from.
Speaker 1: His good buddy Luigi Galvani also did a lot of
Speaker 1: work in this area, although Galvani's understanding of electricity was
Speaker 1: somewhat misguided. He thought when he was a applying electrodes
Speaker 1: to a frog's leg that the frog itself had some
Speaker 1: sort of intrinsic electricity uh, which is kind of true,
Speaker 1: but not in the way that Galvani thought, whereas Volta
Speaker 1: immediately recognized that the frog's muscles were conducting electricity, but
Speaker 1: not generating it, not on the scale that the electrodes were.
Speaker 1: So Volta's invention really did provide a good source for
Speaker 1: future inventors. There were a lot of other people who
Speaker 1: played a role in this too, uh, as well as
Speaker 1: just in a role of discoveries related to television. For example,
Speaker 1: chemist William Hyde Wallaceton wasn't satisfied with being a smarty
Speaker 1: pants and purifying platinum, as well as discovering various elements
Speaker 1: like rhodium and palladium. He also invented an object called
Speaker 1: the camera Lucida in eighteen o six. So this was
Speaker 1: an optical instrument that used a prism to reflect an
Speaker 1: image into the eye so it looked like the image
Speaker 1: was being projected on a sheet of paper. So you
Speaker 1: would have a table upon which you put a sheet
Speaker 1: of paper, and then you would put a little stand
Speaker 1: down on top of the paper where you have this
Speaker 1: prism like object on there. You would direct the prism
Speaker 1: so that a certain face of it is pointed toward
Speaker 1: an object you want to sketch on this piece of paper.
Speaker 1: Then you would have to position yourself over the prism
Speaker 1: so that you're the pupil of your eyes essentially half
Speaker 1: covered by the edge of this prism, and when you
Speaker 1: look down, you would have an image reflected into your eye,
Speaker 1: and it would look to you as if, in fact,
Speaker 1: there was a projection of that object you were interested
Speaker 1: in on a sheet of paper. It was meant to
Speaker 1: help make sketches easier for artists and others, architects, that
Speaker 1: sort of thing, But ultimately this also advanced our understanding
Speaker 1: of optics, which became necessary for the future of cameras.
Speaker 1: All right, we're gonna talk a lot more about electricity, electromagnetism,
Speaker 1: more science, and then we're gonna make our way over
Speaker 1: to the mechanical televisions. But before I get into all
Speaker 1: of that, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor.
Speaker 1: All Right, we're back. Now it's time to talk about
Speaker 1: Humphrey Davy, a Cornish inventor. He was the one who
Speaker 1: created the first arc light and it was actually called
Speaker 1: the Davy lamp, and it was a predecessor to the
Speaker 1: modern incandescent bulb. And this is part of the reason
Speaker 1: why some historians get a little briskly. If you were
Speaker 1: to say Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb, people would say, well, actually,
Speaker 1: and then they'd start building up the precedent that led
Speaker 1: up to Thomas Edison's light bulb. Edison was able to
Speaker 1: advance and perfect ideas had been around for decades, but
Speaker 1: no one had been able to really advance the art
Speaker 1: form to a point where it was practical. So, for example,
Speaker 1: the Davy lamp was not really practical for widespread implementation.
Speaker 1: It would take further refinement to create a lightbulb that
Speaker 1: was going to last long enough and be efficient enough
Speaker 1: and bright enough to actually replace the gas lighting that
Speaker 1: was used in most of the world at that point.
Speaker 1: So uh, Edison did make some very important contributions. I
Speaker 1: don't want to take anything away from him, but he
Speaker 1: didn't just invent the light bulb anyway. Artificial lights became
Speaker 1: a necessary element for television's uh. So that's why I'm
Speaker 1: actually mentioning Davy because his work was what allowed future
Speaker 1: televisions to actually work, so they were not just important
Speaker 1: for capturing images, but also displaying them. Now I'll mostly
Speaker 1: be talking about visuals here, capturing and displaying visuals, because
Speaker 1: you already have radio that was coming about around this
Speaker 1: same time. Uh, and a lot of the elements of
Speaker 1: radio found their way into television. And since I've already
Speaker 1: covered radio, I don't want to go into it a lot. However,
Speaker 1: I do need to mention that sound was a key
Speaker 1: component in television sets after your first wave of TV
Speaker 1: sets came out. The very first television sets didn't have
Speaker 1: any audio at all. I'll talk more about that a
Speaker 1: little bit later, but there's some important people to chat
Speaker 1: about as far as audio goes. One was Charles Wheatstone,
Speaker 1: he was an English inventor and he created a device
Speaker 1: that was meant to help people hear sounds that were unamplified.
Speaker 1: And it was actually just a pair of rods that
Speaker 1: could vibrate in the presence of sound, and you would
Speaker 1: put one end up close to your ear so that
Speaker 1: you could hear better. Uh, And he called this a microphone. Now,
Speaker 1: it wasn't a microphone in the sense of the kind
Speaker 1: that we use today, but that's what he called it.
Speaker 1: It was actually David Edward Hughes who was a British
Speaker 1: American inventor who developed the earliest of modern microphones in
Speaker 1: the eighteen seventies, and he ended up using the same
Speaker 1: term that Wheatstone used. He knew of Wheatstone's work and
Speaker 1: he felt that the technology he was working on had
Speaker 1: a microphone effect, and since then the name is stuck.
Speaker 1: So the original name for microphone actually comes from a
Speaker 1: pair of vibrating rods that you would use to amplify
Speaker 1: sounds so you can hear it better. Not something you
Speaker 1: sing into it karaoke when you've had a few too many,
Speaker 1: or in my case, I don't need any at all,
Speaker 1: I'll still sing into it. I won't do that to
Speaker 1: you guys right now, though, then we have Hans Christian Airstead.
Speaker 1: Airstead discovered the relationship between electricity and magnetism. I would
Speaker 1: argue that it's our understanding of electromagnetism that has transformed
Speaker 1: our world more than any other discovery in the last
Speaker 1: couple of hundred years. Most of our world that we
Speaker 1: depend on today has something to do with electro magnetism
Speaker 1: in some way or another. Our power grids, for example, transformers,
Speaker 1: these all have to do with electromagnetism. Are electronics are
Speaker 1: dependent upon electromagnetism. So Uh, it was really Ersta's discoveries
Speaker 1: that allowed people to find practical applications for that knowledge.
Speaker 1: Michael Faraday also very important. He experimented a great deal
Speaker 1: with electromagnetism. He discovered that a fluctuating magnetic field could
Speaker 1: induce electricity to flow through a coil of wire. Again,
Speaker 1: this goes back to transformers. Uh, the actual power grid component,
Speaker 1: not the toy from the nineteen eighties. Uh. This is
Speaker 1: the relationship I've talked a lot about on tech stuff.
Speaker 1: If you pass a current through a sil of wire,
Speaker 1: it will create a magnetic field. Now, if you pass
Speaker 1: an alternating current through a coil of wire, meaning the
Speaker 1: direction of flow of that current changes over and over again.
Speaker 1: It's cycles. Then you create a fluctuating magnetic field. The
Speaker 1: magnetic field will change as the direction of current changes.
Speaker 1: If you then bring a fluctuating magnetic field within the
Speaker 1: range of another coil of wire, one that is not
Speaker 1: hooked up to any kind of power source, it will
Speaker 1: induce electrons to flow through that unconnected coil of wire.
Speaker 1: It induces electricity. So, just as electricity can induce a
Speaker 1: magnetic field, a magnetic field can induce the flow of electricity.
Speaker 1: It has to be that fluctuating magnetic field, however, otherwise
Speaker 1: you just get a little As the magnetic field moves
Speaker 1: into the range of a coil of copper wire, you
Speaker 1: will get a little bit of a flow of electricity.
Speaker 1: But if the magnetic field is steady, that flow will
Speaker 1: stop up. It has to be a fluctuating magnetic field
Speaker 1: for it to continuously induce electricity to flow. This, again
Speaker 1: was a key component to electronics. Uh fair Day also
Speaker 1: experiment with passing current through a glass tube filled with
Speaker 1: what he called rarefied air, which is essentially meaning that
Speaker 1: he would attempt to pump out air from a tube
Speaker 1: and then pass current through it. His abilities were somewhat
Speaker 1: limited just by the technology of his time. He wasn't
Speaker 1: able to create a true vacuum within the tube. He
Speaker 1: was just able to pump out a good deal of
Speaker 1: the air, so it had a much lower atmospheric pressure
Speaker 1: inside the tube than outside. And he saw that the cathode,
Speaker 1: which is the negative electrode. In a pair, you have
Speaker 1: a cathode and an anode. The cathodes the negative electrode,
Speaker 1: the anodes the positive electrode. So you know, you want
Speaker 1: to hang out with the anode because the cathode is
Speaker 1: kind of a drag. Anyway, he noticed that the cathode
Speaker 1: would produce an arc of light. It would start at
Speaker 1: the cathode and would arc all the way to the anode.
Speaker 1: Uh later on, a German physicist named Heinrich Geisler was
Speaker 1: able to create a vacuum tube with an air pump
Speaker 1: that was more powerful than what what Faraday had at
Speaker 1: his disposal. So the Geistler's tube was more was closer
Speaker 1: to a vacuum. It still wasn't a perfect vacuum, but
Speaker 1: closer to a vacuum than Faraday's And when Geisler began
Speaker 1: to experiment with cathodes and anodes inside a vacuum tube,
Speaker 1: he saw that rather than getting an arc the way
Speaker 1: it did with Faraday, it would make the whole tube
Speaker 1: kind of glow. In many ways. This was a predecessor
Speaker 1: to neon lights that you can find on Broadway. Might
Speaker 1: as well stick with this discovery while I'm on it.
Speaker 1: In the eighteen seventies there was a British scientist named
Speaker 1: William Crooks who created Crooks tubes. You had Faraday tubes,
Speaker 1: you than a Geistler tubes, you had Crooks tubes. And uh,
Speaker 1: he kind of built on this experimental work that Faraday
Speaker 1: and Geisler started. He created even better vacuum tubes. They
Speaker 1: had even less atmosphere inside of them because the pumps
Speaker 1: had gotten better and better, so you could create a
Speaker 1: better vacuum and create a better seal as well. And
Speaker 1: he also experimented with cathodes and anodes, and he noticed
Speaker 1: that there was a dark space very close to the cathode.
Speaker 1: In fact, they called it the cathode dark space, or
Speaker 1: sometimes the Faraday dark space, or sometimes even the Crooks
Speaker 1: dark space. But this arc would start but just between
Speaker 1: the arc and the cathode, the would be this little
Speaker 1: dark segment. And he noticed that as he was able
Speaker 1: to create a better vacuum, as he was able to
Speaker 1: pump out more air, each successive tube would have a
Speaker 1: longer dark space. So the dark space would be wider
Speaker 1: from the cathode to the anode until you got to
Speaker 1: a point where you essentially had a real vacuum inside
Speaker 1: the tube, and the tube itself was completely dark except
Speaker 1: for the very end or the anode was. So here's
Speaker 1: what was happening that people didn't really know at the time.
Speaker 1: The cathode is shooting out electrons. That's the negative end, right,
Speaker 1: and the electrons are attracted to the anode because that's
Speaker 1: the positive end. Remember, opposite charges attract, So electrons have
Speaker 1: a negative charge. You have this positively charged anode. The
Speaker 1: electron quote unquote wants to get across that tube as
Speaker 1: fast as possible to get to that positive charge. Now,
Speaker 1: in Faraday's tubes, there were still, comparatively speaking, quite a
Speaker 1: bit of air inside the tubes, so the electrons would
Speaker 1: collide with air molecules on their way to getting to
Speaker 1: the anode. As they collided with molecules, they would excite
Speaker 1: atoms in those molecules. The atoms would end up having
Speaker 1: their electrons pushed to a higher energy state, and then
Speaker 1: almost immediately those electrons would return to their initial energy state.
Speaker 1: But they had to give up energy in order to
Speaker 1: do that. Right, It's kind of like you suddenly are
Speaker 1: filled with the power of popeye after eating spinach, but
Speaker 1: then immediately that strength goes away from you. But the
Speaker 1: strength has to go somewhere. You can't just destroy energy.
Speaker 1: So with these atoms, they would give up energy in
Speaker 1: the form of light and also heat, but we're mainly
Speaker 1: concerned with light, and so that was the arc that
Speaker 1: Faraday was seeing. He was seeing an arc because these
Speaker 1: electrons were very quickly colliding with uh atoms inside the tube,
Speaker 1: and that was creating this arc of light. Now Geisler,
Speaker 1: he was able to pump out more air, so the
Speaker 1: electrons were going a little further and not colliding quite
Speaker 1: as frequently. You got more of a mellow glow with
Speaker 1: Geisler because it wasn't there wasn't quite as many atoms
Speaker 1: to collide with. By the time you get to Crooks,
Speaker 1: almost all the air is pumped out, so there's very
Speaker 1: little for electrons to collide with. Most of the time
Speaker 1: they were going straight toward the anode, and some of
Speaker 1: them were going past the annode and colliding with the
Speaker 1: very end of the tube, and those were the atoms
Speaker 1: at the end of the tube itself that were fluorescing.
Speaker 1: So with Crooks tubes, you would see that the very
Speaker 1: very end was glowing, but the rest of it was dark,
Speaker 1: and that's because there were no atoms for the electrons
Speaker 1: to collide with, so you couldn't create that light in
Speaker 1: the first place. Uh. It was it was this that
Speaker 1: really ends up being the the secret sauce to electronic
Speaker 1: televisions further down the road. So we'll talk more about
Speaker 1: this in the next episode. So you then have to
Speaker 1: talk about a couple of other people before I move
Speaker 1: on from these vacuum tubes, because they were the ones
Speaker 1: who kind of put the pieces together. You have Johan Hitorf,
Speaker 1: who was a German physicist. He figured out in eighteen
Speaker 1: sixty nine that something had to be traveling from the
Speaker 1: cathode in a straight line in order to do this,
Speaker 1: and so he was the one who described what must
Speaker 1: be happening in these tubes. The others had observed it
Speaker 1: and they thought it was interesting. Hittorf was the one
Speaker 1: who was kind of putting words to it. And then
Speaker 1: there was a guy named Eugen Goldstein who would give
Speaker 1: this something that Hittorf had proposed an actual name. And
Speaker 1: Goldstein called it cathode raise because it was coming from
Speaker 1: the cathode at the end of this tube and shooting
Speaker 1: out in a straight line out the end of the
Speaker 1: tube on the opposite side, on the anode side, and
Speaker 1: we kept on going in a straight line. So he said,
Speaker 1: we're gonna call these cathode rays. They are raised that
Speaker 1: move out from the cathode. And it would be German
Speaker 1: inventor Carl Ferdinand Brown, who are brawn, I guess I
Speaker 1: should say who would end up building the first actual
Speaker 1: cathode ray tube with that purpose in mind, And that
Speaker 1: would not happen until eight seven. So when we talk
Speaker 1: about cathode ray to televisions, this is what we're talking about.
Speaker 1: These cathode ray tubes, These these vacuum tubes that would
Speaker 1: shoot out electrons. The rays that we're talking about are
Speaker 1: really electron streams. You know. Ray sounds cool, but it's
Speaker 1: funny that we kept the name, even after we increased
Speaker 1: our understanding of what was actually happening. But yeah, we're
Speaker 1: really just talking about streams of electrons moving at of
Speaker 1: extreme velocities in a vacuum. It's pretty nifty and we'll
Speaker 1: we'll talk more about them in our next episode. So
Speaker 1: let's get back to talking about electricity and electro magnetism.
Speaker 1: The early work with electricity got some other smarty, pant
Speaker 1: tight people thinking about practical applications because a lot of
Speaker 1: this was experimental work, but you couldn't really do much
Speaker 1: with it in the early days. And one of those
Speaker 1: early applications was for long distance communications. And that's when
Speaker 1: you've got people like Samuel Morse, Sir William Cook, Sir
Speaker 1: Charles Wheatstone, Leonard Gayl, and Alfred Vale working on a
Speaker 1: means of using electricity to send information to distant locations.
Speaker 1: And in the last couple of decades of the nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: inventors began to suspect that they could transmit telegraphs, which
Speaker 1: is what that other group of gentlemen came up with.
Speaker 1: They came up with the way of sending telegraphs across wires.
Speaker 1: There are some people towards the end of the nineteenth
Speaker 1: century who said, I bet we can do this wirelessly.
Speaker 1: James Clerk Maxwell proposed a theory of electromagnetism in the
Speaker 1: eighteen sixties, and gave a more thorough explanation about electromagnetic
Speaker 1: waves in the eighteen seventies, including the hypothesis that light
Speaker 1: itself was a type of electromagnetic wave, which we now
Speaker 1: know is true, although light can behave both as a
Speaker 1: wave and a particle. But that's that's a level of
Speaker 1: quantum physics we don't need to get into right now. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: inventors were coming up with new ways to send information
Speaker 1: through electrical lines. You had Alexander Bain who was a
Speaker 1: Scottish inventor, and he devised a method to transmit images
Speaker 1: over telegraph lines. The blows my mind that he could
Speaker 1: actually send an image using telegraph lines using his invention
Speaker 1: called the pan telegraph, which is kind of like the
Speaker 1: great grand daddy of today's fax machine, or I guess
Speaker 1: yesterday's fax machine. Hardly anyone still uses fax machines. Anyway,
Speaker 1: I got to talk about this thing because it blows
Speaker 1: my mind that someone figured out how to do this
Speaker 1: all the way back in eighteen forty three. So this
Speaker 1: pan telegraph was a cylinder made out of a non
Speaker 1: conductive material, meaning it will not conduct electricity. And then
Speaker 1: what you would do is you would put metal pins
Speaker 1: which could conduct electricity into the cylinder and think of
Speaker 1: it kind of like an old light bright, although I
Speaker 1: don't know how many of you know what a light
Speaker 1: bright is. It's a toy from the nineteen eighties and
Speaker 1: seventies and eighties. Anyway, battleship. Think of battleship where you
Speaker 1: put the little pegs in. It's kind of like that.
Speaker 1: You're putting these pins inside this uh, this cylinder really
Speaker 1: sticking out from the cylinder, and you arrange them to
Speaker 1: make a shape or a word or whatever, and you
Speaker 1: rotate the cylinder along with an electric probe, or you
Speaker 1: have the electricbe probe probing the cylinder and picking up
Speaker 1: the presence of those pins, and that would end up
Speaker 1: allowing an electric current to pass through a telegraph. You
Speaker 1: would have a receiver that would apply a current to
Speaker 1: an electrochemically sensitive paper and reproduce the image. So when
Speaker 1: an electric current touches the paper, the paper would change color.
Speaker 1: The idea being that wherever there was a pen the
Speaker 1: paper's color will change because it's also on a cylinder
Speaker 1: that's rotating at the same speed as the one you're
Speaker 1: using to send the message. But his invention was really
Speaker 1: problematic because he had trouble finding way to synchronize the
Speaker 1: two cylinders. If one cylinder is turning at let's say,
Speaker 1: five revolutions per minute and the other one's turning at
Speaker 1: fifteen revolutions per minute, the image you get is not
Speaker 1: going to represent what you actually scan. You have to
Speaker 1: have them both synchronized properly, so you would end up
Speaker 1: getting these very blurry images. However, his idea was incredible
Speaker 1: for eighteen forty three. Then you had Giovanni Cassell in
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty two created the next generation pan telegraph, and
Speaker 1: this one was about two meters tall, which is about
Speaker 1: six and a half feet tall. It looked a lot
Speaker 1: like a compass um, not the navigational tool, but rather
Speaker 1: a pair of compasses, like a graphic designer or an
Speaker 1: architect might use. And to send a message, you would
Speaker 1: write something on a sheet of paper. It was often
Speaker 1: tried to use anyway for signature verification for things like
Speaker 1: bank transactions, So you write something on a sheet using
Speaker 1: um a non conductive ink, and the sheet itself would
Speaker 1: be made out of tin, So using non conductive ink
Speaker 1: to cover up the tin. Then you would have a
Speaker 1: stylus on this pan telegraph device which would move across
Speaker 1: the tin sheet and it would send an electric signal
Speaker 1: to a receiver to a telegraph that was then attached
Speaker 1: to a receiver telegraph wire, I should say, so the
Speaker 1: partner device would print the scanned image, laying down inc
Speaker 1: in the places where the gaps in conductivity were. So remember,
Speaker 1: whenever the probe is going over this non conductive ink,
Speaker 1: it cannot send electric current. So it's at that point
Speaker 1: where the receiver says, this is where ink should go
Speaker 1: because there's an interruption in that current. Uh. They He
Speaker 1: also included regulating clocks and pendulums to keep the devices
Speaker 1: in sync with one another, so he could avoid the
Speaker 1: problems as predecessor had encountered, which is pretty nifty. But
Speaker 1: it wasn't really good at producing anything of high resolution,
Speaker 1: so it wasn't incredibly popular. But still it was eighteen
Speaker 1: sixty two. The US Civil War was happening at that time. Now,
Speaker 1: by the eighteen eighties you had physicists named Heinrich Hurtz,
Speaker 1: who devised experiments to test Maxwell's theories on electro magnetism,
Speaker 1: and he used spark gaps to test the presence of
Speaker 1: electromagnetic waves. So unpowered spark gap would act kind of
Speaker 1: like an antenna and convert electro magnetic waves into electricity,
Speaker 1: which would result in a spark. But Hurts didn't envision
Speaker 1: really a use for this. He he was using the
Speaker 1: approach to test a theory, and he thought, that's that's
Speaker 1: all it's good for. We'll never We'll never have a
Speaker 1: practical application for this, as far as he was concerned, Hurts,
Speaker 1: don't it. So many people took the work that scientists
Speaker 1: had done and they ended up creating or tried to
Speaker 1: create practical applications of that knowledge. You had people like
Speaker 1: Nikola Tesla. You had a yangaish Chandra bos You had
Speaker 1: Roberto Landel Domuera. You had Alexander Stefanovitch I should say
Speaker 1: that was his last name was Popov. You had Julio
Speaker 1: Servera Baviera. You had Marconi. You had a lot of
Speaker 1: people from all over the world. This was something where
Speaker 1: it wasn't like one area of the globe had the
Speaker 1: constant traded efforts and you could point to that it
Speaker 1: was a worldwide kind of phenomenon. Uh. And eventually this
Speaker 1: led to the invention of radio. And while the transmission
Speaker 1: of audio information was impressive, even as it was just
Speaker 1: getting off the ground, there were engineers who were dreaming
Speaker 1: of doing something they thought was even more challenging, which
Speaker 1: was using electricity and electromagnetism to transmit pictures and more
Speaker 1: than that, moving pictures, so not just a scan of
Speaker 1: an image, but actual moving images. So an early component
Speaker 1: to transmitting moving pictures with electricity was selenium. Selenium's an element.
Speaker 1: It's number thirty four on the periodic table. You can
Speaker 1: all get your periodic tables out now. Uh. Selenium is
Speaker 1: really interesting stuff. It's a non metal. It was first
Speaker 1: discovered by John's Jacob Berzelius or yawns Jakob Berzelius, if
Speaker 1: you prefer the more correct pronunciation. It was a chemist
Speaker 1: in Sweden. And I'm still sure I mispronounced his name.
Speaker 1: That's gonna continuously happen, by the way, I understand, and
Speaker 1: it's no disrespect, it's merely my ignorance on how to
Speaker 1: pronounce names that aren't Jonathan anyway, h he discovered selenium
Speaker 1: in eighteen seventeen, and he wasn't even looking for it,
Speaker 1: or rather, he was looking for something, but he didn't
Speaker 1: know it was selenium. He was actually looking to track
Speaker 1: down an impurity that was being produced in a factory
Speaker 1: that was making sulfuric acid. So he knew that there
Speaker 1: was a s impurity present, but he wasn't sure what
Speaker 1: it was. And once he found it, he realized he
Speaker 1: was looking at a at that point undiscovered element. Uh.
Speaker 1: What Brazilius did not know, and no one else really
Speaker 1: knew it for another sixty years, was that selenium has
Speaker 1: a really interesting relationship with light and with electricity. And
Speaker 1: in the dark, selenium has a pretty high resistance to
Speaker 1: the flow of current through it. So a dark piece
Speaker 1: of selenium doesn't allow current to flow very easily. But
Speaker 1: if you shine light on selenium, its resistance to the
Speaker 1: flow electronic electric current rather decreases, light facilitates electricity flowing
Speaker 1: through the material. Willoughby Smith discovered this feature of selenium,
Speaker 1: and his discovery led to the application of selenium as
Speaker 1: a light sensing components, So a lot of light sensors
Speaker 1: have selenium in them. Measuring a change in resistance would
Speaker 1: indicate the presence of light. So if you have something
Speaker 1: that's essentially acting as a resistor and you're able to
Speaker 1: measure how well it performs as a resistor and you
Speaker 1: can see when it dips, that would be an indication
Speaker 1: that light was shining on the selenium photo cell. And
Speaker 1: it was later discovered that selenium will transmit an electric
Speaker 1: current proportional to the intensity of light hitting it. So
Speaker 1: the brighter the light, the stronger the electric current. Dimm
Speaker 1: or light would produce less powerful electric current. Now, together
Speaker 1: with Joseph May, he was responsible for this discovery of
Speaker 1: photo o conductivity. In eighteen seventy seven, a civil servant
Speaker 1: from Boston named George Carey submitted drawings for a new
Speaker 1: invention called a selenium camera, and it was meant to
Speaker 1: allow people to see by electricity. And that same year
Speaker 1: that was when Eugen gold Sign created the term cathode
Speaker 1: raise and that was to describe that ray effect of
Speaker 1: the vacuum tubes with electric current passing through it. In
Speaker 1: eight one, Sheldon or Shelford, depending upon whom you ask, Bidwell,
Speaker 1: who was an inventor from England, created his scanning photo telegraph,
Speaker 1: which used a selenium photo cell inside a rotating cylinder.
Speaker 1: So the cylinder had a small hole which would allow
Speaker 1: light to pass through it, and you would put an
Speaker 1: image on a glass slide and use a lot of
Speaker 1: bright light to illuminate the glass slide, and you would
Speaker 1: rotate the cylinder so light would sometimes be able to
Speaker 1: come through this hole and touch the selenium, and then
Speaker 1: you would move the cylinders that you can scan the
Speaker 1: entire image, so little bits of light are hitting the
Speaker 1: selenium as the hole comes around, and that was how
Speaker 1: you were able to scan an actual image there Um.
Speaker 1: You would then use electrochemically sensitive paper inside this cylinder,
Speaker 1: and as the current varied from the selenium due to
Speaker 1: the scanned image, it would cause that electrochemically sensitive ink
Speaker 1: to change color and that would recreate the scanned image.
Speaker 1: So this was one of the earliest uses of selenium
Speaker 1: to transmit optical image via electric current, but it was
Speaker 1: not the last one. All Right, we're ready to take
Speaker 1: another quick break. When we come back, we're going to
Speaker 1: get to the actual point of mechanical televisions, which are
Speaker 1: super cool. But first a quick word from our sponsor. Alright,
Speaker 1: so how do you go from transmitting still images to
Speaker 1: transmitting a moving image. Bidwell thought that it would be possible,
Speaker 1: but only if you had a massive machine that had
Speaker 1: a circuit dedicated to breaking down pictures into individual components
Speaker 1: and capable of replicating that at a very rapid pace.
Speaker 1: And since circuits in those days were enormous, you know,
Speaker 1: this was before the invention of the transistor, this was
Speaker 1: the vacuum tube era, it meant that it would be
Speaker 1: prohibitively large. This would be such a big device that
Speaker 1: it would not make sense to build it. And then
Speaker 1: there were the challenges of making sure that the sending
Speaker 1: station and receiving station are in synchronization with one another,
Speaker 1: so that you would get an image that makes sense
Speaker 1: and not just a big jumble of visual data that
Speaker 1: doesn't make anything meaningful. Think of something like static almost
Speaker 1: or really scrambled image. That would have been a problem
Speaker 1: if you couldn't get the synchronization just right. And then
Speaker 1: came Paul nip Caw who was a German engineering student,
Speaker 1: and he was the one who came up with the
Speaker 1: clever idea which he patented in four to create a
Speaker 1: synchronized system for the mechanical transmission of moving images. Dip
Speaker 1: Kel solved the synchronization problem by using a pair of
Speaker 1: spinning disks. So think of these big metal disks that
Speaker 1: you would put on an axle like a wheel, and
Speaker 1: along the edge you had pinholes punched through this disk
Speaker 1: in a sort of spiral shape around the outside. You
Speaker 1: would align the two disks perfectly. One would be in
Speaker 1: the sending station, one would be in the receiving station,
Speaker 1: so they'd be aligned so their orientation is the same,
Speaker 1: and you would rotate them at the same speed. This
Speaker 1: was all important for synchronization. The receiving station would essentially
Speaker 1: be what ultimately became a television set, and that's how
Speaker 1: you would set us up. And the pinholes were essentially
Speaker 1: lenses that would allow light through. So on the the
Speaker 1: camera side, the capturing side, you'd have a really brightly
Speaker 1: lit scene, and it needed to be very bright to
Speaker 1: send enough information to Selenium. Light would be hitting the
Speaker 1: spinning disk. Behind the spinning disc, you would have a
Speaker 1: Selenium Selenium photo cell. So lights coming through these little
Speaker 1: dots and hitting the Selenium photo cell cell would then
Speaker 1: generate a difference in voltage, which would induce current to
Speaker 1: flow through a wire. That wire would go over to
Speaker 1: a neon lamp. Now, as the disc spun UH, it
Speaker 1: would allow light to hit the selenium kind of like
Speaker 1: a scanner. That was the purpose for that spiraling shape
Speaker 1: of the penholes was to create a distribution so that
Speaker 1: it's like moving a scanner across an image. In this case,
Speaker 1: you're having the scanner turn and turn and turn for
Speaker 1: a moving image. So on that television that end UH,
Speaker 1: the current from the selenium cell would feed into a
Speaker 1: neon lamp and that would light up with an intensity
Speaker 1: that was proportionate to the strength of the current. So
Speaker 1: a bright light hits the selenium cell, it generates a
Speaker 1: strong current that would generate a bright light in the
Speaker 1: neon lamp. UH. A dim light hitting the selenium cell
Speaker 1: would generate a less powerful current, so the lamp wouldn't
Speaker 1: light up as brightly. Then you would also have a
Speaker 1: spinning disk on the other side of the neon lamp
Speaker 1: on the television side, and through that light would pass
Speaker 1: until it hit the screen for this device, which is
Speaker 1: what you would be looking at, and you'd be looking
Speaker 1: at the front side of the screen, the lights having
Speaker 1: the backside of the screen, and you would be able
Speaker 1: to see a moving image. In theory, each rotation of
Speaker 1: the disk represented a frame of motion. So remember we
Speaker 1: talked with film about twenty four frames a second. You
Speaker 1: would have to rotate the disk twenty four times in
Speaker 1: a second to replicate the frames that you would find
Speaker 1: in film. Although the mechanical television's the early ones anyway,
Speaker 1: did not rotate at so fast as speed. It was
Speaker 1: more like about half of that. And it was a
Speaker 1: revolutionary idea, which I guess is a partially intended pun. Anyway,
Speaker 1: revolutionary or not, there's a lack of evidence that nip
Speaker 1: Cal ever actually built one of these things. If he had,
Speaker 1: he would have seen that there were some real challenges
Speaker 1: to his design. For example, he had no amplifiers in
Speaker 1: his design. He just had a Selenium photo cell and
Speaker 1: a spinning disk on one side, and a neon lamp
Speaker 1: and another spinning disk on another side, but no way
Speaker 1: to amplify the signal from the selenium cell, and the
Speaker 1: signal just wasn't very strong. So chances are if you
Speaker 1: had built a design based off nip Kel's initial approach,
Speaker 1: the image would be so dark and blurry that you
Speaker 1: probably wouldn't be able to make out very much going
Speaker 1: on unless you had an incredibly brightly lit scene on
Speaker 1: the other side, something so bright that would probably be
Speaker 1: painful to look on at the actual filming location, so
Speaker 1: that you could get something that would show up enough
Speaker 1: at the television set. Also, there was no sound, There
Speaker 1: was no way to transmit sound with this methodology. It
Speaker 1: was just for the moving images. Uh. But it was
Speaker 1: a pretty cool notion, and other people took note of it.
Speaker 1: So we're also finally at the point where someone actually
Speaker 1: uses the word television for the first time. This would
Speaker 1: be Constantine dmitro vic Persky, who was a fellow who
Speaker 1: coined the term in a paper he presented at the
Speaker 1: World's Fair in Paris in nineteen hundred and he referenced
Speaker 1: people working on transmitting moving images with electricity, including nip Cal.
Speaker 1: He mentioned nip Cal by name. So even though this
Speaker 1: was a silent TV, I mean silent ish, I bet
Speaker 1: you could probably hear the disks on the inside, it
Speaker 1: was something that was getting worldwide attention. Now, two different
Speaker 1: inventors working in different parts of the world at the
Speaker 1: same time, independently of each other, we're able to create
Speaker 1: a working device based in part off of Nipkov's nip
Speaker 1: Call's work. One of those was Charles Francis Jenkins, who
Speaker 1: was an American inventor, and the other was John Logi Baird,
Speaker 1: a Scottish inventor. And they each independently created this work.
Speaker 1: So they weren't they weren't talking to each other, they
Speaker 1: weren't copying each other's work. This was that one of
Speaker 1: those examples of two different people arriving at similar conclusions. Uh,
Speaker 1: just because it was the right time for that to happen,
Speaker 1: enough of the groundwork had been laid for this to follow. Now,
Speaker 1: Jenkins had already had some experience bringing motion to screens
Speaker 1: because he invented the motion picture projector, And I'll probably
Speaker 1: end up talking a lot more about him in a
Speaker 1: future episode of tech Stuff if I tell about motion
Speaker 1: picture projectors in particular. As for his work with television,
Speaker 1: he was able to use a Nipkel disc arrangement to
Speaker 1: transmit the image of a silhouette to a receiver in
Speaker 1: a separate room back in nineteen two. So he set
Speaker 1: up a filming location in one room, a reception location
Speaker 1: in another room. But all you could see was the
Speaker 1: silhouette that was clearly moving so it was impressive, but
Speaker 1: not really high fidelity. Two years later, Bared was able
Speaker 1: to transmit moving images using a homemade setup that included,
Speaker 1: among other things, a coffin board, as in a flat
Speaker 1: board that undertakers would use to move bodies around. But wait,
Speaker 1: it gets way more creepy than just a coffin board,
Speaker 1: way more creepy with Bared because he also, as one
Speaker 1: of his early subjects for this type of television, used
Speaker 1: a Ventriloquist dummy head, which he named stooky Bill. If
Speaker 1: you want to have nightmares, google image search stookey Bill.
Speaker 1: That's s t o o k y Bill. Now, the
Speaker 1: reason he used of Ventriloquist dummy head is because no
Speaker 1: human being wanted to actually sit through the process of
Speaker 1: being filmed by his setup. And the reason is that
Speaker 1: you still needed very bright light for that selenium cell
Speaker 1: to generate enough electric current to be received on the
Speaker 1: other end. So the scenes were incredibly brightly lit and
Speaker 1: the lightbulbs that were being used were very very hot,
Speaker 1: So it was incredibly uncomfortable being under a brightly lit
Speaker 1: scene while being shot on camera. As someone who has
Speaker 1: done very very many on camera appearances, I can tell
Speaker 1: you this is still a problem, though not nearly as
Speaker 1: hot as it was back in Baird's day, but still uncomfortable.
Speaker 1: So you had Bair doing this work, you had Jenkins
Speaker 1: doing the work in the US, both independently of each other,
Speaker 1: and they were both getting a lot of attention. Around
Speaker 1: that same time, Baird was showing off his invention UH
Speaker 1: he made the first transatlantic television broadcast and used shortwave
Speaker 1: radio to do it. And meanwhile, Jenkins was working on
Speaker 1: his design in by applied for and received an experimental
Speaker 1: license from the US Federal Radio Commission, which was a
Speaker 1: predecessor to the f c C, and he created a
Speaker 1: company called the Jenkins Television Corporation. He used shortwave radio
Speaker 1: transmissions to send what he called radio movies at forty
Speaker 1: eight lines of resolution forty eight it's not very many,
Speaker 1: and at fifteen frames a second. Baird was also using
Speaker 1: shortwave radio. Like I said, he had done the first
Speaker 1: transatlantic broadcast, and he also added another element to his invention,
Speaker 1: which was a color wheel. The color wheel would spin
Speaker 1: and give images color, and even toyed with the idea
Speaker 1: of three D television. So he's way ahead of his time.
Speaker 1: It would be a long time before we would see
Speaker 1: color television enter the electronic TV world, but in the
Speaker 1: mechanical TV TV world it was there pretty early. So
Speaker 1: Jenkins was transmitting at forty eight lines of resolution. Bears
Speaker 1: transmissions were actually even lower resolution, they were at thirty lines,
Speaker 1: and he even transmitted at a lower frame rate of
Speaker 1: twelve point five frames per second, which is pretty much
Speaker 1: the bare minimum you would want to get an animation
Speaker 1: like effect without it being too jerky and unsettling. He
Speaker 1: worked with the British Broadcasting Company, you know, the BBC,
Speaker 1: with whom he had a rather contentious relationship, but it's
Speaker 1: set a strong precedent for creators further down the road,
Speaker 1: many of whom would find operation with the BBC to
Speaker 1: be almost but not quite completely in opposition of lngland
Speaker 1: get their jobs done. That might be a little bit
Speaker 1: of biased commentary for my part, to be fair, the
Speaker 1: BBC has done some things that I think most people
Speaker 1: consider ridiculous, for example, wiping tapes that were the only
Speaker 1: known existing copies of some of the or programming, so
Speaker 1: we've lost entire seasons of television shows because they wanted
Speaker 1: to reuse the tapes that they had instead of buying
Speaker 1: new ones, but I digress. Jenkins also went on to
Speaker 1: incorporate sound in his transmissions, but he did in a
Speaker 1: really weird way, or at least we would consider it
Speaker 1: weird today. He didn't have enough bandwidth to send both
Speaker 1: sound and video at the same time, so instead you
Speaker 1: would end up getting notifications of when to switch your
Speaker 1: radio on to hear the sound portion of a radio movie,
Speaker 1: and then they would give you a queue win to
Speaker 1: switch over to the visual part of your radio movie,
Speaker 1: and at the end of the visual part you would
Speaker 1: get a visual cue saying go back to the radio
Speaker 1: part um. So you had to switch back and forth
Speaker 1: between whether you were listening to audio or watching video.
Speaker 1: You couldn't do both simultaneously, which was kind of interesting now.
Speaker 1: Mechanical televisions were on the market for a while and
Speaker 1: thousands of people bought one, but the technology obviously had limitations,
Speaker 1: and the invention of the electronic television made mechanical ones
Speaker 1: obsolete after a short while, although elements of the mechanical
Speaker 1: approach would remain in some forms of electronic transmission for
Speaker 1: a while. For example, uh that moon landing it used
Speaker 1: a color wheel like Baird had done. Pretty incredible inventors
Speaker 1: would use those mechanical color wheels to try and make
Speaker 1: a color television standard. I'll talk more about that in
Speaker 1: the next episode. Ultimately, that did not pan out to
Speaker 1: become the standard, and I'll explain why. It largely has
Speaker 1: to do with one company undercutting all of the competition
Speaker 1: in a really ruthless way. But that's it for this episode.
Speaker 1: So the stage is set for the dramatic rise of
Speaker 1: electronic television and it's a pretty incredible story, complete with
Speaker 1: innovation and drama and quite a bit of backstabbing as
Speaker 1: it turns out. In other words, the invention of TV
Speaker 1: is a lot like a soap opera. Tune in next
Speaker 1: episode to hear more. As for me, it's time to
Speaker 1: sign off for this episode. If you have questions, comments,
Speaker 1: suggestions for future episodes, maybe a request for a guest
Speaker 1: to appear on this show, let me know. Write me
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