TV Turns 90 (axios.com) 117
An anonymous reader shares a report: A live webcast today will celebrate the transmission of the first electronic TV signal on Sept. 7, 1927, and the man behind it, Philo T. Farnsworth, per AP: The webcast is set for 6 p.m. ET from the original location of Farnsworth's San Francisco lab. It'll be repeated at 9 p.m. and midnight. Veteran producer Phil Savenick created the site to detail the medium's history and the contributions of Farnsworth and other TV pioneers.
And after 90 years... (Score:5, Insightful)
There is still nothing worth watching on...
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PBS? Seriously?
I rest my case....
Now get off my lawn!
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FTFY, dumbass.
Re:And after 90 years... (Score:5, Interesting)
And after 90 years there is still nothing worth watching on...
And all mainstream music is shit and Hollywood sucks right? The more I learn about snobs of all varieties - not just the classic intellectual snobs but also the anti-intellectual counter-snobs and even the grumpy everything was better before-snobs the more I realize they're just shooting themselves in the foot by not enjoying what other people enjoy in order to somehow feel superior to them. Take the serious for what it is. Take the silly and fun for what it is. If you go to the opera, enjoy the opera. If you go to a barn dance, enjoy the barn dance. Things get a lot more fun when you stop comparing to the things it is not.
Re: And after 90 years... (Score:1)
Having standards is a bad thing, then.
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No, thinking your standards are superior and using them to insult and belittle people with different standards is a bad thing. It's the kind of black and white thinking that you see in a lot of recovering addicts and people on the spectrum. Their brains can't handle nuance very well, and ambiguity makes them uncomfortable.
Please, do have some personal standards. Just shut the fuck up about them and live your life. If people want to know why you are so happy and successful, they will ask, and then you can te
Re:And after 90 years... (Score:4, Interesting)
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And after 90 years there is still nothing worth watching on...
And all mainstream music is shit and Hollywood sucks right? The more I learn about snobs of all varieties - not just the classic intellectual snobs but also the anti-intellectual counter-snobs and even the grumpy everything was better before-snobs the more I realize they're just shooting themselves in the foot by not enjoying what other people enjoy in order to somehow feel superior to them. Take the serious for what it is. Take the silly and fun for what it is. If you go to the opera, enjoy the opera. If you go to a barn dance, enjoy the barn dance. Things get a lot more fun when you stop comparing to the things it is not.
Calm down.... What I posted was a paraphrase of a classic joke.. (it was supposed to be funny...)
Why on earth it got moderated Insightful is beyond me...
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I fucking agree bro. Amen.
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There is still nothing worth watching on...
"90% of television is crap, because 90% of everything is crap." -- Sturgeon's Law
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10% of crap can be very entertaining or thought provoking.
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bobbied snorted:
There is still nothing worth watching on...
Yeah, nothing to see here ...
... except Game of Thrones. And Fargo. And Better Call Saul. And Orphan Black (although, to be strictly fair, that one's over now - just like The Sopranos, and Rome, and Penny Dreadful, and Babylon 5.). And House of Cards. And Mr. Robot. And The Venture Bros. And Archer. And Master of None. And Documentary Now! And ... oh ... lots of other programs nobody watches.
But you're right. There hasn't been anything worth watching since TV was invented by whoever it was t
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You don't need a TV for any "on demand" content...
LOL
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The real problem with TV is that the good shows get axed before they get any chance to find an audience yet we get season after season of reality TV garbage like Survivor.
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Reality TV? Oh, that cheaply made, closely edited and scripted stuff made to look like it's real? Personally it seems like a bit of a fad to me, one that will hopefully end soon.
fake news, Philo tried in 1930s to be recognized (Score:5, Informative)
John Logie Baird in 1926 sent television images by radio.
If sending by wire instead of free space is acceptable as criteria, television was invented in the mid 19th century.
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The summary said "first electronic television signal". Which is accurate if you interpret it as meaning the first signal generated by electronic scanning (Baird used mechanical scanning).
I feel that the much earlier fax transmissions can be ignored; most people would consider "television" as implying a frame rate fast enough to provide an "animated" image rather than a slide show.
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Baird's demonstration in early 1926 is widely documented. Here's a BBC article, for example [bbc.co.uk]
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You have it backwards, Farnsworth was the one in the 1930s who wanted the title and used courts.
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Yes, but Baird was not American, so the Americans picked someone else. Many Americans think the car was invented by Henry Ford...
Re: fake news, Philo tried in 1930s to be recogniz (Score:1)
I think you are wrong. Amongst the Americans who do think, I expect many of them think that Henry Ford applied mass production to cars.
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I think you are wrong. Amongst the Americans who do think, I expect many of them think that Henry Ford applied mass production to cars.
That's what we were taught in school. I remember writing a paper about it in fourth grade. I think it was Daimler who had the first commercially available motorized car.
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https://www.biography.com/peop... [biography.com]
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No, but I believe his company was the first to use a moving assembly line to mass produce cars. Apparently Olds was the first to mass produce a car, with a stationary assembly line.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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most americans in no way believe he invented the car
I hope you're right, but I am not so confident of that. These are the same people who think Europe is a country.
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The article said "electronic" television, which definitely was invented by Farnsworth. Baird was mechanically-scanned and effectively a dead-end. It's a bigger difference than between spark-gap radio and continuous-wave radio.
Re:fake news, Philo tried in 1930s to be recognize (Score:4, Insightful)
bullshit, the information was transmitted by electronic means. scanners and fax machines have electomechanical parts too, they aren't electronic devices?
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You're confused, CRT based television is by definition electronic. Mechanical scanning referred to the use of a large spinning disk instead of a CRT.
The electron beam in the CRT in 1930s era televisions was bent (or more correctly deflected) so that it scanned the screen building up a picture, in one of two ways. Electrostatic deflection or Electromagnetic deflection.
Electromagnetic deflection uses an electro-magnet built around the outside of the electron gun. Passing a varying current through the elect
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I'm not confused, I know of even more television systems than those.
The point is even the electromechanical systems were coupled to radio transmission, which makes it electronic television. Just as a fax machine, scanner, copier are electronic devices.
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Again a completely Ameri-centric viewpoint. High definition television in Great Britain (as opposed to Baird's mechanical system) was developed by EMI in the early 30s, in parallel and independently of Farnsworth or RCA (i.e. Zworykin). The EMI developed Emitron camera (patented 1932) and 405 line-system was used to start the worlds first high definition television service by the BBC in November 1936 (to the London area).
The incandescent light bulb was developed in parallel and independently on both sides
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I know of those works, but anyway prefer to think of the 1920s work as "first", even though the system you mention is superior and more like what was in use until very recently with the advent of all-digital service
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The article said "electronic" television, which definitely was invented by Farnsworth. Baird was mechanically-scanned and effectively a dead-end. It's a bigger difference than between spark-gap radio and continuous-wave radio.
Even the electronic television predates Farnsworth. Several people had invented electronic televisons before Farnsworth. The significance behind Farnsworth is that he gave the first demonstration to the American press of a electronic television. Farnsworth wasn't the inventor of the TV or even the electronic TV.
Wait a moment (Score:3)
I thought John Logie Baird invented TV
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Nah, Simon wasn't a phone.
Now Merlin on the other hand... just look at it!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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The key point is the invention of the whole system, not just the display unit. Farnsworth's invention was on the television scanner side of things, not the television display.
Re:Wait a moment (Score:4, Insightful)
He was the first person to successfully transmit a moving image over radio waves, which is what most people would consider to be what television is. I seem to recall that JLB coined the term television too,
However American's don't like to think any bit of modern technology was not invented by themselves so because Farnsworth system was the one initially widely used they like to think that Farnsworth invented the TV.
Thing is none of the TV's in my house look like either a JBL or Farnsworth system, so the idea that it was Farnsworth that invented it because his system is the one in widespread use is now looking somewhat of a feeble argument because CRT based TV's are basically yesterday's technology, with the number of CRT based TV's in use rapidly declining.
Further Farnsworth method of capturing the image for transmission went ages ago, it's all CCD or CMOS devices today and has been for a long time now.
Of course getting an American to actually admit that is like getting the truth out of Trump.
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For most of the history of television, Americans believed a Russian named Zworykin invented television. RCA poured a lot of money into convincing people of that, while simultaneously using their monopoly power to relegate Farnsworth to obscurity. They were very successful at that. Farnsworth's key contributions to the technology that made television feasible on a large scale were not widely recognized until relatively recently.
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For most of the history of television, Americans believed a Russian named Zworykin invented television. RCA poured a lot of money into convincing people of that, while simultaneously using their monopoly power to relegate Farnsworth to obscurity. They were very successful at that.
Would guess this campaign took place in the 50's and did not stick. I wasn't born until the late 60's. Growing up, I never heard of Zworkin or Farnsworth. The story I heard was there was no single inventor, perhaps to avoid giving credit to the Nazi's who demonstrated television at the 1936 Summer Olympics.
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Most Americans haven't heard of either Farnsworth or Baird, and don't care. Every country holds on to "their" inventors, don't act like it's a point of pride just for us over here. However in my opinion Farnsworth should be the one credited with the invention every adapted for use, the most accepted definition of "inventor". If you really want to split hairs you also need to include Zworykin.
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Hey, I had a CRT in my living room just this year!
Of course he did (Score:2)
Of course Baird invented TV. That's why everyone used giant spinning discs to transmit TV pictures until CCDs came along.
Or did they use Farnsworth's video tubes?
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Farnsworth invented video tubes; Baird invented television.
So what exactly did Baird invent? He got the spinning disc contraption from someone else (it was pretty old technology by the time Baird was using it) He used the image processing and signal amplification circuits from Arthur Korn. He used already available photo cells. There were papers detailing the possibility of transmitting moving images dating back to the 1910s and theories on how to implement it.
Baird was the first to transmit moving images electronically. I wouldn't say he invented television, the s
An excellent book on the topic... (Score:5, Informative)
imo, well worth a read. I bought the book when it first came out, and have reread it a couple of times.
Re:An excellent book on the topic... (Score:4, Funny)
Boobtube (Score:1)
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And false dichotomies (Score:3)
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Stalin was already employing people to remove the purged from history and photographs at the time Orwell wrote 1984. He was guided by what was already going on in his present, not the other way around.
We could tell... (Score:2)
TV got old and senile, is boring everyone with old stories, and sometimes rehashing them thinking we won't recognise the repeat.
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Every Story has already been told. The only things changing are the characters and circumstances that create the overarching plot narrative. There are a number of people who have quipped about it in the past, and it is largely true (more or less).
It is the narrative of the story arc that matters anymore; the uniqueness of the characters, situations.
That being said, the rehash of the fourth time, of Batman origins is ... tiring.
Good news everyone! (Score:2)
The real question (Score:4, Interesting)
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Good news, everyone! Wrong Farnsworth?
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That's not a question about TV, you're talking about the material broadcast in the USA as a specific and very tiny subset of the "television" that Farnsworth helped invent.
What's there to be sad about in a device:
- Which brings joy to millions.
- Which allows wide spread discemination of information.
- Which provides methods of entertainment as well as information both broadcast as video and as data.
- Which has a critical role in protecting people during emerging emergency situations.
If he sees his invention
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He has one friend. Online. It's Lennart Poettering.
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Here's a segment from a TV show back in the 50s where he touches a little bit (in passing) on that, at least at that time:
https://youtu.be/3cspYZyGp1A?t... [youtu.be]
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The real question here is: if Philo T. Farnsworth were alive today to see what's become of television, would he be happy or sad?
Amazed and impressed. 4K, 5K, 8K, vast color palettes, high-contrast, incredibly-thin screens... the technology is pretty amazing.
Re: Professor Farnsworth (Score:1)
Yes, Philo is his ancestor.
Obligatory Frank Zappa link (Score:1)
Farnsworth? (Score:4, Funny)
Wernstrom!
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I was going to post something like this, but I don't think over-the-air digital media is dead. Television signals, as originally created, are dead. But over-the-air digital media is very much alive. See the related Slashdot link from the box at the bottom of the page: https://entertainment.slashdot... [slashdot.org]
Fusor (Score:2)
It's worth noting that Farnsworth also invented the only device to achieve Nuclear Fusion [wikipedia.org] that has ever been commercially produced.
Nice hair (Score:2)
I knew a relative of his (also named Farnsworth) and it turns out they have the same hairstyle. Kind of a resemblance in facial features too if my memory is serving accurately.
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Re:actually... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm pretty sure Philo T. Farnsworth wasn't the guy who invented TV, though.
Nobody claims that he did. However, he did invent electrically scanned TV, which was a big advance over the Nipkow disk [wikipedia.org] and other mechanically scanned TV schemes that came before him -- including those of John Logie Baird [wikipedia.org].
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Am I the only person who thinks that the intro sequence to American Horror Story is whispering "Wernstrom!"