Television is 100 years old today

Television is 100 years old today(diamondgeezer.blogspot.com)

669 points by qassiov 111 days ago | 273 comments

sosomoxie 111 days ago |

CRTs are peak steam punk technology. Analog, electric, kinda dangerous. Just totally mindblowing that we had these things in our living rooms shooting electric beams everywhere. I doubt it's environmentally friendly at all, but I'd love to see some new CRTs being made.

retrac 111 days ago | |

There's a synchronous and instantaneous nature you don't find in modern designs.

The image is not stored at any point. The receiver and the transmitter are part of the same electric circuit in a certain sense. It's a virtual circuit but the entire thing - transmitter and receiving unit alike - are oscillating in unison driven by a single clock.

The image is never entirely realized as a complete thing, either. While slow phosphor tubes do display a static image, most CRT systems used extremely fast phosphors; they release the majority of the light within a millisecond of the beam hitting them. If you take a really fast exposure of a CRT display (say 1/100,000th of a second) you don't see the whole image on the photograph - only the most recently few drawn lines glow. The image as a whole never exists at the same time. It exists only in the persistence of vision.

accounting2026 111 days ago | | |

> The image is not stored at any point.

Just wanted to add one thing, not as a correction but just because I learned it recently and find it fascinating. PAL televisions (the color TV standard in Europe) actually do store one full horizontal scanline at a time, before any of it is drawn on the screen. This is due to a clever encoding used in this format where the TV actually needs to average two successive scan lines (phase-shifted compared to each other) to draw them. Supposedly this cancels out some forms of distortion. It is quite fascinating this was even possible with analogue technology. The line is stored in a delay line for 64 microseconds. See e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsk4WWtRx6M

ninkendo 111 days ago | | |

It doesn’t begin at the transmitter either, in the earliest days even the camera was essentially part of the same circuit. Yes, the concept of filming a show and showing the film over the air existed eventually, but before that (and even after that, for live programming) the camera would scan the subject image (actors, etc) line-by-line and down a wire to the transmitter which would send it straight to your TV and into the electron beam.

In fact in order to show a feed of only text/logos/etc in the earlier days, they would literally just point the camera at a physical object (like letters on a paper, etc) and broadcast from the camera directly. There wasn’t really any other way to do it.

lifeisstillgood 111 days ago | | |

>>> The image is not stored at any point.

The very first computers (Manchester baby) used CRTs as memory - the ones and zeros were bright spots on a “mesh” and the electric charge on the mesh was read and resent back to the crt to keep the ram fresh (a sorta self refreshing ram)

torginus 111 days ago | | |

Yeah it super weird that while we struggle with latency in the digital world, storing anything for any amount of time is an almost impossible challenge in the analog world.

mrandish 111 days ago | |

It's worth deep diving into how analog composite broadcast television works, because you quickly realize just how insanely ambitious it was for 1930s engineers to have not only conceived, but perfected and shipped at consumer scale using only 1930s technologies.

Being old enough to have learned video engineering at the end of the analog days, it's kind of fun helping young engineers today wrap their brains around completely alien concepts, like "the image is never pixels" then "it's never digital" and "never quantized." Those who've been raised in a digital world learn to understand things from a fundamentally digital frame of reference. Even analog signals are often reasoned about as if their quantized form was their "true nature".

Interestingly, I suspect the converse would be equally true trying to explain digital television to a 1930s video engineer. They'd probably struggle similarly, always mentally remapping digital images to their "true" analog nature. The fundamental nature of their world was analog. Nothing was quantized. Even the idea "quanta" might be at the root of physics was newfangled, suspect and, even if true, of no practical use in engineering systems.

accounting2026 110 days ago | | |

Yes agreed! And while it is not quantized as such there is an element of semi-digital protocol to it. The concept of "scanline" is quantized and there's "protocols" for indicating when a line ends, and a picture ends etc. that the receiver/send needs to agree on... and "colorbursts packets" for line, delay lines and all kinds of clever technique etc. so it is extremely complicated. Many things were necessary to overcome distortion and also to ensure backwards compatibility - first, how do you fit in the color so a monochrome TV can still show it? Later, how do you make it 16:9 and it can still show on a 4:3 TV (which it could!).

account42 110 days ago | | |

It's interesting how early digital video systems were influenced by the analog aspects. DVDs were very much still defined by NTSC/PAL even though the data is fully digital.

lebuffon 111 days ago | |

I was on a course at Sony in San Mateo in the 1980s and they had a 36" prototype television in the corner. We all asked for it to be turned on. We were told by the instructor that he was not allowed to turn it on because the 40,000V anode voltage generated too many X-rays at the front of the picture tube.

:-))))

itisit 111 days ago | |

And perhaps peak atompunk too when used as RAM. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_tube

BizarroLand 111 days ago | | |

Damn, what I wouldn't give to be able to look at my computer and see the bits bobbing in its onboard ram

ortusdux 111 days ago | |

One summer odd-job included an afternoon of throwing a few dozen CRTs off a 3rd floor balcony into a rolloff dumpster. I'da done it for free.

ihaveajob 111 days ago | | |

People pay for that these days in smash rooms.

hahahahhaah 111 days ago | | |

Rock and roll!

fecal_henge 111 days ago | |

Extra dangerous aspect: On really early CRTs they hadn't quite nailed the glass thicknesses. One failure mode was that the neck that held the electron gun would fail. This would propell the gun through the front of the screen, possibly toward the viewer.

ASalazarMX 111 days ago | | |

I don't know, "Killed by electron gun breakdown" sounds like a rad way to go. You can replace "electron gun" with "particle accelerator" if you want.

cf100clunk 111 days ago | | |

Likewise, a dropped CRT tube was a constant terror for TV manufacturing and repair folks, as it likely would implode and send zillions of razor-sharp fragments airborne.

kleiba 111 days ago | |

What do you mean "had"? I just turned mine off a minute ago. I am yet to make the transition to flat screen TVs but in the mean time, at least no-one's tracking my consumer habits.

rapfaria 111 days ago | | |

Not through your TV, but they see you driving to the last Blockbuster tho

account42 110 days ago | |

While not entirely thematically unrelated, being electric puts it distinctly outside of steampunk and even dieselpunk. I don't think anyone would call The Matrix steampunk but CRTs are at the center of its aesthetic. Cassette Futurism is the correct term I believe though it also overlaps with some sub-genres of cyberpunk.

kazinator 111 days ago | |

With CRTs, the environmental problem is the heavy metals: tons of lead in the glass screen, plus cadmium and whatnot. Supposedly there can be many pounds of lead in a large CRT.

accounting2026 110 days ago | |

Yes - and x-rays too! Both from the main TV tube itself (though often shielded) but historically the main problem was actually the vacuum rectifiers used to generate the high voltages required. Those vacuum tubes essentially became x-ray bulbs and had to be shielded. This problem appeared as the first color TV's appeared in the late 60s. Color required higher voltages for the same brightness, due to the introduction of a mask that absorbed a lot of the energy. As a famous example, certain GE TV's would emit a strong beam of x-rays, but it was downwards so it would mostly expose someone beneath the TV. Reportedly a few models could emit 50,000 mR/hr at 9 inches distance https://www.nytimes.com/1967/07/22/archives/owners-of-9000-c... which is actually quite a lot (enough for radiation sickness after a few hours). All were recalled of course!

cf100clunk 111 days ago | |

The shadow mask system for colour CRTs was a huge improvement that thwarted worries about ''beams everywhere'':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_mask

accounting2026 110 days ago | | |

Actually, the voltages had to be raised due to the shadow mask, and this rise in voltage meant you were now in x-ray territory, which wasn't the case before. The infamous problems with TV's emitting x-rays and associate recalls were the early color TV's. And it wasn't so much from the tube, but from the shunt regulators etc. in the power supply that were themselves vacuum tubes. If you removed the protection cans around those you would be exposed to strong radiation. Most of that went away when the TV's were transistorized so the high-voltage circuits didn't involve vacuum tubes.

hahahahhaah 111 days ago | | |

Try antialias with that bad boy

brcmthrowaway 111 days ago | |

The 1940-1990 era of technology can't be beat. Add hard drives and tape to the mix. What happened to electromechanical design? I doubt it would be taught anymore. Everything is solid state

Xirdus 111 days ago | | |

Solid state is the superior technology for almost everything. No moving parts means more reliable, quieter, and very likely more energy efficient since no mass has to move.

grishka 111 days ago | |

That and modern digital TV is just incredibly boring from the technical standpoint. Because everything is a computer these days, it's just some MPEG-2 video. The only thing impressive about it is that they managed to squeeze multiple channels worth of video streams into the bandwidth of one analog channel.

joe_the_user 111 days ago | |

Also, I believe precursors to CRT existed in the 19th century. What was unique with television was the creation of a full CRT system that allowed moving picture consumption to be a mass phenomena.

pinnochio 111 days ago | |

We're getting awfully close to recreating CRT qualities with modern display panels. A curved 4:3 1000Hz OLED panel behind glass, and an integrated RetroTink 4K with G-Sync Pulsar support would do it. Then add in a simulated degauss effect and electrical whine and buzzing sounds for fun.

soperj 111 days ago | | |

still can't play duck hunt on it though.

charcircuit 111 days ago | | |

>1000 Hz

This sounds like a brute force solution over just having the display controller read the image as it is being sent and emulating the phosphors.

pezezin 109 days ago | | |

Why curved? We didn't like the CRT curvature back then and manufacturers struggled to make them as flat as possible, finally reaching "virtually flat" screens towards the end of the CRT era. I have one right here on my desk, a Sony Multiscan E200.

femto 111 days ago | |

This thread makes me realise that the old Telequipment D61 Cathode Ray Oscilloscope I have is worth hanging on to. It's basically a CRT with signal conditioning on its inputs, including a "Z mod" input, making it easy to do cool stuff with it.

gman83 110 days ago | |

This is a cool little project you might be interested in - https://github.com/mausimus/ShaderGlass

accidentallfact 110 days ago | |

'Steampunk' means no electricity. You need to come up with another term. Analogpunk, maybe?

WorldMaker 110 days ago | | |

"Dieselpunk" is sometimes considered the next door neighbor term for WW1 through early 1950's retrofuturism with electricity and radios/very early televisions.

Sometimes people use "Steampunk" for shorthand for both because there are some overlaps in either direction, especially if you are trying for "just" pre-WWI retrofuture. Though I think the above poster was maybe especially trying to highlight the sort of pre-WWI overlap with Steampunk with more electricity but not yet as many cars and "diesel".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieselpunk

timonoko 111 days ago |

I saw TV first time in 1957. Finland had no TV transmitters, so programs came from Soviet Estonia. I distinctly remember watching romantic Russian film with a catching tune. Perhaps named "Moscow Lights"?

How this is even possible that I remember all this, because I was 4 yrs old?

Gemini knows:

The Film: In the Days of the Spartakiad (1956/1957)

The song "Moscow Nights" was originally written for a documentary film called "In the Days of the Spartakiad" (V dni spartakiady), which chronicled a massive Soviet sports competition.

The Scene: In the film, there is a romantic, quiet scene where athletes are resting in the countryside near Moscow at night.

The Music: The song was sung by Vladimir Troshin. It was intended to be background music, but it was so hauntingly melodic that it became an overnight sensation across the USSR and its neighbors.

The Finnish Connection: In 1957, the song became a massive hit in Finland and Estonia. Since you were watching Estonian TV, you likely saw a version where the dialogue or narration was dubbed into Finnish—a common practice for broadcasts intended for Finnish-speaking audiences across the Gulf of Finland.

jedberg 111 days ago |

This is interesting. John Logie Baird did in fact demonstrate something that looked like TV, but the technology was a dead end.

Philo Farnsworth demonstrated a competing technology a few years later, but every TV today is based on his technology.

So, who actually invented Television?

TacticalCoder 111 days ago |

And 100 years ago my great-aunt and grandmother (both RIP) were little kids and my great-grandmother, born in the 19th century and which I knew very well for she lived until 99 years old, was filming them playing on the beach using a "Pathe Baby" hand camera.

I still have the reels, they look like this:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Films_Path%C3%A9-Bab...

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path%C3%A9-Baby

And we converted some of these reels to digital files (well brothers and I asked a specialized company to "digitalize" them).

100 years ago people already had cars, tramways (as a kid my great-grandmother tried to look under the first tramway she saw to see "where the horses were hiding"), cameras to film movies, telephones, the telegraph existed, you could trade the stock market and, well, it's knew to me but TV was just invented too.

TeMPOraL 111 days ago | |

On the one hand, it's fascinating to know just how much of what shapes our lives was already there a hundred years ago in some form.

On the other hand, it's just as fascinating to realize that all that, and ~everything that shapes modern life, did not exist until ~200 years ago. Not just appliances, but medicines and medicine, plastics and greases and other products of petrochemical industry and everything built on top of it, paints and cleaners and materials and so on...

shevy-java 111 days ago |

In a way television was kind of cool. I loved it as a child, give or take.

Nowadays ..... hmmm. I no longer own a TV since many years. Sadly youtube kind of replaced television. It is not the same, quality-wise I think youtube is actually worse than e. g. the 1980s era. But I also don't really want to go back to television, as it also had low quality - and it simply took longer, too. On youtube I was recently watching old "Aktenzeichen XY ungelöst", in german. The old videos are kind of cool and interesting from the 1980s. I watched the new ones - it no longer made ANY sense to watch it ... the quality is much worse, and it is also much more boring. It's strange.

tzs 111 days ago |

I've sometimes wondered how things would have been different if the TV pioneers had went with circular CRTs instead of rounded rectangles.

Circles would have had a couple of advantages. First, I believe they would have been easier to make. From what I've read rectangles have more stress at the corners. Rounding the corners reduces that but it is still more than circles have. With circles they could have more easily made bigger CRTs.

Second, there is no aspect ratio thus avoiding the whole problem of picking an aspect ratio.

Electronically the signals to the XY deflectors to scan a spiral out from the center (or in from the edge if you prefer) on a circle are as easy to make as the signals to to scan in horizontal lines on a rectangle.

As far as I can tell that would have been fine up until we got computers and wanted to use TV CRTs as computer displays. I can't imagine how to build a bitmapped interface for such a CRT that would not be a complete nightmare to deal with.

rhplus 111 days ago | |

I would guess that even at the time a circular viewport would have seemed a bit weird and so rectangular was preferred. After all, theater stages, most windows, photographs and books - all common place - aren’t circular either.

account42 110 days ago | | |

Futurism of the time was all about round shapes though.

icehawk 111 days ago | |

Picture tubes started round, and then became rectangular:

https://www.earlytelevision.org/prewar_crts.html

They didn't really have the problem of picking an aspect ratio because motion pictures existed and that was already 4:3

abcde666777 111 days ago | |

Regarding aspect ratio, I'd bet they would have explored oval shapes before long.

ortusdux 111 days ago | |

Reminds me of how every single piece of paper on Battlestar Galactica has the corners cut off. Somewhere in their timeline paper became 8 sided, and it's just as odd as our 4 side paper and rectangular TVs

Schmerika 110 days ago | | |

Whoa. Guess I need to watch the entire series again :)

bobthepanda 111 days ago | |

Circles don’t pack together well. And they need a different solution for standing up.

hahahahhaah 111 days ago | | |

Circle tube, rectangle case.

ofrzeta 111 days ago |

Neil Postman's theory still holds up and is extended to the Internet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death

willturman 111 days ago | |

> In the introduction to Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman said that the contemporary world was better reflected by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, whose public was oppressed by their addiction to amusement, rather than by Orwell's work, where they were oppressed by state violence.

And modern America asked itself, why can't it be both?

mrandish 111 days ago |

Early television was a hotbed of hacker/hobbyist DIY experimentation much like early radio and early personal computers. The first issue of "Television Magazine" from 1928 (https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=37097) has a remarkably similar vibe to 1970s computer zines (https://archive.org/details/kilobaudmagazine-1977-01/).

For example, page 26 has directions on how to pop by the local chemist to pick up materials to make your own selenium cell (your first imager) and page 29 covers constructing your first Televisor, including helpful tips like "A very suitable tin-plate is ... the same material out of which biscuit tins and similar light tinware is made. It is easily handled and can readily be cut with an ordinary pair of scissors. It is sold in sheets of 22 inches by 30 inches. Any ironmonger will supply these."

augusteo 111 days ago |

The Baird vs Farnsworth debate reminds me of similar discussions in tech. The first demo rarely becomes the dominant standard.

What strikes me is how fast the iteration was. Baird went from hatboxes and bicycle lenses to color TV prototypes in just two years. That's the kind of rapid experimentation we're seeing with AI right now, though compressed even further.

smithza 110 days ago |

Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman is the book that comes to mind with this article link. 2 years ago my wife and I took the TV off the wall. My kids don't have Bluey or the latest Disney cartoon to keep them company. I am not going back... It has been the most blissful time. Amazing that the TV is not required to lead a thriving life despite what the incessant sales-industrial-complex will tell you.

briantoknowyou 109 days ago | |

Ew. Reeks more of a paranoid victim complex than true embodied virtue. I’d consider therapy there uh bud

Avalaxy 111 days ago |

Does anyone here still have television? Ever since I moved out of my parents house (15 years ago), I never had a TV subscription. I did own a TV screen, but only to run apps like Netflix and Youtube. I'd rather have a simple monitor without the TV options to do so, but strangely that never existed or was too expensive.

Edit: to make it clear, I absolutely did not miss having TV for even a second in all of those years.

bilsbie 111 days ago |

Odd we never adapted to it.

Video has a strange hypnotic power over most people and messages seem to bypass normal mental defenses.

Geste 111 days ago | |

I'd say we did, you need more and more for the same effect.

Here is the first ad ever, for a watch : https://youtu.be/ho2OJfXkvpI

For comparison, here is the latest ad for the best selling watch as of today : https://youtu.be/kdMTc5WfnkM

derektank 111 days ago | | |

In case anyone accuses you of not comparing like to like, even a contemporary Bulova commercial is much more similar to the latter than the former: https://youtu.be/trp7p634qAU?si=fGvyxHp_cayuw5xa

andai 111 days ago | | |

Everyone's trying too hard to stand out, but honestly the first one would stand out more today, despite being a still image!

vulcan01 111 days ago | | |

I'm not sure it is valid to use the first ad ever as a basis for comparison. At this time it was a novelty to even have a television – of course an incredibly basic ad would work. And how much do you think they had to pay for an ad on a very new technology? I doubt much.

wat10000 111 days ago | | |

Wow, I haven't watched any ads for a while and that was pretty jarring.

JoeDaDude 111 days ago |

I don't care to start a debate about who first invented television when, but I remember hearing (conformed by wikipedia [1]) that Leon Theremin, inventor of the musical instrument named after him, demonstrated mechanical television at roughly the same time.

[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Theremin

robotmachine 111 days ago | |

Funny you bring Leon Theremin up. I just showed a friend of mine The Thing[0] today.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)

G_o_D 111 days ago |

I still only have CRT, No matter how much i browse shopping sites or visit showrooms, i cannot make up my mind buying newer tv, lcd, led, plasma, oled etc, so much new technologies have arrived but i have'nt tried them for TV Yet as of today

My tv's have gone through real stress test in real life unlike factories

During childhood, we had our tv Switched on in morning 4:00 till 22:00 at night, constantly being watched 16-18 hrs a day during weekends and vacations (45 days), while least 10hrs a day during weekdays , for last 22 years

I only had 2 crt in my 30yrs of lifetime, Sansui and Samsung, channel broadcasters being changed from Tetrestrial Channels --> FTA Antenna --> Cable Tv --> Satellite Dish from time to time

Newer tv cannot cope up with such lenghty watchtimes,

Still RCA Only, no HDMI, Tv still have its Radio Antenna port on top

accidentallfact 110 days ago | |

I think it was because old TVs already had wide gamut, so sRGB meant a significant reduction. It never was "contrast" as such. Anything made today is vastly better than any CRT.

GoatInGrey 111 days ago | |

CRTs are a very interesting display technology with their refresh rate and clarity. I'd like to see an "HD" CRT someday, and however many tons it would weigh!

jen20 111 days ago | | |

Until very recently I had a Bang and Olufsen CRT, and it was by far the best picture I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately “small” (32”) yet simultaneously weighed a ton.

pezezin 109 days ago | | |

PC monitors were already HD. If you have the chance, watch a HD video on a big enough PC monitor, the picture quality is quite impressive.

RASBR89 111 days ago | | |

There’s some that have high resolution. There were some consumer 1080i sets I think.

zdc1 111 days ago | |

How do you feel about having so much screentime?

fyrn_ 111 days ago |

Only 100 years old. Wow. I mean you know the world has changed rapidly but it's hard to get perspective enough to really feel that change. Something about it only having been 100 years since televsion really does that for me.

rexpop 111 days ago |

Television, arguably, can be blamed for the near-total degradation of civic life and, subsequently, human liberty. By substituting the unilateral flow of images for the dialogue of the community, television enforces a banking concept of reality where we are reduced to passive receptacles, stripping us of the bridging social capital necessary to resist domination.

This privatization of leisure generates a vicious circle of isolation, transforming the active citizen into a member of a lonely crowd. In this atomized state, we lose our mētis—the practical, situated knowledge essential for self-governance—and become vulnerable to the high-modernist state's imposition of simplified, legible grids upon our lives. Furthermore, the media inundates us with the myths, preventing us from naming the world for ourselves. To break this cycle, we must move from submissiveness to a liberating praxis that reclaims our time to build alternative social institutions and counterhegemony through direct, face-to-face cooperation.

Why, even here on Hacker News we've corroborated my position regarding the necessity of breaking the "spectacle" through direct, generative action. On a recent thread about the "loneliness epidemic," HN folks argued that the epidemic is not merely an individual failing but a structural byproduct of a "death spiral" where digital convenience and "behavior modification schemes" have cannibalized the "real world". The community identifies that the privatization of leisure—manifested in car-centric suburban sprawl and the erasure of "third places"—has stripped us of the capacity for spontaneous encounter, leaving us waiting for "nicely packaged solutions" rather than facing the "great unknown" of human connection. Consequently, the proposed remedy aligns precisely: individuals must transition from passive consumers to active "Hosts", building "alternative social institutions" like non-profit event platforms that reject "dark patterns", organizing "physical social networks" on street corners, or reclaiming public spaces through guerilla cleanup efforts, effectively proving that we must "stop waiting for someone else" to reconstruct the civic dialogue.

grishka 111 days ago |

Having just finished my software-defined analog video decoder[0], I've gotta say, my mind is thoroughly blown by just how much of an engineering achievement television must've been at the time when it was invented. It must have also been the first ever communication system to have backwards compatibility.

[0] https://github.com/grishka/miscellaneous/blob/master/AVDecod...

account42 110 days ago | |

Cool project. Anything in particular that you use it for? There are some great films or TV series that were never released in digital form and some more where the digital releases were butchered in some way (e.g. cropped) compared to the original analog broadcast / VHS / Laserdisc releases.

grishka 110 days ago | | |

I made this to teach myself about digital signal processing and scratch an itch I had for a long time, starting back when these technologies were still current.

Deanallen 111 days ago |

> Television, he notes, has introduced the phrase "now this", which implies a complete absence of connection between the separate topics the phrase ostensibly connects.

This idea is why I always take media with a grain of salt. The decontexualization makes it easy for people to be reactive towards something, that isn’t logical

Eg “now this is why <insert person or group> is good/evil”

People call me the devils advocate when I point out these nuances but I just think we need to be much more critical when forming and holding opinions.

hnlmorg 111 days ago | |

Your example isn’t what your quote is referring to.

“Now this” is just a segue between unrelated topics.

Eg “and now a word from our sponsors”.

burkaman 111 days ago | |

Isn't "now this" just a synonym for "moving on" or "next order of business" or "apropos of nothing"? I don't think the concept of jumping to a completely new topic is something TV introduced.

hackerdood 111 days ago | | |

It’s been a bit since I’ve read Amusing Ourselves to Death but I believe in the book the phrase ”Now this” is used disparagingly to refer to the fact that with tv you can go from a horrific news story like a local family being murdered to a completely unrelated story, both in content and emotion in the span of seconds. This doesn’t allow ample time for the viewer to process the former and essentially forces them to turn their brain off as the cognitive dissonance of holding both stories (and more) simultaneously would be impossible.

masfuerte 111 days ago | |

What are you quoting?

criddell 111 days ago | | |

Sounds like something from Neil Postman’s excellent book Amusing Ourselves to Death.

marcd35 111 days ago |

funny story - I had a job recently that installed DirecTV setups for mostly retirement communities. On almost every service call, I'd show up and 95% of the time, without fail, they'd either be watching Fox News, CNN, or CNBC. It was quite depressing to see 24/7 news stations had completely consumed their lives and became the majority of topics of conversation while I was there.

I eventually quit the job. I decided I didn't want to be a part of making our society worse by installing these devices that were causing manufactured outrage, hate, and selective truth telling.

Soon after I left, I found a book while thrifting that came out in 1978 called "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television" by Jerry Mander. I laughed at the title and couldn't believe someone was already arguing for the detriments of TV before I was born. It's very well written and the points he makes are still relevant today.

From the wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Arguments_for_the_Elimina...

Mander believes that "television and democratic society are incompatible" due to television removing all of society's senses except for seeing and hearing. The author states that television makes it so that people have no common sense which leads to...being "powerless to reject the camera's line of sight, reset the stage, or call on our own sensory apparatus to correct the doctored sights and sounds the machine delivers".

Mander's four arguments in the book to eliminate television are:

1. that telecommunication removes the sense of reality from people,

2. television promotes capitalism,

3. television can be used as a scapegoat, and

4. that all three of these issues negatively work together.

0PingWithJesus 111 days ago | |

Reminds me of Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death" (1985), in which he argues that TV as a medium is fundamentally incapable of producing anything other than entertainment. So things like news, political discussion, or any other type of educational programming can only exist on TV as a nutrition-less pantomime of the real thing.

mjevans 111 days ago | | |

Education, real education, can be made entertaining. Mythbusters and Connections (I believe it was called) both qualify. As do some historic documentaries.

empressplay 111 days ago |

Related: Baird's Mechanical Television

https://paleotronic.com/2018/09/15/gadget-graveyard-bairds-m...

UncleSlacky 111 days ago | |

Also this site, which shows how the recorded Phonovision broadcasts were eventually recovered:

http://www.tvdawn.com/earliest-tv/phonovision-experiments-19...

metalman 109 days ago |

I owned a TV for aproximatly 30 seconds, when an obnoxtious roomy sold me theres for $20, thinking they could still watch there horrid shit, but I promptly threw it off the balcony. Obviously doing this with a screen, but I have zero "accounts" for social media that are not text based, and block everything by default. My basic practice is to resist and avoid asymetric situations that are not defined by a negotiated contract or agreament, up or down.

hackerdood 111 days ago |

rmason 111 days ago |

My late father told me the first time he saw a TV. He was in Ann Arbor, Michigan making a sales call in 1947. When he drove in he noticed there was a huge crowd around a store window but couldn't see what was going on.

After making the call he noticed the crowd was still there so he parked his car and decided to investigate. There was a black and white TV broadcasting a Detroit Tigers game in the window of a radio repair shop. He told me that he came away impressed.

dwe3k 111 days ago | |

I remember a similar story from my father, of people in the small town he was in crowding standing in the front yard of a neighbor, crowding around a picture window to look in at the first TV in town in the mid-1950's.

rmason 111 days ago | | |

When I was born my parents bought a TV. Back then it was sold as a way of enhancing the education of children. I remember the early days of the web when the same case was made. Pretty sure you could have predicted it would descend to the lowest common denominator ;<).

The family stayed with black and white until the late seventies. I remember the entire family watching the first moon landing. For the longest time I didn't know whether NASA was recording in color or not ;<).

6510 111 days ago |

Thanks to TV you will no longer have to travel around the world to attend lectures. From the comfort of your home you can watch professors talk about cutting edge developments. It will be a revolution in education. Everyone will embrace the sciences! We will progress into the information age!

It's not their exact words and I also forgot who said it. It's probably better for them we don't remember.

tibbydudeza 111 days ago |

Watching Dallas on a Tuesday evening with the entire family gathered in our parents' bedroom with me and brother and sister at the end of the bed on the floor watching the latest schemes of JR Ewing and poor hapless brother Bobby.

We never had the TV set in the lounge - it was meant for special occasions like tea and cake for family gatherings.

We still have a TV but it hardly used - everybody has iPads in the house.

josalhor 111 days ago |

On the one hand I look at some tech lifecycles and feel everything moves so slow (cars, energy and train infrastructure etc..). And then I look at other stuff and I cannot phantom that someone who was born 100 years ago saw a TV (or media electronic screen) from conception to modern miracle. As someone in his 20s I can't imagine what I'll see in the next 80 years!

jibolash 111 days ago | |

Unfortunately technological progress is not always exponential. An human landed on the moon 56 years ago and people back then thought space travel would be a routine thing today so it'll be interesting to see how things go

WalterBright 111 days ago | | |

I had a look at the Gemini capsule in the Smithsonian a few years ago. I was shocked at how primitive the controls looked.

sodafountan 111 days ago | | |

It's certainly not routine, but I'd say the privatization of the space industry that's unfolded over the last few decades is significant progress.

When I get depressed and look out at the world, I'm actually amazed at what I'm living through—the internet, space travel, electric and autonomous cars, smartphones. It's really amazing.

crystal_revenge 111 days ago | |

> As someone in his 20s I can't imagine what I'll see in the next 80 years!

All of these rapid technological advancements are a function of tremendous increases in energy available .

We passed peak conventional oil years ago and only see proven reserves increase because we redefined 'shale oil' as included under proven reserves. But shale oil has much lower EROEI than traditional oil. We can already see geopolitics heating up before our eyes to capture and control what remains, but to continue to advance society we need more energy.

On top of this we are just now starting to feel the impacts of the effects of the byproducts of this energy usage: climate change. What we are experiencing now is only a slight hint of what is to come in recent years.

In the next 80 years we'll very likely see an incredible decline in technology as certain complex systems no longer have adequate energy to maintain. The climate will continue to worsen and in more extreme ways, while geopolitics melts down in a struggle for the last bits of oil and fossil fuels (interestingly these combine in the fight for Greenland because a soon-to-be ice free arctic holds lots of oil, not enough to advance civilization the way it has been going, but enough to keep yours running if you can keep everyone else away).

I sincerely suspect within the next 80 years we will see the full collapse of industrial civilization and very possibly the near or complete extinction of the human race. You can see the early stages of this beginning to unfold right now.

account42 110 days ago | | |

I don't think we'll see a decline in technology globally but there will definitely be some regressions in countries that put feel good politics over the energy needs of their citizens.

tosti 111 days ago |

High definition is nearly 90 years old? I guess their definition of high is quite low by more modern standards.

cf100clunk 111 days ago | |

Analogue interlaced-scan TV systems like PAL and SECAM were actually ''higher'' definition in relation to NTSC by visual line count, although the former's 25Hz refresh rate was noticeable for flickering compared to NTSC's ~30Hz, which was much closer to the human eye's comfort level.

There was a prototype 819-line analogue ''high definition'' system used to record The T.A.M.I. Show in 1964, with excellent results, but the recordings were committed to film for distribution since there was no apparatus for broadcasting it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.A.M.I._Show

There were also experiments by NHK of Japan with analogue HD broadcasting, but digital TV was so close on the horizon that it was mooted.

''High definition'' has been a relative term in the professional TV world all along, but became consumer buzzwords with the advent of digital TV in the early 2000's. Nowadays we know it to mean 720, 1080, or higher lines, usually in progressive scan.

account42 110 days ago | | |

> Analogue interlaced-scan TV systems like PAL and SECAM were actually ''higher'' definition in relation to NTSC by visual line count, although the former's 25Hz refresh rate was noticeable for flickering compared to NTSC's ~30Hz, which was much closer to the human eye's comfort level.

Yet motion pictures are still stuck at 24 FPS to this day and there are even people who have strong opinions about this being a good thing.

Also just because NTSC was 29.97 Hz doesn't mean that the video content actually was - almost everything shot on film was actually effectively 23.97 Hz - telecined to 59.94 fields per second but that doesn't actually change the number of unique full frames.

ronsor 111 days ago | |

Going from 30 lines to 300 lines is a big leap!

anthk 111 days ago | |

Cinema was "HD" by design. So, in some way, 35mm movies are HD quality and predate PAL and NTSC standards.

tosti 111 days ago | | |

Sure, but that's not TV.

wglass 111 days ago |

Related to discussion on Baird vs. Farnsworth, there's a plaque honoring Farnsworth on Green Street in San Francisco. https://noehill.com/sf/landmarks/cal0941.asp

afrnswrth 111 days ago | |

There is also a statue in the Presidio https://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/27928

oscord 110 days ago |

1897 Boris Rosing of Russia showed moving image using cathode ray tube.

mrbluecoat 111 days ago |

Inventor status is a bit murky: https://farnovision.com/wp/no-iconoscope-in-1923/

gcanyon 111 days ago | |

The interesting question (to me) is how directly a line can be drawn from the original invention to what we in modern times think of as “the thing”?

As an example, the Wright brothers built a biplane that had wing warping instead of ailerons and a canard design. That bears little resemblance to most modern airplanes, but people have little trouble crediting it as “the invention of the airplane” —- questions of whether the Wrights were first or not notwithstanding.

Can ”TV” be thus simplified so that an electromechanical device with spinning discs qualifies?

WalterBright 111 days ago | | |

The invention of the "airplane" is just a simplified term for "controlled and sustained powered flight".

Which the Wrights did with both controlled and powered in the 1903 Flyer.

(The Wrights invented the first 3-axis control system, and designed & built the first aviation engine capable of sustained flight.)

While the Wrights were first, by several years, its invention was inevitable.

nephihaha 111 days ago |

I have mixed feelings about television and no longer have one. Some great series but also tonnes and tonnes of forgettable and insulting trash.

I think television has had a negative effect on community and social interaction.

ChrisMarshallNY 111 days ago |

Love the name of the blog!

I think that LCD screens, huge digital bandwidth, and CCD sensors, have turned video ("television"), into a vast new landscape.

I'm old enough to remember putting foil on the rabbit-ears...

banku_brougham 111 days ago |

for every episode of the A-Team, for Saturday morning cartoons, for I Love Lucy, and for Miami Vice, I give thanks.

Edit: And Star Trek, and Cosmos

nephihaha 111 days ago | |

Diamonds on a dung heap. For every good series which we love there are dozens of terrible/forgettable ones.

A shame since TV has so much potential as a medium.

HelloMcFly 111 days ago | | |

I think this is likely to be true for every artistic creation that requires lots of capital and widespread human coordination. Ultimately for a TV show to be great many, many things have to go right, and much of what could go wrong happens after the money is spent and the air date is already assured. I'm grateful we've had so many great things, certainly far more than I'll have time to watch in my life. But I'm not a heavy TV viewer.

banku_brougham 111 days ago | | |

Well, A-Team was objectively terrible but I have a nostalgic connection to kids shows like that, Knight Rider etc. In retrospect Bay Watch was an effective CPR training tool at unprecedented scale.

I would be hesitant to pass judgement.

account42 110 days ago | | |

Terrible shows are still better than actively malicious ones.

Kye 111 days ago |

Blogger was new when TV was 75 years old. Glad to see it's still around.

morkalork 111 days ago |

Long live the new flesh

Edman274 111 days ago | |

It did always strike me as funny that Cronenberg had a movie about "what if TV was evil and made people murderous and the studio execs had to pay", and a movie about "what if video games were evil and made people murderous and their creators had to pay", but never a movie about "what if movies were evil and made people murderous and film directors had to pay". Obvious bias aside I wonder if it would work as a story - movies don't seem as hypnotic in the public consciousness, I believe.

account42 110 days ago | | |

The game one being eXistenZ? Only recently got to see Videodrome and quite liked it so will check it out.

fuzzfactor 111 days ago |

My buddy has an old Portacolor, but it's only 60.

throw0101a 111 days ago |

In interesting plot point in the novel/movie Contact (early, so not much of a spoiler):

> […] This puts her at odds with much of the scientific community, including Drumlin, who pushes to defund SETI. Eventually, the project detects a signal from Vega, 26 light-years away, transmitting prime numbers.[a][b] Further analysis reveals a retransmission of Adolf Hitler's 1936 Olympic speech, the first TV signal to escape Earth's ionosphere.[1]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_(novel)

ngcc_hk 111 days ago |

Only 100 years. Less than even Leica ? Wow!

jakedata 111 days ago |

Inspired one of my absolute favorite Zappa grooves.

I am the Slime

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiCQcEW98OY

I am gross and perverted

I'm obsessed and deranged

I have existed for years

But very little has changed

I'm the tool of the Government

And industry too

For I am destined to rule

And regulate you

I may be vile and pernicious

But you can't look away

I make you think I'm delicious

With the stuff that I say

I'm the best you can get

Have you guessed me yet?

I'm the slime oozin' out

From your TV set

You will obey me while I lead you

And eat the garbage that I feed you

Until the day that we don't need you

Don't go for help, no one will heed you

Your mind is totally controlled

It has been stuffed into my mold

And you will do as you are told

Until the rights to you are sold

That's right, folks

Don't touch that dial

Well, I am the slime from your video

Oozin' along on your livin' room floor

I am the slime from your video

Can't stop the slime, people, look at me go

I am the slime from your video

Oozin' along on your livin' room floor

I am the slime from your video

Can't stop the slime, people, look at me go

Source: Musixmatch

Songwriters: Frank Zappa

lr1970 111 days ago |

Another important person in creation of the TV technology was Vladimir Zworykin [0]. He developed cathode-ray tube based TV transmission devices that he patented in 1923 and 1925.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_K._Zworykin

willturman 111 days ago |

> It’s entirely possible that my plangent noises about the impossibility of rebelling against an aura that promotes and vitiates all rebellion say more about my residency inside that aura, my own lack of vision, than they do about any exhaustion of U.S. fiction’s possibilities. The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naïve, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows. Today’s most engaged young fiction does seem like some kind of line’s end’s end. I guess that means we all get to draw our own conclusions. Have to. Are you immensely pleased.

- David Foster Wallace, E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction

throw4847285 111 days ago |

Really? But Marquee Moon isn't even 50 years old yet. What were they doing for the first 50?

racl101 111 days ago |

Thank you Mr. Farnsworth.

goda90 111 days ago | |

Philo Farnsworth did make considerable contribution to television with his image dissector, but he didn't make the first TV. He was the first TV patent holder in the US though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television#History

a3w 111 days ago | |

And in Futurama, a man with the same family name invents a universal remote. The [drumroll] longer finger!