The TV Story Part 1

and how have they evolved? And this is going to be on multi part episode, y'all in fact, and just brace yourselves because spoiler alert, I am not even going to get to talk about electronic televisions in part one. That's how massive a topic this is. Now, these episodes are probably gonna be fairly similar to one I recorded with Chris Palette. You might remember him as my original co host way back in the old days. Chris and I sat down one day to record an episode about

who invented the radio? And here's the problem. There's not really an easy answer to that question. You might shout out it was Nikola, Tesla, or it was Marconi, but it gets way more complicated than that. And Pallette and I, after we sat down and recorded a full episode, we found ourselves stuck we figured that the episode was a complete mess. It was a mire as we tried to

explain it. We actually recorded the episode two times because right after the first attempt, we just kind of sat there staring at each other and uh, after a few moments, I said, you know, we can't release that, right and Palette, to his credit, said yeah, that was awful. So we ended up deciding that the story was just way too complicated and it jumped around in different parts of the world and in different parts of the timeline so much that we felt we made it more confusing rather than

explained it. So we went outside of the little alcove we were in because it wasn't it wasn't in this building that was in a totally different part of Atlanta at the time. And uh. We went to our producer, who I believe was Tyler for that particular episode, and we told him we had to record it again and is his heart shrunk three sizes that day, but he

agreed to do it. So we went back, sat down and recorded the episode a second time, and that was the version that actually published on tech Stuff, And if you want to listen to it, you need to do a search in the Tech stuff list list on the archive and look for who invented the radio. It published on April two thousand eleven, and I honestly do not know how it holds up after all those years. I

haven't listened to it since we published it. Really. As for the original episode that we sat down and recorded, the one that we thought was terrible, as far as I know, that's gone forever. I think Tyler actually erased it, unless he's holding onto it in case he ever needs to blackmail me, in which case you could probably ask Tyler and he might share it. But I think it's gone anyway. The reason I'm telling that story in the first place is because it turns out that inventions in

general are more complicated than they first seem. And I'm not talking about how they work. I mean the story of how they came to be tends to be more complicated than a simple so and so invented the such and such. Now, as humans, we like simplicity in our stories. We love to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. So it's really easy to say something like Thomas Edison in a Lot the light Bulb, but it's also not really true, or at least it's not entirely true. The

truth is more complicated. It's messy, and it involves a lot of different people researching and engineering different stuff, and then later inventors building on that work, learning from the people who came before, refining things, redefining things. So you can't really just start with so and so invented the TV. It's again, much more complicated than that. And even the version I'm going to talk about today, the one that I've had to split up into multiple episodes, even this

is a simplification of the story. If I were to detail every single person who had a hand in shaping the way television works, I could do a full podcast series on that. I'm not joking. It could be ten or fifteen episodes long. But I'm obviously not going to do that to my listeners. I want to have a good variety of topics. So this one is probably gonna be I'm guessing a three parter. I'm trying not to

make it go all the way to four parts. But spoiler alert, uh, I only have the research done for parts one and two, and Part two ends with color television, so we got a lot of ground to cover, all right, So for your history buffs out there. I will get around to talking about Filo T. Farnsworth, and I'll talk about Vladimir's working, and I'll talk about David Sarnoff and how he tried to get a monopoly on television manufacturing,

licensing and even broadcast. But I'll also talk about other people like Paul nip Cow, I'll talk about Charles Francis Jenkins, and John Logi Baird. But I think it's safe to say the development of television was the product of the work of a lot of different people. I would argue one is perhaps more instrumental than all the others for the modern concept of TV. But I'll allow you guys

to draw your own conclusions on that. Also, please keep in mind that a lot of the work I'm talking about, both in exploratory science and in engineering, was taking place during a really hectic era in history. The ninet and early twentieth centuries were marked with enormous changes and monumental conflicts. You had the Industrial Revolution, which was transforming the way we do work. You may remember I did some episodes

about the Industrial Revolution. You had massive migrations of people from rural areas into urban centers and really, the birth of the modern city came in the Uh. Really, the the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I would argue, is when they were truly born. I mean, obviously you had large centers of population like London and Paris and New York, but even those really weren't modern cities until I would

argue the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the United States, during the some of the work that would lead to the invention of television, you had a civil War. It was a massive event here in the US, and I would argue it didn't so much tear the country apart. Everyone says the Civil War toward the country apart. I would argue the country was already torn apart before the

Civil War started. The Civil War was kind of the result of that tearing of the country apart, which ultimately boils down to the untenable position of the South maintaining slavery. And uh, yeah, that's really what the Civil War was about. Don't let anyone tell you that it was the state's rights issue. Ultimately, that's just a layer of protection. It was really about slavery when you get down to it. As someone who grew up in the South, and is

a Southerner. I feel very confident saying that at the tail end of this era, I'm talking about that eighteenth and early nineteenth or nineteenth rather in early twentieth centuries. Uh, you also had the First World War, a global conflict

that ended up impacting television itself. A lot was going on. Now, it might surprise you to hear that the very first television's, the ones that you could purchase before black and white TVs became a thing, were mechanical TVs, which means they actually had moving parts inside of them designed to create moving images. Not It wasn't an electron gun firing electrons a screen. It was actual mechanical elements, and I'm going to explain how those worked and what they did in

this episode. Those mechanical sets preceded the electronic ones, though not by a whole lot. It was actually a pretty rapid development from mechanical sets to electronics sets. There was even a camera with mechanical elements that went to the Moon. That's how we recorded color footage of the moon landing

on the Moon's surface. Really not so much the moon landing, but rather astronauts exploring the Moon once they got there because, as it turns out, no one was on the moon ahead of us to film the whole process of landing. That would have been awkward if that had happened. Anyway, before we talk about TV itself, we have to spend a little time with our brains, and for some of us this might be a little uncomfortable. I know that my brain and I aren't always on the best of terms,

and sometimes it won't even return my phone calls. But you could argue that our brains are ultimately what make television and film and animation work, not just because we invented those things, but because of the way our brains work and how it allows us to interpret this information being more than what it actually is. And there are two elements, really, I would argue that are at play here, and ultimately, when we get to color television, I would

argue there are three elements at work. But with your basic television picture, one of those elements is that our brains can assemble bits of information into something that is greater than itself. So with a digital photograph or a television screen, you probably know that it is made up of a series of dots, very tiny dots called pixels, whether it's a digital photograph or a TV image. And uh, I want you to just imagine that, right take the

digital photograph. I'm not saying you should go out and take a selfie right now, although if you want to, that's fine, go ahead tweet it to me, that's cool. What I mean is that these digital photos that are made up of pixels, those are individual points of light or if you prefer, points of color, although ultimately color is just a representation of light. So it's kind of semantics. The size, shape, and number of pixels determines and images resolution.

And if I show you a picture made out of four solid color blocks of wood, so I've got four blocks and each of them is a certain color, uh, and I have been given the task assemble these blocks so that people know it's a rep since an image of the Eiffel Tower. That's gonna be really hard to do. These four solid color blocks, even if they are gray and say blue, it's hard to arrange them in a way that is going to look like the thing I'm

trying to represent. Now, if I had sixteen blocks, I might be able to do a rough estimation of a tower. You might be able to figure out that I'm trying to build some sort of structure, or an image of a structure. If I had sixty four blocks, you might be able to figure out roughly what it is I'm trying to build. Right, you might say, well, it doesn't really look like the Eiffel Tower, but I can recognize

that's what you're trying to make. If I had millions of tiny blocks that I could put together, and each tiny block itself is a solid color that I can arrange those in an array so it looks like a picture, then you'd say, oh, well that's the Eiffel Tower. Well, that's because our brains are able to take those individuals a little points and assemble them into a picture that

is a whole. I guess philosophically we could start getting into how we're all just a bunch of atoms that are kind of close together in the macro's scale, though if you were to get down to the sub atomic layer, you would say, oh, you're mostly empty space. But that's going a little too far. The point is our brains can see a full image based upon this representation of

tiny little pixels, and modern televisions do that. They the images they show us are made up of millions of those little points of light, and our brains interpret that as the cohesive image. It's kind of like, uh, that famous painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jat by George Serrat. You know what I'm talking about. It's the one of all the people on the banks of a river at a park, and they're all and very fancy, kind of Edwardian era dress, and it's all

made up of tiny little points of paint. It's actually a technique that's called point all is um, and originally Pointillisum was used as sort of a derogatory term. Other painters were saying, oh, that's not that's Pointillism, just using the little the point of the paint brush to make little dots to make up an image. But Serat elevated this to a true art form, and from a distance it is easily recognizable as a picture of what it's

supposed to be. If you're far enough back, you say, yes, it's a painting of a bunch of people by the side of a river. And as you get closer and closer, you start seeing those individual dots, and if you get close enough, the dots are all you see. You no longer see a picture of people standing at a river. You see these little dots. Same things true with televisions. If you could get close enough, if you had a powerful enough magnifying glass, you can see the individual pixels

that make up the screen. Now there's a related brainy capability, which is our tendency to recognize animation as actual movement. So it's easiest to talk about this for me, at least in terms of film, and I'm talking about physical film,

the art form of cinema using film. So in film, we watch a sequence of still images played back at a certain speed, and typically we're talking about twenty four frames per second, which means you're looking at twenty four separate photographs every second that goes by, and the photographs

are capturing movement. So each one is a still image, but each image in succession is catching a slightly different moment of time where things are moving across the frame of the photo, and you have to use a really fast shutter to remove as much blur as possible, especially for things that are moving very very quickly across the frame. So when you played these frames at this speed, it looks like we're watching objects in motion rather than just

a sequence of pictures. And if our brains didn't work this way, movies and television wouldn't work. We wouldn't see them as moving thing things. We would just witness a sequence of individual photographs or or actually we'd actually see the pixels appearing on a television screen. We lack the ability to see the transitions as anything but instantaneous. We cannot see that it's really a sequence of individual events. So to us, television looks like it's stuff showing stuff

that's actually moving. And there are a lot of inventions that predate television that took advantage of this particular phenomenon. So, for example, there was a device made by Philip James de Lufferberg, whose name I have mispronounced. He was a painter of some renown, and his contribution was a curiosity called the ido Fusicon. Ido Fusicon, I'm going with that pronunciation.

So the ido fusicon was actually an invention that came out in the seventeen eighties, So this is a very old invention, and it used mirrors and pulleys to create the illusion of moving images in a little theater like setting, and by this time we understood the sequence of still images that capture a moving object, when viewed sequentially at proper speed, creates that illusion in our brains of an

actual object in motion. But there were a lot of others who created entertainments and curiosities that utilize this same principle. There was a Belgian physicist, Joseph Plateau. Yeah, he created the Phena kit scope or phena kissed a scope. I guess it's kissed a scope because there's an s after the eye after the k Phena kissed a scope. There was William George Horner's dead alium. There was William E. Lincoln's zoa trope. These were all rotating devices that used

various means to present an image. You might have seen one, it's like a platter. Often the zoo trope is the most popular one. You can find them still today. Where I'd say, a kind of a cylinder that has slits in it, and you're supposed to lean down and look through the slits. So you're looking through the cylinder at the opposite inner edge of the cylinder, and you spin it and there is a sequence of drawings or photographs

that are on the inside edge of the cylinder. The slats end up creating a shutter like effect, and you start looking at these different images and sequence and then you get the feeling that you're looking at a moving image. Typically it's something like a horse trotting. That's a famous one.

In fact, that last one, the zoetrope. It was so popular that a little company called Milton Bradley got involved and started making the first commercial version of it, and in a way you could argue that that was the the commercial predecessor to television. Although you're not transmitting anything there. It's obviously you've got everything you need right in front of you. So that covers the psychological aspect of why

tell of Vision works. It works because our brains allow us to construct this concept of movement and animation even when all we're really doing is looking at a light show. But then again, our entire sense of vision is based off of light. And if I go down that pathway, this series is gonna last twenty episodes instead of three.

So let's get on to talking about some of the science of physics and electricity and electro magnetism, and and also about sending information over wires and some basic scientific discoveries that really made television possible. I can spend an entire episode on each of these, to be perfectly honest, but I'm gonna do my best to cover the basics. So again, I'm not going to talk about every single inventor and scientist who made discoveries that contributed to the

invention of television. But I'm gonna hit some of like the greatest hits. You know this were a mixed tape of a bunch of artists that you like. These are the ones that you think really represent the music you love. It's kind of the same thing I'm doing right here. So let's begin with an important guy, Alessandro Volta. Alessandro Volto as the guy who um invented batteries, came up

with this idea. I mean, apart from the ones you could argue that came from ancient times that people probably didn't even know they really were batteries, Volta is the one who scientifically went through the process of creating batteries for the first time. Now, batteries are what made it possible to create a source of continuous electric current. Before batteries, if you were creating current, you were doing so in a sporadic and uncontrollable way, it was hard to create

a steady current. So Volta's invention of batteries where it was one of those things that made it easier for future inventors to have kind of a baseline to work from. His good buddy Luigi Galvani also did a lot of work in this area, although Galvani's understanding of electricity was

somewhat misguided. He thought when he was a applying electrodes to a frog's leg that the frog itself had some sort of intrinsic electricity uh, which is kind of true, but not in the way that Galvani thought, whereas Volta immediately recognized that the frog's muscles were conducting electricity, but not generating it, not on the scale that the electrodes were. So Volta's invention really did provide a good source for

future inventors. There were a lot of other people who played a role in this too, uh, as well as just in a role of discoveries related to television. For example, chemist William Hyde Wallaceton wasn't satisfied with being a smarty pants and purifying platinum, as well as discovering various elements like rhodium and palladium. He also invented an object called

the camera Lucida in eighteen o six. So this was an optical instrument that used a prism to reflect an image into the eye so it looked like the image was being projected on a sheet of paper. So you would have a table upon which you put a sheet of paper, and then you would put a little stand down on top of the paper where you have this prism like object on there. You would direct the prism so that a certain face of it is pointed toward an object you want to sketch on this piece of paper.

Then you would have to position yourself over the prism so that you're the pupil of your eyes essentially half covered by the edge of this prism, and when you look down, you would have an image reflected into your eye, and it would look to you as if, in fact, there was a projection of that object you were interested

in on a sheet of paper. It was meant to help make sketches easier for artists and others, architects, that sort of thing, But ultimately this also advanced our understanding of optics, which became necessary for the future of cameras. All right, we're gonna talk a lot more about electricity, electromagnetism, more science, and then we're gonna make our way over to the mechanical televisions. But before I get into all of that, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor.

All Right, we're back. Now it's time to talk about Humphrey Davy, a Cornish inventor. He was the one who created the first arc light and it was actually called the Davy lamp, and it was a predecessor to the modern incandescent bulb. And this is part of the reason why some historians get a little briskly. If you were to say Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb, people would say, well, actually, and then they'd start building up the precedent that led

up to Thomas Edison's light bulb. Edison was able to advance and perfect ideas had been around for decades, but no one had been able to really advance the art form to a point where it was practical. So, for example, the Davy lamp was not really practical for widespread implementation.

It would take further refinement to create a lightbulb that was going to last long enough and be efficient enough and bright enough to actually replace the gas lighting that was used in most of the world at that point. So uh, Edison did make some very important contributions. I don't want to take anything away from him, but he didn't just invent the light bulb anyway. Artificial lights became

a necessary element for television's uh. So that's why I'm actually mentioning Davy because his work was what allowed future televisions to actually work, so they were not just important for capturing images, but also displaying them. Now I'll mostly be talking about visuals here, capturing and displaying visuals, because you already have radio that was coming about around this same time. Uh, and a lot of the elements of radio found their way into television. And since I've already

covered radio, I don't want to go into it a lot. However, I do need to mention that sound was a key component in television sets after your first wave of TV sets came out. The very first television sets didn't have any audio at all. I'll talk more about that a little bit later, but there's some important people to chat about as far as audio goes. One was Charles Wheatstone, he was an English inventor and he created a device that was meant to help people hear sounds that were unamplified.

And it was actually just a pair of rods that could vibrate in the presence of sound, and you would put one end up close to your ear so that you could hear better. Uh, And he called this a microphone. Now, it wasn't a microphone in the sense of the kind that we use today, but that's what he called it. It was actually David Edward Hughes who was a British American inventor who developed the earliest of modern microphones in the eighteen seventies, and he ended up using the same

term that Wheatstone used. He knew of Wheatstone's work and he felt that the technology he was working on had a microphone effect, and since then the name is stuck. So the original name for microphone actually comes from a pair of vibrating rods that you would use to amplify sounds so you can hear it better. Not something you sing into it karaoke when you've had a few too many, or in my case, I don't need any at all,

I'll still sing into it. I won't do that to you guys right now, though, then we have Hans Christian Airstead. Airstead discovered the relationship between electricity and magnetism. I would argue that it's our understanding of electromagnetism that has transformed our world more than any other discovery in the last couple of hundred years. Most of our world that we depend on today has something to do with electro magnetism in some way or another. Our power grids, for example, transformers,

these all have to do with electromagnetism. Are electronics are dependent upon electromagnetism. So Uh, it was really Ersta's discoveries that allowed people to find practical applications for that knowledge. Michael Faraday also very important. He experimented a great deal with electromagnetism. He discovered that a fluctuating magnetic field could induce electricity to flow through a coil of wire. Again, this goes back to transformers. Uh, the actual power grid component,

not the toy from the nineteen eighties. Uh. This is the relationship I've talked a lot about on tech stuff. If you pass a current through a sil of wire, it will create a magnetic field. Now, if you pass an alternating current through a coil of wire, meaning the direction of flow of that current changes over and over again. It's cycles. Then you create a fluctuating magnetic field. The magnetic field will change as the direction of current changes.

If you then bring a fluctuating magnetic field within the range of another coil of wire, one that is not hooked up to any kind of power source, it will induce electrons to flow through that unconnected coil of wire. It induces electricity. So, just as electricity can induce a magnetic field, a magnetic field can induce the flow of electricity.

It has to be that fluctuating magnetic field, however, otherwise you just get a little As the magnetic field moves into the range of a coil of copper wire, you will get a little bit of a flow of electricity. But if the magnetic field is steady, that flow will stop up. It has to be a fluctuating magnetic field for it to continuously induce electricity to flow. This, again

was a key component to electronics. Uh fair Day also experiment with passing current through a glass tube filled with what he called rarefied air, which is essentially meaning that he would attempt to pump out air from a tube and then pass current through it. His abilities were somewhat limited just by the technology of his time. He wasn't able to create a true vacuum within the tube. He was just able to pump out a good deal of the air, so it had a much lower atmospheric pressure

inside the tube than outside. And he saw that the cathode, which is the negative electrode. In a pair, you have a cathode and an anode. The cathodes the negative electrode, the anodes the positive electrode. So you know, you want to hang out with the anode because the cathode is kind of a drag. Anyway, he noticed that the cathode would produce an arc of light. It would start at the cathode and would arc all the way to the anode.

Uh later on, a German physicist named Heinrich Geisler was able to create a vacuum tube with an air pump that was more powerful than what what Faraday had at his disposal. So the Geistler's tube was more was closer to a vacuum. It still wasn't a perfect vacuum, but closer to a vacuum than Faraday's And when Geisler began to experiment with cathodes and anodes inside a vacuum tube, he saw that rather than getting an arc the way it did with Faraday, it would make the whole tube

kind of glow. In many ways. This was a predecessor to neon lights that you can find on Broadway. Might as well stick with this discovery while I'm on it. In the eighteen seventies there was a British scientist named William Crooks who created Crooks tubes. You had Faraday tubes, you than a Geistler tubes, you had Crooks tubes. And uh, he kind of built on this experimental work that Faraday

and Geisler started. He created even better vacuum tubes. They had even less atmosphere inside of them because the pumps had gotten better and better, so you could create a better vacuum and create a better seal as well. And he also experimented with cathodes and anodes, and he noticed that there was a dark space very close to the cathode. In fact, they called it the cathode dark space, or sometimes the Faraday dark space, or sometimes even the Crooks

dark space. But this arc would start but just between the arc and the cathode, the would be this little dark segment. And he noticed that as he was able to create a better vacuum, as he was able to pump out more air, each successive tube would have a longer dark space. So the dark space would be wider from the cathode to the anode until you got to a point where you essentially had a real vacuum inside the tube, and the tube itself was completely dark except

for the very end or the anode was. So here's what was happening that people didn't really know at the time. The cathode is shooting out electrons. That's the negative end, right, and the electrons are attracted to the anode because that's the positive end. Remember, opposite charges attract, So electrons have a negative charge. You have this positively charged anode. The electron quote unquote wants to get across that tube as

fast as possible to get to that positive charge. Now, in Faraday's tubes, there were still, comparatively speaking, quite a bit of air inside the tubes, so the electrons would collide with air molecules on their way to getting to the anode. As they collided with molecules, they would excite atoms in those molecules. The atoms would end up having their electrons pushed to a higher energy state, and then almost immediately those electrons would return to their initial energy state.

But they had to give up energy in order to do that. Right, It's kind of like you suddenly are filled with the power of popeye after eating spinach, but then immediately that strength goes away from you. But the strength has to go somewhere. You can't just destroy energy. So with these atoms, they would give up energy in the form of light and also heat, but we're mainly concerned with light, and so that was the arc that

Faraday was seeing. He was seeing an arc because these electrons were very quickly colliding with uh atoms inside the tube, and that was creating this arc of light. Now Geisler, he was able to pump out more air, so the electrons were going a little further and not colliding quite as frequently. You got more of a mellow glow with Geisler because it wasn't there wasn't quite as many atoms to collide with. By the time you get to Crooks, almost all the air is pumped out, so there's very

little for electrons to collide with. Most of the time they were going straight toward the anode, and some of them were going past the annode and colliding with the very end of the tube, and those were the atoms at the end of the tube itself that were fluorescing. So with Crooks tubes, you would see that the very very end was glowing, but the rest of it was dark, and that's because there were no atoms for the electrons to collide with, so you couldn't create that light in

the first place. Uh. It was it was this that really ends up being the the secret sauce to electronic televisions further down the road. So we'll talk more about this in the next episode. So you then have to talk about a couple of other people before I move on from these vacuum tubes, because they were the ones who kind of put the pieces together. You have Johan Hitorf,

who was a German physicist. He figured out in eighteen sixty nine that something had to be traveling from the cathode in a straight line in order to do this, and so he was the one who described what must be happening in these tubes. The others had observed it and they thought it was interesting. Hittorf was the one who was kind of putting words to it. And then there was a guy named Eugen Goldstein who would give

this something that Hittorf had proposed an actual name. And Goldstein called it cathode raise because it was coming from the cathode at the end of this tube and shooting out in a straight line out the end of the tube on the opposite side, on the anode side, and we kept on going in a straight line. So he said, we're gonna call these cathode rays. They are raised that

move out from the cathode. And it would be German inventor Carl Ferdinand Brown, who are brawn, I guess I should say who would end up building the first actual cathode ray tube with that purpose in mind, And that would not happen until eight seven. So when we talk about cathode ray to televisions, this is what we're talking about. These cathode ray tubes, These these vacuum tubes that would shoot out electrons. The rays that we're talking about are

really electron streams. You know. Ray sounds cool, but it's funny that we kept the name, even after we increased our understanding of what was actually happening. But yeah, we're really just talking about streams of electrons moving at of extreme velocities in a vacuum. It's pretty nifty and we'll we'll talk more about them in our next episode. So let's get back to talking about electricity and electro magnetism.

The early work with electricity got some other smarty, pant tight people thinking about practical applications because a lot of this was experimental work, but you couldn't really do much with it in the early days. And one of those early applications was for long distance communications. And that's when you've got people like Samuel Morse, Sir William Cook, Sir Charles Wheatstone, Leonard Gayl, and Alfred Vale working on a means of using electricity to send information to distant locations.

And in the last couple of decades of the nineteenth century, inventors began to suspect that they could transmit telegraphs, which is what that other group of gentlemen came up with. They came up with the way of sending telegraphs across wires. There are some people towards the end of the nineteenth century who said, I bet we can do this wirelessly.

James Clerk Maxwell proposed a theory of electromagnetism in the eighteen sixties, and gave a more thorough explanation about electromagnetic waves in the eighteen seventies, including the hypothesis that light itself was a type of electromagnetic wave, which we now know is true, although light can behave both as a wave and a particle. But that's that's a level of quantum physics we don't need to get into right now. Meanwhile, inventors were coming up with new ways to send information

through electrical lines. You had Alexander Bain who was a Scottish inventor, and he devised a method to transmit images over telegraph lines. The blows my mind that he could actually send an image using telegraph lines using his invention called the pan telegraph, which is kind of like the great grand daddy of today's fax machine, or I guess

yesterday's fax machine. Hardly anyone still uses fax machines. Anyway, I got to talk about this thing because it blows my mind that someone figured out how to do this all the way back in eighteen forty three. So this pan telegraph was a cylinder made out of a non

conductive material, meaning it will not conduct electricity. And then what you would do is you would put metal pins which could conduct electricity into the cylinder and think of it kind of like an old light bright, although I don't know how many of you know what a light bright is. It's a toy from the nineteen eighties and seventies and eighties. Anyway, battleship. Think of battleship where you put the little pegs in. It's kind of like that.

You're putting these pins inside this uh, this cylinder really sticking out from the cylinder, and you arrange them to make a shape or a word or whatever, and you rotate the cylinder along with an electric probe, or you have the electricbe probe probing the cylinder and picking up the presence of those pins, and that would end up allowing an electric current to pass through a telegraph. You would have a receiver that would apply a current to

an electrochemically sensitive paper and reproduce the image. So when an electric current touches the paper, the paper would change color. The idea being that wherever there was a pen the paper's color will change because it's also on a cylinder that's rotating at the same speed as the one you're using to send the message. But his invention was really problematic because he had trouble finding way to synchronize the

two cylinders. If one cylinder is turning at let's say, five revolutions per minute and the other one's turning at fifteen revolutions per minute, the image you get is not going to represent what you actually scan. You have to have them both synchronized properly, so you would end up getting these very blurry images. However, his idea was incredible

for eighteen forty three. Then you had Giovanni Cassell in eighteen sixty two created the next generation pan telegraph, and this one was about two meters tall, which is about six and a half feet tall. It looked a lot like a compass um, not the navigational tool, but rather a pair of compasses, like a graphic designer or an architect might use. And to send a message, you would

write something on a sheet of paper. It was often tried to use anyway for signature verification for things like bank transactions, So you write something on a sheet using um a non conductive ink, and the sheet itself would be made out of tin, So using non conductive ink

to cover up the tin. Then you would have a stylus on this pan telegraph device which would move across the tin sheet and it would send an electric signal to a receiver to a telegraph that was then attached to a receiver telegraph wire, I should say, so the partner device would print the scanned image, laying down inc in the places where the gaps in conductivity were. So remember, whenever the probe is going over this non conductive ink,

it cannot send electric current. So it's at that point where the receiver says, this is where ink should go because there's an interruption in that current. Uh. They He also included regulating clocks and pendulums to keep the devices in sync with one another, so he could avoid the problems as predecessor had encountered, which is pretty nifty. But it wasn't really good at producing anything of high resolution, so it wasn't incredibly popular. But still it was eighteen

sixty two. The US Civil War was happening at that time. Now, by the eighteen eighties you had physicists named Heinrich Hurtz, who devised experiments to test Maxwell's theories on electro magnetism, and he used spark gaps to test the presence of electromagnetic waves. So unpowered spark gap would act kind of like an antenna and convert electro magnetic waves into electricity, which would result in a spark. But Hurts didn't envision

really a use for this. He he was using the approach to test a theory, and he thought, that's that's all it's good for. We'll never We'll never have a practical application for this, as far as he was concerned, Hurts, don't it. So many people took the work that scientists had done and they ended up creating or tried to create practical applications of that knowledge. You had people like Nikola Tesla. You had a yangaish Chandra bos You had

Roberto Landel Domuera. You had Alexander Stefanovitch I should say that was his last name was Popov. You had Julio Servera Baviera. You had Marconi. You had a lot of people from all over the world. This was something where it wasn't like one area of the globe had the constant traded efforts and you could point to that it was a worldwide kind of phenomenon. Uh. And eventually this

led to the invention of radio. And while the transmission of audio information was impressive, even as it was just getting off the ground, there were engineers who were dreaming of doing something they thought was even more challenging, which was using electricity and electromagnetism to transmit pictures and more than that, moving pictures, so not just a scan of an image, but actual moving images. So an early component

to transmitting moving pictures with electricity was selenium. Selenium's an element. It's number thirty four on the periodic table. You can all get your periodic tables out now. Uh. Selenium is really interesting stuff. It's a non metal. It was first discovered by John's Jacob Berzelius or yawns Jakob Berzelius, if you prefer the more correct pronunciation. It was a chemist in Sweden. And I'm still sure I mispronounced his name.

That's gonna continuously happen, by the way, I understand, and it's no disrespect, it's merely my ignorance on how to pronounce names that aren't Jonathan anyway, h he discovered selenium in eighteen seventeen, and he wasn't even looking for it, or rather, he was looking for something, but he didn't know it was selenium. He was actually looking to track down an impurity that was being produced in a factory

that was making sulfuric acid. So he knew that there was a s impurity present, but he wasn't sure what it was. And once he found it, he realized he was looking at a at that point undiscovered element. Uh. What Brazilius did not know, and no one else really knew it for another sixty years, was that selenium has a really interesting relationship with light and with electricity. And in the dark, selenium has a pretty high resistance to the flow of current through it. So a dark piece

of selenium doesn't allow current to flow very easily. But if you shine light on selenium, its resistance to the flow electronic electric current rather decreases, light facilitates electricity flowing through the material. Willoughby Smith discovered this feature of selenium, and his discovery led to the application of selenium as a light sensing components, So a lot of light sensors have selenium in them. Measuring a change in resistance would

indicate the presence of light. So if you have something that's essentially acting as a resistor and you're able to measure how well it performs as a resistor and you can see when it dips, that would be an indication that light was shining on the selenium photo cell. And it was later discovered that selenium will transmit an electric current proportional to the intensity of light hitting it. So the brighter the light, the stronger the electric current. Dimm

or light would produce less powerful electric current. Now, together with Joseph May, he was responsible for this discovery of photo o conductivity. In eighteen seventy seven, a civil servant from Boston named George Carey submitted drawings for a new invention called a selenium camera, and it was meant to allow people to see by electricity. And that same year that was when Eugen gold Sign created the term cathode raise and that was to describe that ray effect of

the vacuum tubes with electric current passing through it. In eight one, Sheldon or Shelford, depending upon whom you ask, Bidwell, who was an inventor from England, created his scanning photo telegraph, which used a selenium photo cell inside a rotating cylinder.

So the cylinder had a small hole which would allow light to pass through it, and you would put an image on a glass slide and use a lot of bright light to illuminate the glass slide, and you would rotate the cylinder so light would sometimes be able to come through this hole and touch the selenium, and then you would move the cylinders that you can scan the entire image, so little bits of light are hitting the selenium as the hole comes around, and that was how

you were able to scan an actual image there Um. You would then use electrochemically sensitive paper inside this cylinder, and as the current varied from the selenium due to the scanned image, it would cause that electrochemically sensitive ink to change color and that would recreate the scanned image. So this was one of the earliest uses of selenium to transmit optical image via electric current, but it was not the last one. All Right, we're ready to take

another quick break. When we come back, we're going to get to the actual point of mechanical televisions, which are super cool. But first a quick word from our sponsor. Alright, so how do you go from transmitting still images to transmitting a moving image. Bidwell thought that it would be possible, but only if you had a massive machine that had a circuit dedicated to breaking down pictures into individual components and capable of replicating that at a very rapid pace.

And since circuits in those days were enormous, you know, this was before the invention of the transistor, this was the vacuum tube era, it meant that it would be prohibitively large. This would be such a big device that it would not make sense to build it. And then there were the challenges of making sure that the sending station and receiving station are in synchronization with one another, so that you would get an image that makes sense and not just a big jumble of visual data that

doesn't make anything meaningful. Think of something like static almost or really scrambled image. That would have been a problem if you couldn't get the synchronization just right. And then came Paul nip Caw who was a German engineering student, and he was the one who came up with the clever idea which he patented in four to create a synchronized system for the mechanical transmission of moving images. Dip Kel solved the synchronization problem by using a pair of

spinning disks. So think of these big metal disks that you would put on an axle like a wheel, and along the edge you had pinholes punched through this disk in a sort of spiral shape around the outside. You would align the two disks perfectly. One would be in the sending station, one would be in the receiving station, so they'd be aligned so their orientation is the same, and you would rotate them at the same speed. This

was all important for synchronization. The receiving station would essentially be what ultimately became a television set, and that's how you would set us up. And the pinholes were essentially lenses that would allow light through. So on the the camera side, the capturing side, you'd have a really brightly lit scene, and it needed to be very bright to send enough information to Selenium. Light would be hitting the spinning disk. Behind the spinning disc, you would have a

Selenium Selenium photo cell. So lights coming through these little dots and hitting the Selenium photo cell cell would then generate a difference in voltage, which would induce current to flow through a wire. That wire would go over to a neon lamp. Now, as the disc spun UH, it would allow light to hit the selenium kind of like a scanner. That was the purpose for that spiraling shape of the penholes was to create a distribution so that

it's like moving a scanner across an image. In this case, you're having the scanner turn and turn and turn for a moving image. So on that television that end UH, the current from the selenium cell would feed into a neon lamp and that would light up with an intensity that was proportionate to the strength of the current. So a bright light hits the selenium cell, it generates a strong current that would generate a bright light in the

neon lamp. UH. A dim light hitting the selenium cell would generate a less powerful current, so the lamp wouldn't light up as brightly. Then you would also have a spinning disk on the other side of the neon lamp on the television side, and through that light would pass until it hit the screen for this device, which is what you would be looking at, and you'd be looking at the front side of the screen, the lights having the backside of the screen, and you would be able

to see a moving image. In theory, each rotation of the disk represented a frame of motion. So remember we talked with film about twenty four frames a second. You would have to rotate the disk twenty four times in a second to replicate the frames that you would find in film. Although the mechanical television's the early ones anyway, did not rotate at so fast as speed. It was more like about half of that. And it was a

revolutionary idea, which I guess is a partially intended pun. Anyway, revolutionary or not, there's a lack of evidence that nip Cal ever actually built one of these things. If he had, he would have seen that there were some real challenges to his design. For example, he had no amplifiers in his design. He just had a Selenium photo cell and a spinning disk on one side, and a neon lamp and another spinning disk on another side, but no way to amplify the signal from the selenium cell, and the

signal just wasn't very strong. So chances are if you had built a design based off nip Kel's initial approach, the image would be so dark and blurry that you probably wouldn't be able to make out very much going on unless you had an incredibly brightly lit scene on the other side, something so bright that would probably be painful to look on at the actual filming location, so that you could get something that would show up enough at the television set. Also, there was no sound, There

was no way to transmit sound with this methodology. It was just for the moving images. Uh. But it was a pretty cool notion, and other people took note of it. So we're also finally at the point where someone actually

uses the word television for the first time. This would be Constantine dmitro vic Persky, who was a fellow who coined the term in a paper he presented at the World's Fair in Paris in nineteen hundred and he referenced people working on transmitting moving images with electricity, including nip Cal. He mentioned nip Cal by name. So even though this was a silent TV, I mean silent ish, I bet you could probably hear the disks on the inside, it

was something that was getting worldwide attention. Now, two different inventors working in different parts of the world at the same time, independently of each other, we're able to create a working device based in part off of Nipkov's nip Call's work. One of those was Charles Francis Jenkins, who was an American inventor, and the other was John Logi Baird, a Scottish inventor. And they each independently created this work. So they weren't they weren't talking to each other, they

weren't copying each other's work. This was that one of those examples of two different people arriving at similar conclusions. Uh, just because it was the right time for that to happen, enough of the groundwork had been laid for this to follow. Now, Jenkins had already had some experience bringing motion to screens because he invented the motion picture projector, And I'll probably end up talking a lot more about him in a future episode of tech Stuff if I tell about motion

picture projectors in particular. As for his work with television, he was able to use a Nipkel disc arrangement to transmit the image of a silhouette to a receiver in a separate room back in nineteen two. So he set up a filming location in one room, a reception location in another room. But all you could see was the silhouette that was clearly moving so it was impressive, but

not really high fidelity. Two years later, Bared was able to transmit moving images using a homemade setup that included, among other things, a coffin board, as in a flat board that undertakers would use to move bodies around. But wait, it gets way more creepy than just a coffin board, way more creepy with Bared because he also, as one of his early subjects for this type of television, used

a Ventriloquist dummy head, which he named stooky Bill. If you want to have nightmares, google image search stookey Bill. That's s t o o k y Bill. Now, the reason he used of Ventriloquist dummy head is because no human being wanted to actually sit through the process of being filmed by his setup. And the reason is that you still needed very bright light for that selenium cell to generate enough electric current to be received on the

other end. So the scenes were incredibly brightly lit and the lightbulbs that were being used were very very hot, So it was incredibly uncomfortable being under a brightly lit scene while being shot on camera. As someone who has done very very many on camera appearances, I can tell you this is still a problem, though not nearly as hot as it was back in Baird's day, but still uncomfortable.

So you had Bair doing this work, you had Jenkins doing the work in the US, both independently of each other, and they were both getting a lot of attention. Around that same time, Baird was showing off his invention UH he made the first transatlantic television broadcast and used shortwave

radio to do it. And meanwhile, Jenkins was working on his design in by applied for and received an experimental license from the US Federal Radio Commission, which was a predecessor to the f c C, and he created a company called the Jenkins Television Corporation. He used shortwave radio transmissions to send what he called radio movies at forty eight lines of resolution forty eight it's not very many, and at fifteen frames a second. Baird was also using

shortwave radio. Like I said, he had done the first transatlantic broadcast, and he also added another element to his invention, which was a color wheel. The color wheel would spin and give images color, and even toyed with the idea of three D television. So he's way ahead of his time. It would be a long time before we would see color television enter the electronic TV world, but in the mechanical TV TV world it was there pretty early. So

Jenkins was transmitting at forty eight lines of resolution. Bears transmissions were actually even lower resolution, they were at thirty lines, and he even transmitted at a lower frame rate of twelve point five frames per second, which is pretty much the bare minimum you would want to get an animation

like effect without it being too jerky and unsettling. He worked with the British Broadcasting Company, you know, the BBC, with whom he had a rather contentious relationship, but it's set a strong precedent for creators further down the road, many of whom would find operation with the BBC to be almost but not quite completely in opposition of lngland

get their jobs done. That might be a little bit of biased commentary for my part, to be fair, the BBC has done some things that I think most people consider ridiculous, for example, wiping tapes that were the only known existing copies of some of the or programming, so we've lost entire seasons of television shows because they wanted to reuse the tapes that they had instead of buying

new ones, but I digress. Jenkins also went on to incorporate sound in his transmissions, but he did in a really weird way, or at least we would consider it

weird today. He didn't have enough bandwidth to send both sound and video at the same time, so instead you would end up getting notifications of when to switch your radio on to hear the sound portion of a radio movie, and then they would give you a queue win to switch over to the visual part of your radio movie, and at the end of the visual part you would get a visual cue saying go back to the radio

part um. So you had to switch back and forth between whether you were listening to audio or watching video. You couldn't do both simultaneously, which was kind of interesting now.

Mechanical televisions were on the market for a while and thousands of people bought one, but the technology obviously had limitations, and the invention of the electronic television made mechanical ones obsolete after a short while, although elements of the mechanical approach would remain in some forms of electronic transmission for a while. For example, uh that moon landing it used

a color wheel like Baird had done. Pretty incredible inventors would use those mechanical color wheels to try and make a color television standard. I'll talk more about that in the next episode. Ultimately, that did not pan out to become the standard, and I'll explain why. It largely has to do with one company undercutting all of the competition in a really ruthless way. But that's it for this episode.

So the stage is set for the dramatic rise of electronic television and it's a pretty incredible story, complete with innovation and drama and quite a bit of backstabbing as it turns out. In other words, the invention of TV is a lot like a soap opera. Tune in next episode to hear more. As for me, it's time to sign off for this episode. If you have questions, comments, suggestions for future episodes, maybe a request for a guest

to appear on this show, let me know. Write me at tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop me a line on Twitter or Facebook. The show's handle at both is text stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com