Off screen telerecordings of Farnsworth TV experiments!
 

G'day all.

Been watching on the aptsarchive channel on YouTube a documentary called "The Race For Television" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQoeJbP6JH4 which was an excellent documentary on the history of television and its inventors. Anyhow about halfway through the program I saw a couple of off screen film telerecording snippets of Farnsworth's early electronic TV experiments (dating I guess early/mid 1930s) with his image dissector tube camera, one of a clarinet player at 26:13 and an image of a woman on screen at 26:23, very thrilling for me to see!!!:D The pictures of the clarinet player on screen came up very well, quite amazing quality for the very first electronic television camera, Farnsworth's image dissector tube looks to bring up pretty good images in good light!

Anyhow I am curious to know more about those pieces of footage, where have they been sourced from and if there's any more off screen telerecordings of Farnsworth's TV experiments?

Also there's some other great off screen telerecordings in the program from the mechanical sets, one most notable is at 20:38 which features a young guy in front of the camera speaking, quality looking quite good for a 30 line picture dating say late 1920s. And also there's some off screen telerecordings of the bomber cameras around 47:05 which look very good and longer versions of course can be found on some pay per download archive site which I've forgotten the name of.

Anyways here below are some screen caps of the Farnsworth telerecordings and in studio shots, plus a snap of that guy on mechanical television.

This is fantastic. I have nto seen those studio shots before. I think I have never seen this documentary, and would like to have a copy of the whole thing. I can't find anythng by that title on Amazon.

After looking, I realize I have seen at least some of this before.

Some of this aired on the Petroleum Broadcasting System back in the mid/late 1980's...

I don't know the name of the guy in the mechanical TV screen shot, but I do know that he worked at General Electric, because I saw him in another documentary called When TV Was King where he demonstrates an early electronic television system. There was a filmed bit where he says something to the effect that because of public interest in television, they had decided to give a short demonstration of the technology at its present state of development. Then there was a shot of him on a television screen, saying something like "This is a demonstration of an electronic television system, synchronized with sound and recorded at the General Electric laboratory in Schenectady, New York." Then there was another filmed bit with him saying sheepishly, "Well, that's about all we can show you today. Not much entertainment, I'm afraid..." His voice is distinctive--rather high-pitched and nasal, and when I saw The Race For Television a few months ago, I recognized his voice.

So his voice really sounded like that? I'd like to see the entire film of that demonstration some time. In the brief portion shown, the voice is quite noticeably not synchronized with the lip movement at all, which is why I wondered if perhaps the audio was just some random--and sped up--narration that was dubbed in.

General Electric's experiments of the mechanical era began with 24 line pictures, advancing shortly to 48 line, the resolution I believe was used here as you can just about count each one and those visible add up to about 40. No US system used a 30 line standard.

No, there are two film clips: this one, that was in the Race For Television documentary, and another one that was in When TV Was King. This one is clearly a mechanical system, circa 1930, but the other one was a fully electronic system and was evidently made some years later (he had lost some of his hair). I recognized him because of his voice.

Ho capito all of that; you had written this:

and I pointed out that the resolution was in fact somewhat better than what 30 lines would afford. If that's what 48 lines looked like, imagine how crude the 24 line transmissions must have been.