1928 Broadcast
 

Hi,

I have a question about the 1928 production of The Queen's Messenger by W2XB in Schenectady NY.

The photograph I've attached shows a technician working a flying spot scanner. He's in a number of other photos as well as a public information film GE made at the time. My question is, why is he wearing headphones? The director was in the same room about eight feet away, and did his own switching, checking the picture in a GE Octagon receiver. Contemporary accounts don't mention any other production people or duplicate monitors, so who would be giving him instructions?

Any guesses?

http://videokarma.org/attachment.php...5&d=1407256684

Curious. Afraid I have no idea.

Many of those mechanical TV broadcasts had sound and no one else appears to be listening via phones(speakers would feed back) so perhaps he is monitoring the audio signal.

If you look at this clip you can see the same people minus their jackets after the lights got to them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nP-rgKUzsUI

The clip seems to show a rehearsal with a director with a baton leading the actors. He is leading other actors with no camera to be seen on them. Accounts agree with the director being in the studio. I guess I should get a baton when I am directing.

The guy with the headsets can be seen adjusting a camera lens at :18sec. "Pan left...no, your other left". I suspect he is on headsets to someone telling him about camera adjustments. More staff are in the studio now. The tall candle on the table has vanished. The bottle moved. Typical rehearsal. And I think the director is wearing tv makeup in the clip. Dark lips typical of the era. I think this is staged for a newsreel clip and photos and not from the actual broadcast.

Here is a page on the ETF website about the production;

http://www.earlytelevision.org/queens_messenger.html

It looks like this film is cut off at the end. Does anyone know if the rest of this film still exists? I would love to see this show recreated today.

There were no bright lights if this was a flying spot camera. The box that was being tilted and panned so actively seems to be a large photocell.

The bright lights I refer to were the stage lamps for the filmed demonstration.

The clip was excerpted from a publicity film, so it's unlikely that they filmed the whole rehearsal, and if they did it's exceedingly unlikely that it still exists. I got this clip from YouTube, but I think that there are complete films at the Internet Archive. (The last 10 seconds of the clip, by the way, appear at the climax of the story. Standish, the messenger, distraught over letting his dispatch fall into the hands of a foreign power, decides to commit suicide rather than face dishonour. The female spy, horrified at what he's about to do, has a change of heart and grabs the gun away from him.)

The thing that puzzles me about the tech with the headphones is that he's the only one that we see. (I think that the guy sitting down just in front of the curtain is a prompter.) Since he had to be there to move the scanner, there must have been other technicians to handle audio, although the press accounts don't mention any. Can anyone hazard a guess about how many other people might have been needed for the broadcast?