|
I will try to keep this to as narrow a scope as I possibly can because I have been known to ramble. It seems to me that two of the people who were very responsible for mechanical TV had the royal screw job put on them. John Logie Baird, about whom I have read several books, deserves way, way, way more credit in the annals of inventors for no other reasons than having the humility and foresight to recognize that his "baby" (mechanical TV) was obsolete and pick himself up, change strategies, and make major advances in this newer replacement technology (color electronic TV). It would be like the Wright Brothers inventing the airplane, witnessing Christopher Whittle (or Germans) inventing jets, throwing away their old prop planes, going back to the drawing board and then leapfrogging over all of them to invent the Harrier jump-jet within just a few years. I could go on and on about Baird, but it is easier to just encourage anyone who has not read about Baird to pick up a fair and balanced book about him and prepare to be startled as to how incredibly smart this man must have been. Mechanical TV is sometimes remembered to be modern TV’s eccentric older brother, acknowledged but easily neglected and tossed off to the side. However, it is truly remarkable at how decent of a picture a low-resolution mechanical set can get. A lot of people have seen the first images of television of Oliver Hutchinson or the dummy Stookey Bill and thought this was how mechanical television programming must have looked. We shall never know how those early TV broadcasts looked (other than some experimental “Phonovision” discs which were used on Baird’s 1920s precursor to the DVD player), but we can look at the moon landing footage, which used a mechanical TV camera, or footage on YouTube of modern mechanical TV experiments to see how well it could have worked.
The other inventor, and about whom there is much less information to be found, is Francis Jenkins. Jenkins got royally ripped off when a former associate teamed up with Thomas Edison to steal his “Phantascope” motion picture device and rebrand it the “Vitascope”, thereby receiving popular credit for this historic invention. He was not far behind Baird in terms of making a working TV and is given credit for creating the first officially sanctioned television station designed to be broadcast to the public. He was the first to air dramatic programming in 1928, two years before Baird and the BBC. Anyhow, as far as I can recall, he abandoned Baird’s system, which relied on a Nipkow disk spinning in front of a photosensitive selenium cell, in favor of a rotating mirror drum system. I have found very little information about this system. In fact, for a time, RCA employed Jenkins to build a very elaborate mechanical system. I have seen an image of Jenkins sitting in the middle of a giant ring of lenses or lights which stands about 6 or 7 feet tall. There are literally thousands of wires coming from these devices. It actually looks rather futuristic for circa 1930. I have always been curious about what became of this system. I would have to assume that it probably didn’t work, or if it did, I am sure that Sarnoff had become aware of Zworykin’s work by this time and abandoned the whole project in favor of electronic TV. Does anyone have any solid resources (biography, in-depth articles, etc.) on the TV work of C. Francis Jenkins? Anyone have any thoughts on Baird? Anyone out there try to build a mechanical TV? I would love to hear anyone’s thoughts about any of this.
|