Hoary old question.........

[Combwork]

Who invented television? Ok, as worded it's an impossible question to answer, but in a book called `Victorian Inventions' by Leonard de Vries (compiled in colaboration with Ilonka van Amstel) published in 1971 there's an artical about `Dessaud's Teleoscope'; essentially a mechanical scanning disc based television with a frame rate of 10 per second. I don't know how well it worked (if at all) but it's very clever and purely mechancally, it looks as if it maybe could have done. Final paragraph reads "Monsieur Dussaud is at present engaged in improving his system, and it is hoped that he will succeed in completing his experiments in time for the Exhibition to be held in Paris in 1900"

I wonder how many inventions were quietly made and then forgotten long before they were officially `invented'. Hiram Maxim's Steam Flying Machine was decades before the Wright Brothers but was effectively a rich mans toy with no apparent practical value, so having built the thing (it had several stacked wings, the longest of which had a span 125 feet!), he more or less lost interest. Imagine working for someone like this. One day you're head gardner, next day it's "stand there, pull that lever when I tell you and send me a postcard when you get wherever you're going"....... Jim