Mechanical TV?

[BigZach1000]

Is it OK to discuss mechanical TV in this forum or should I go somewhere else? I do not own one; I just find them fascinating and I can never seem to get enough answers. Happy holidays to everyone!

[jeyurkon]

I can't speak for the moderators, but it certainly sounds "early B/W" to me! I'd find a discussion interesting.

John

[Eric H]

It's perfectly fine to talk about mechanical sets in here, encouraged even. :yes

[old_tv_nut]

BigZach, how about listing what resources you are already aware of, and we can go from there?

[old_coot88]

One of the best resources on the web, here..
http://www.earlytelevision.org/mechanical.html

[BigZach1000]

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.

[old_tv_nut]

Ok, you didn't list what resources you already know about, so it's 20 questions time.

How about:
the narrow band TV association:
http://www.nbtv.wyenet.co.uk/

their list of links:
http://www.nbtv.wyenet.co.uk/web1.htm

Jim Hawes' site:
http://www.hawestv.com/

Peter Yanczer's work:
http://www.televisionexperimenters.com/

Tom Genova's tvhistory.tv site:
http://www.tvhistory.tv/pre-1935.htm

my postings:
http://www.bretl.com/mechtvprogress/mechtvprogress.htm
http://www.bretl.com/mechtvprogress2...vprogress2.htm
http://www.bretl.com/mech%20tv/mechanical%20tv.htm

Do you have a link to the picture of Jenkins sitting inside a "giant ring of lenses or lights?" I don't think I've seen that.

[BigZach1000]

Thank you for those links. I did not know about any of them. The only resources I have are a few books. I have googled search terms but sometimes the best information does not come up. That picture of Jenkins is in a book. I will track it down and scan it. Now that I think about it, he may have been working for Bell Labs when he did that work, not RCA.

[Steve McVoy]

My view on Baird is that he stuck with mechanical television well after it was obvious that electronic television was the future. His attempt to compete with EMI using the impractical intermediate film system and mechanical scanning in the 1936 BBC trials shows this. By 1934 iconoscope cameras were producing better pictures than the best mechanical systems.

As for Jenkins, I don't think he deserves to be singled out among American mechanical TV pioneers. Bairds's work was well publicized, and many people, including Alexandersen, Ives, Sanabria, Hugo Gernsback, and Hollis Baird built mechanical stations and receivers in the same time period. Jenkins' station came on the air in 1928, along with many others, including stations in Chicago, Schenectady, New York and Boston. Bell Labs broadcast television a full year earlier in April of 1927, and the Westinghouse station in Pittsburgh probably began broadcasting that year too.

[bgadow]

At one time (before VK was split off from AK) there was a seperate forum here for mechanical and other pre-war sets. I believe it was all folded into this forum and those old thread might be buried here in the archives?

[rld-tv01]

Another resourse is through the book link on http://www.earlytelevision.org. You are able to download (for free) the books to your computer/phone etc and read them. I purchased original hard copies of a lot of these book years ago and most go for $75 - $200 if you buy original copies. I read the downloaded copies of the books to keep my copies from wearing out. The book download link is:

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

[BigZach1000]

Thank you all very much for that information. It is interesting to learn about how such a complicated machine was conceived and built.

Steve McAvoy has some interesting thoughts about Baird and Jenkins. Baird may have stuck to his guns with mechanical TV in the 1930s. He had a fortune invested in it. However, I personally believe that the picture quality of mechanical TV during that time might be better than remembered. Baird was able to televise the Derby in 1931 (which required mobile facilities and was filmed in daylight, not the hot studio lights he needed just a couple of years earlier) and this was seen as far away as Berlin. The next year he televised the Derby to a large crowd on a 7 X 9 foot screen. This was obviously a viable invention, not just the bizarre curiosity box we see when we look at the Baird Televisor. Baird beat everyone to the punch with an all-electronic color system called the "telechrome" in 1941-1942, which operated at a resolution as high as 1000 lines.

I admire Jenkins because he was a visionary. It seems to me that he realized that television could be a consumer product while most everyone thought TV was the territory of tinkerers. I believe that Bell Labs aired a play for in-house demonstration before Jenkins, but he was airing movies with excellent results before anyone else.

rld-tv01- Thank you very much for that link. I am going to do a lot of reading.

If there is ever a mechanical tv forum, let me know.

[Steve McVoy]

We have several working mechanical sets at our museum, and I can assure you the pictures are not very good. And the pictures are far better than they were in Baird's day. We use a standards converter to create the 30 line images from NTSC. Baird used a mechanical camera. We have direct connection from the source to the receiver, while Baird broadcast on the AM radio band, with all the interference problems. We have a direct connection for sync, while Baird's receivers extracted the sync from the video in a way that cause loss of sync whenever there was little white content in the picture.

There are several surviving photos from mechanical receivers from the 20s and 30s, and they all show very poor quality images.

http://www.earlytelevision.org/western_41_pictures.html

I don't think Baird ever had a viable entertainment media with his 30 line system. This is the main reason that mechanical broadcasting ended (with a few exceptions) by 1932 - it simply wasn't good enough for entertainment purposes.

The only possible exception was the Scophony system, which was capable of high resolution. This didn't solve the camera problem, though. There were higher resolution flying spot scanners for use with film (Baird's, for instance. Also one made by Harry Lubke: http://www.earlytelevision.org/w6xao.html), but nothing that would work for live television.

[old_coot88]

There's some pretty neat stuff on UTube on the subject of mechanical television...

http://www.youtube.com/results?searc...elevision&aq=0

[Sandy G]

One DOES wonder though, what mechanical TV could have been developed into w/all the money & 80 years' worth of development that electronic TV has had...Or maybe I'm jousting w/windmills...(grin)