Showing posts with label Felix the Cat. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Felix the Cat. Show all posts

Monday, September 28, 2015

Time machine: the birth of TV





As you've probably guessed by now, this isn't exactly an educational blog. If you want to learn everything about the birth of television, go on Wikipedia NOW:


There. I promise you that this Wiki entry is a small book that goes on for many thousands of words, without too many pictures. And pictures are what this blog is all about (if it's about anything - I'm still trying to figure that out). 

I love everything about early TV, because it constitutes my very first memories. I swear I remember sitting in front of the TV on the floor, my fat little legs splayed out, left on my own because those flickering black-and-white images from the DuMont network were a convenient babysitter. This is a body memory which  places me at around age two. Mid-1950s, in other words, so my recognition of Ernie Kovacs decades later proved that he wasn't just a nightmarish fantasy.




Though most prototype TVs looked like big radios with a round eye, this one looks like some sort of bird house, or maybe a barn. I wonder what sort of programming they had back then, and how close you'd have to be to the screen to see anything at all.




For some reason people were less intimidated by TVs that looked like radios. Early newspaper headlines talked about being able to "see the radio", a bizarre concept. This one, handsome as it is, still has a pretty small screen, but something is visible there that might even be people.




Viewtone must have become obsolete at some point, like my beloved DuMont Teleset with its swinging cabinet doors that were used to hide the bloody thing during the day when there was no signal. Slowly, slowly the screen is getting bigger, the cabinet less radiolike.




This is either John Logie Baird, or someone posing for John Logie Baird, an early television pioneer who experimented with trying to broadcast the image of a face. To me, it looks like Dylan Thomas after a night on the town.




And it looked. . . something like this. Please forgive the large colour watermark, but I can't crop a gif. I like that vertically-striped effect which sliced and diced the picture. It was no worse than the constant flipping which always afflicted our set, nearly as bad as the picture tube "blowing" which necessitated a visit by the TV repairman.




It is said that Felix the Cat was the first TV star. He sat on what looks like a turntable for days on end, some time in the late 1920s I think (look it up!). I don't know if the broadcast image was this clear. Probably not. The audience for this sort of programming was likely small, because no one had a TV set or even knew what one was.







"Her face at first just ghostly. . ." These are spectres, and no doubt the people behind them are long dead. I don't understand the bottom one however, as the picture was usually divided into vertical slices, and these are horizontal. Another experiment, perhaps.





I am sorry to have to include this, but according to the early TV site I lifted it from, it's an image of - WTF??? Looks like an ultrasound gone terribly wrong, or an xray of a woman who left her IUD in for 26 years.




How close to the TV would you have to sit? Even closer than we did when our Moms screamed at us, "Don't sit so close to the TV! You'll ruin your eyesight!" (Fortunately, my eyesight was already ruined, but I won't say by what.)




This is the first image I could find of actual entertainment on TV. Probably on the DuMont network, which featured Milton Berle doing sketches on a stage with curtains and everything. Well, that's how you did things, wasn't it? This isn't the radio, for God's sake. Get back on that stage where you belong!




BUT WAIT: THERE'S MORE!


This lovely little sucker, the G. E. Octagon, surely must have been some sort of prototype rather than a model people could use in their homes. Unless their eyesight was a hell of a lot better than mine.





Like the Dumont Teleset, which had a screen about 100 times larger than this one, the Octagon (made in the late 1920s) had foldout doors like a cabinet. Why? Inside were spindles, perhaps speakers, perhaps not, and two indescribable "things" that looked a bit like drawer handles.  I love things that baffle me just because I like to be baffled.

As far as obsolete technology is concerned, this is about as good as it gets. You'd have to treat this like a veritable microscope and put your eyeball right down on the glass.

People still rebuild these, refurbish them, and somehow get them going again, no doubt pulling in signals from Clara Bow, Ben Turpin and Harold Lloyd. Only problem is, there'd be no sound.








This is called the Octagon "motor", but how could a TV set have a motor? This whole scenario just gets weirder and weirder. Looks like a deformed metallic elephant to me.





This looks like a gramophone from Mars, or a meat grinder that can walk, but apparently it's some sort of experimental device for sending pictures. 




This thing - no, it's not a coconut cake shaped like a juke box, it's a TV of some sort. This is from a fantastic site about the history of television, but the thing of it is, it's all in French. Still. I'll post the link to it in case you're French, or only want to look at the pictures.





Call this the badda-boom. I keep finding ever-more-bizarre things about early TV, the guts of which looked like some kind of sewing machine with a spinning disc full of holes. The image projected - somewhere - was a disembodied head named Stooky Bill. (So much for the Felix the Cat legend.) John Logie Baird looks proudly on his glass-encased Sleeping Beauty of a machine which, beknownst to him, will change society forever. If he was smart enough to build this, he was smart enough to Know.



This is the Wizard of Oz of television invention, pulling levers and throwing switches. Chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, it went, as if driven by a giant hamster. 




I realize I've come at this subject in abstract fashion, but it's imagery I'm after, not history. Consider it an archaeological dig with the layers somewhat scrambled. I never much cared for chronological order anyway, and always walk through museums backwards, starting with the present moment and ending with the Dawn of Time. The invention and development of television is nothing less than a spectacular feat of human evolution, as important as the wheel, stone tool-making and harnessing fire. There were, of necessity, lots of experiments, lots of things thrown away, and things that look pretty goofily godawful to modern eyes. But to me, it's all beautiful: John Logie Baird and his creepy dummy head, all those sliced-'n-diced, quiveringly surreal, disembodied ghost-faces, viewing screens a couple of inches across, obsolete companies like Viewtone (a nod to radio, no doubt) and DuMont. And a glowing, flipping, flickering eye that raised me while my parents were off doing more important things.



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Sunday, June 29, 2014

This is only a test

   


(From Ask MetaFilter):

An old memory of color TV? Color on a black and white TV? What?! (1950s filter).

My dad was born in 1952. Recently, we went out to lunch. The conversation covered a variety of topics. At one point, he recalled a tale from his youth...

Essentially, this: He grew up outside of Detroit, and he positively recalls that his family owned a black and white television set. He says that periodically the television network or local broadcast partners would attempt to deploy new technologies that might transmit a color signal to a black and white set, and that these attempts would be prefaced with an on air announcement. Essentially, "We will be trying to send color to your black and white TV sets. If anyone sees color, please call us and let us know."

I find many aspects of this story super strange, and also potentially fascinating. However, parts of it also don't add up. Like... what!? Does this ring a bell to anyone? Perhaps there's a kernel of truth buried inside a story that has otherwise "grown" a little bit over time?


(From Some Science Forum Thingie)

Something happened that reminded me of this tonight, and I think I have finally made sense of something seen as a kid. For some odd reason it just hit me. When I was fairly young and living in the Los Angeles area, there was a test done one night on a local TV channel that was supposed to produce a color picture on the black and white TVs commonly in use. And I can recall seeing some color; I think mostly green. From time to time I have thought about this and wondered what it was that I saw. In fact at times I have doubted the memory as it didn't make any sense, but I can remember the event very clearly. Tonight it occurred to me what they were probably up to. I bet that they were strobing the white to produce a false color image, as is done with alternating black and white dots on a rotating wheel [I don't recall the name of the effect]. The idea is that each pixel on the screen would be strobed at the frequency required to produce the desired color for that dot. Does this make sense? I'm not sure what the strobe rate is that produces the false color effect, or if this was doable on B&W televisions, but it is the only thing that has even threatened to make any sense here. Is there any other way that one can imagine producing color on a B&W screen?


Why do I remember these things? I must have been an
embryo or something, or else very very little. The
TV both fascinated me (it was a magic box that was just about
the only thing that could pry me out of boredom) and scared
the living bejeezus out of me cuz every so often, there
would be a Test of the Emergency Broadcasting System, with
terse-sounding announcer coming on to say, "This is
ONLY a test". There would be this Godawful official-
looking logo on that said CD, probably for Civil Defense,
then for half a minute or so there would be this BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOP
sound that gave me nightmares. I would literally wake
up screaming,my head dripping with sweat. This "only a
test" stuff, routine as it was supposed to be, seemed to
escalate at certain times, which I new see coincided with
things like the Cuban Missile Crisis. My brother "played
war" all the time,which was no doubt his way of coping
with it all, but too often I was the one playing the
prisoner, further stoking my tiny paranoia.


But this, this - I really thought I had dreamed
this! My TV was always doing strange things, like
cancelling Howdy Doody, flipping like crazy, or refusing
to broadcast anything but a tiny dot of light so
that the TV repairman had to come over and replace the
picture tube.
But this was even more bizarre. An announcer
would come on - God, how far back I must dig to
retrieve this one! Anyway, an announcer would come on,
and as he talked a picture would come on of, say,
scene in Hawaii with palm trees swishing
around, and around the border of the shot would
be a strobing, flashing pattern. The announcer
 would say, "Do you see color on your TV?"
(I guess assuming no one had color TV at that point,
maybe because it was 1958).


I don't know if I saw color, but the flashing,
strobing patterns and the stupid meaningless
Hawaii scene scared me almost as much as the announcer,
whom I was sure was THE SAME GUY who did those
Civil Defense announcements.
Now I find these two posts from science forums
(note, one of them would not post because it turned
completely transparent on the page - heh-heh, no
ghosts here - so  attempted to re-paste it in color,, and
good luck reading it), you know the type, done by guys
with glasses held together with tape, and they're saying,
maybe it was realBut everyone has the same feeling: I
probably imagined this, it probably didn't happen.
There is even a sense of embarrassment about it: it
must've been a joke, I was fooled, I made it up! The
memory always seems to be hazy and there is a weird
feeling of unreality, even isolation.




We got all the Detroit channels, so the
mention of "outside of Detroit" (if you can read
it) seems significant. They were always doing
weird things in Detroit, like rioting and broadcasting
Poopdeck Paul and Milky the Clown. Now at least I know
I'm not completely insane to remember this.




I wonder what they proposed to do: frame
the black-and-white shows with dancing borders
of flashing color? Sounds like about as much
fun as having a migraine to me. I think maybe I did make
this up. Or maybe the memory was implanted telepathically into
several thousand brains by evil Russian scientists:


"This is only a test."