Regards

Doug, red was the color of the neon lamps used in the early mechanical television sets, used because you could modulate the brightness quickly enough to form the image, as opposed to incandescent lamps with the thermal inertia of their filaments:

http://books.google.com/books?.....38;f=false

There may not have been a World’s Far in 1919 (Good thing I said I “Believe” that’s where it was) but there was SOME opportunity for them to show it off. Who was it, Baird? Who eventually got credit for transmitting the first moving pictures in public BEFORE he is credited with gaining the capability. I think it was 1925 when he had a public show in a department store, at a time when a single store could be what it takes a mall to be today. But thst system turns out to only be 4 or 5 frames a second, where continous motion came to be defined as at least 6 frames a second, which he came up with shortly after his demonstration. Baird invented what he called the “Video disk,” which was played on a “Phonovision,” if that gives you an idea of how it worked.

Funny how the FCC website doesn’t acknowledge that General Electric was broadcasting regularly WITHOUT a license while licenses for others were being processed. The FCC issued it’s first license to Charles Jenkins according to your link, but I’m more interested in the 2ND LICENSE. That’s to Hugo Gernsback. That’s right, Hugo A GO GO, who created the term Science Fiction and had the award for it named after him. His license was also issued in 1928, and he’d been at it for 5 years when this article came out. Gernsback published the first Television magazine, called—’Television.’

All this fascinates me to no end, which is probably why it became my career, dormant though it may be at the time. Im much the manner of Ham operators, people were building their own receivers and watching television in the 1920′s. And it was much happening much like radio had 10 years earlier; stores, manufacturers and newspapers broadcasting just to be big shots; along with a few garage efforts by people also wanting to be bigshots. So much will be dismissed by the FCC historians as hooliganism, and for me that’s the best part. Timeline’s leave out the interesting parts.

But rereading this again, I see ‘Spiraling lenses,’ ‘Discs’ and ’30,000 flickers a second.’ That tells me this IS the mechanical television system. I don’t have the explanation for the red images other than it was red’s turn to be winning that fight. But I’ll bet the shade was magenta.

I don’t know about in digital, but in analog the video signal was 1 volt. Green was generated by .59 volts, red by .31 volts, blue used the remaining .1 volt. If the signal faded by .03 volts in green, .02 volts in red, and .01 volts in blue, the picture would be green even though it lost the most signal, because it has lost the smallest percentage. If green alone got weak the picture turned magenta. If red alone weakened it turned cyan. If the blue weakened it turned yellow.

When I was getting started in TV, the tube cameras were still common in low budget operations, and the tubes would often be utterly shot. If the studio had money, they’d have just bought CCD cameras, they’d never retube the old junk. And of course engineers cost money, so we’d be without one. We being a bunch of kids that’ll work cheap in this awful environment because we needed the money. A great opportunity for a guy whose Dad had nicknamed him ‘Dauntless’ as a play on his name, because he just stumbled in and tried it all the time.

It was pretty easy figuring out how to make the cameras give a good picture in the studio with all the scopes and controlled lighting available, but what about ENG in the field? When I had to work with junk cameras like that I took to carrying magenta, cyan and yellow cards for white balance. The camera wasn’t going to properly take a white balance in its’ condition, but I could fool it by making it try to turn the offending color to white by white balancing on that color of card. It also worked well for ‘Day for Night’ video: The idea being to make daytime look like night by taking the blue out of the picture, so I’d white balance on a blue card. Then I’d crush the IRE and boost the peds to bright black. (There is too bright black in video, there’s also blacker than black.) I know you’re not really understanding this without a successful Google session, but I’m having fun. (Sigh) People insist there’s no such thing as black light, but play the end of a videotape where the picture is black and turn off the overhead light. Notice how you can read in the light from the black screen. . . .

The word television was announced publicly for the first time by the Russian Constantin Perskyi at the 1900 Paris International World Fair http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantin_Perskyi

As to the invention of television itself, I know… http://www.fcc.gov/omd/history.....ars_tv.pdf

There was broadcasting underway years before 1939. They were shooting live video from planes in 1939, and I’ve always wondered if some of the film from planes attacking ships might actually be kinescopes of broadcasts filmed back on the carriers. At the 1936 Olympics Hitler became the first leader delivering a speech on television. If you read this it mentions a London transmission that “Skipped,” basically was reflected off the horizon somewhere between the atmosphere and space, and was received in New York. At the time that was printed, there were already tinkers with receivers in their homes, as the headline of this says, that article is about the “Commercial debut.” Meaning home reception made easy. Dang, there were ‘Radio photgraphs’ dating back to the early 20′s. (I’ll let YOU Google all this.) Oh, and the original 2″ Quad video recorders recorded video in square frames just like film, and the tape was physically cut and spliced for editing. Helical scan video recordings could not be edited until the invention of the time base corrector in the 70′s.

Television did NOT just up and start because someone started selling sets in department stores. In fact, it is a true open source technology, not invented by a single person but in fact is a compliation of hundreds of discoveries over decades by thousands of people who made their information public. . . .

http://books.google.com/books?.....38;f=false

Wish I could dig up an article I saved from a trade magazine years ago about the camera and screen they showed at I believe it was the 1919 World’s Fair. I have looked for that and looked for that over the years.

And that statement “The line caused by the light pencil has been nearly eliminated.” Dang, I don’t even remember my old NTSC terminology, it’s sort of passe now, but could this “Light pencil” be the horizontal scanning? The line being the gap between the 525 lines, 472 of which appeared on the screen if you saw the full picture? (Before pixels, it was horizontal lines.) Remember bad TV’s where you only saw the middle compared to the better TV’s? When I was getting started we still had to worry about the “Safe area,” so important things didn’t get cropped. Imagine sports replays where the call in question was to the side, and you couldn’t see the whole thing because of it.

The great joke in television was that NTSC stood for “Never The Same Color.” NTSC was a black and white system the FCC would not let the industry replace in the 1950′s because of a few hundred thousand TV’s already in use, so they had to come up with a way to artificially color a black and white image. Two identical cameras didn’t really give identical pictures. And black and white TV’s continued to sell in the U.S. for what? 40 years?

But contrary to legend, the socalled PAL system the industry wanted to adopt is NOT the same system that took over in Europe. (PAL being called “Peace At Last.”) The unknowledgeable often insist it is. Our PAL didn’t actually work anyway, which contributed to the FCC not allowing it. There’s also the variant, PAL-M, AKA “Pay A Little More.”

And the French adopted their own SECAM standard. And since they ARE French afterall, it’s referred to as “Something Entired Contrary to the American Method.”

Dang, I want my career back.

The station is still operating as KFAN sports radio. The Wikipedia entry includes the following:
“In 1933, Dr. Young was granted a license for W9XAT, an experimental mechanical television station. It is believed that the first transmission of the 120- or 125-line system—probably the first telecast in Minnesota—occurred on August 4 of that year, featuring a handshake between WDGY station personality Clellan Card and Minneapolis mayor William Kunze. The station pushed the technological limits of the day and provided a lot of interesting exercises for WDGY engineers, but Dr. Young never got into regular broadcasts. The license for that station expired in 1938, partly because mechanical television development was heavily discouraged by that point. After 64 years of dormancy, an amateur radio group in the area acquired the W9XAT call sign in 2002 with the intention of using it for mechanical and narrow-bandwidth TV experiments.”

If Young was indeed using 120 line scanning, he was one of the few experimenters to do so.

1938 was also the year the FCC tightened the requirements for experimental TV licenses. CRT was going to be the standard and if you didn’t already have CRT research ongoing, your license was pulled.

At the top of the page are links to…

PLASMA TV TV STANDS
BUY TELEVISION STANDS
MODERN MAPLE TV STANDS

… based on the title of the article.

I wonder what ads would appear for “Miget Racing” (Small race cars.)

Interestingly if you read the wikipedia article about DLPs that I linked to, they explain that single chip DLP’s actually use a spinning color wheel like the old color tv’s did.