His Vision Made Television
The True Story of a Boy Who Had a Big Idea and Followed It Through to Final Success
By ELLIOTT ARNOLD
HE only trouble with Philo T. Farnsworth’s story is that it is out of time. It belongs to another day. It ought to be a hoary legend now and it’s just twenty years old and still in the making.
It has everything the school teachers love —boyhood on a farm, the dreamy inventor, the years of struggle, success. It’s the story of television and it all took place when folks whose names slip the mind for the moment did a lot of shouting about the frontiers being gone.
Farnsworth dreamed of television without moving parts when he was thirteen; a year later, still in high school, he invented some of the basic parts of electronic television. In 1927, when he was twenty, he took out his first patent, on an entire television system—not just one part—and Donald K. Lippincott, the radio engineer, called him “one of the ten greatest mathematical wizards of the day.”
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For the ’80’s: a decade of wonders in home electronics
Look for 3-D TV, hand-held VCR-cameras, giant-screen TV, and noiseless discs
By JOHN FREE
Video. That word and its companion hardware dominated three home-electronics shows I attended this year. Exhibits brimmed with new videotape and videodisc machines, computerized TV games, accessories, mammoth earth-station antennas, an umbrella-size direct-broadcast-satellite antenna, and more.
Giant-screen TV, the most dramatic video eye-catcher, was everywhere, too, as the leaders in color TV finally entered the field: RCA showed its Hitachi-built front-projection console, and Zenith unveiled its pop-up screen, rear-projection console IPS, Aug.].
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It’s pretty amazing to read about the early days of television. Building a TV without a Cathode Ray Tube is like building a computer without transistors. You CAN do it, but man is it a pain in the ass. The “primitive” models he describes with their “flickering red images” remind me of the Nintendo Virtual Boy.
Where Television Stands Today
In this article the well known owner of station WDGY and the owner-operator of the largest private television station, W9 ICI, gives you a resume of the past year’s progress in this fascinating new development.
by DR. YOUNG - Operator, WDGY
IF YOU were one of the comparatively few men who saw the first few television demonstrations, you no doubt were one of the men who said that television would take some time to perfect.
Doubtless you therefore have an avid curiosity about the progress of television in the last twelve months.
From the first crude, flickering red images—the best that were available at this time last year—we have made the following progress:
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TV Tubes Get Bigger…And Tuners Cross the Room
Larger TV screens are featured in most current telesets, with 14- to 19-inch tubes getting the biggest play. General Electric promises a 24-inch set for this fall, and Du Mont is showing the giant 30-incher above. It’s the largest direct-view set to date, has 536 square inch picture area, and is suitable for restaurants, clubs, schools, and other public places.
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TV SHOWROOM FOR INVENTIONS
WHEN Ernie Simon, pioneer Chicago announcer, was telecasting an interview program one evening, a man pulled out an invention and demonstrated it. Simon was entranced, and it occurred to him that almost everyone from housewife to businessman has a “pet idea” he’ll “do something about someday.” An offer to show inventions on the program brought an avalanche of useful and weird contrivances.
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Wheel Weaves Colors Together for Television
COLOR television for which the Columbia Broadcasting: System has gone to bat began last winter with transmission of movies; direct transmission of street scenes by means of a live color television camera is promised this summer.
Actually, persons gathered around a Columbia ultra-high-frequency television receiver are seeing an extremely rapid series of one-color pictures—first red, then blue, then green. The pictures are seen through a rapidly revolving color filter, which is mounted in front of the set’s viewing tube, and the persistence of vision within the watcher’s eyes causes the images to appear in their natural colors.
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Wow, that sure is a tiny hearing aid. You almost need giant TV magnifier to see it!
Radio - Television - Electronics - HELPFUL HINTS FOR 1950
A—Producing large-size images from TV screens of nominal dimensions, this glare-less, flat and extremely thin lightweight screen utilizes the Fresnel principle of magnification. Advantages are claimed to include good optical quality and freedom from edge distortion. The magnifying element of the screen is a thin sheet of Plexi-glas into which hundreds of tiny circular grooves are pressed. It includes a glare filter and enlarges the image from a 10-in. TV tube up to the size received on a 16-in. tube.
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You’d think that if their owners were really so swinging they could think of something better to do at the beach than watch TV…
TV Goes Out
A GROWING demand for TV sets that, like their swinging owners, go-go anywhere has led Exide to produce the Personal Power Pack. The unit contains a lead/acid storage battery and a charger. The output is 12 volts DC. The new carry-around TV sets being offered by Philco, Sony, Panasonic and others operate on either 117 volts AC or 12 volts DC. A home-type portable that operates on AC only also can be powered by Exide pack if an inverter (costing about $60) is put between pack and set to change the DC to 117 volts AC. Exide now is working on a pack that will include an inverter. One charge runs a small TV set about eight hours; battery life is put at 1,000 hours. The price is $39.95.
