Interesting and fairly comprehensive article about the state of television in 1948. A time when there were less than 60 stations covering about a million viewers.
What every family wants to know about Television
by Miles Ginsberg
The frontier days are back in one. sector of the American economy. The television industry, only a shadowy outline a year ago, is galloping toward giantism with much of the driving, mercurial spirit of an earlier time in this country. All a television executive needs to be completely in character is a six-shooter and a pair of spurs.
In the wild and wooly television industry, every company releasing information has an axe to grind and a hatchet to throw at the next company’s facts. Nevertheless, by balancing claim against claim, a reporter can compile an amazingly optimistic set of fairly solid facts about television. For example:
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Why Don’t We Have… BATTLEVISION
Tomorrow’s generals may be able to tune in on the battlefield courtesy of television, relayed to headquarters by battle-going TV Seeing Eyes.
By Colonel Robert Hertzberg
Signal Corps, USAR
THIS is no fantastic rambling of science-fiction!
If there is another war, it will provide definite opportunities for the use of modern television miracles.
TV set owners now enjoy better views of athletic contests than do most people right on the scene. Powerful telephoto lenses reach across playing fields and give spectacular close-ups of a runner dashing for the goal line or of a fielder snatching a high fly. Wide-angle lenses broaden the view and produce panoramic effects of great sweep.
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That kid’s record recorder is pretty awesome. It works like a tape recorder. I wonder how well it worked.
“Playtalk” electronic toy for children uses a grooveless paper disk coated with “powdered” iron to record and reproduce magnetically music or voice. Records hold about two minutes of recording; can be “erased” and reused often
RADIO and ELECTRONICS TODAY
A — Twelve-pound self-powered tape recorder swings over the shoulder like a camera case. It is used by newsmen to cover news for the “Mutual Newsreel” programs; the small microphone may be held in the hand, or strapped on wrist
B — All-channel television and FM indoor antenna of unusual design employs parabolic-dipole arrangement on telescoping rods. Swivel joints make numerous adjustments possible
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Wow, given that that the list on the first page tops out at a 16″ screen, I wonder what they’d have thought of a 42″ plasma screen? They’d probably suggest you’d only need one per town.
What You Want to Know About Television
Buying a TV set? Here are some practical suggestions to help you decide what you want for how much.
By Carl Dreher
Drawings by Jere Donovan
“How big a set should I buy?”
“How can I tell what’s a good buy?”
“Should I install it myself?”
“How about the antenna?”
“Where should I put the set?”
“What about fire and shock hazards?”
“What’s the best place to buy a set?”
THESE are the questions people are asking about television. Last year a novelty, the galloping postcards now threaten the automobile as the center of family interest. Grownups stare respectfully at moth-eaten movies that wouldn’t pull customers in a free theater. Children are fascinated into silence.
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This article gives a nice overview of the technological challenges that had to be overcome to make HDTV commercially viable. At the time this article was written there wasn’t even a tape drive that could support the bandwidth needed for a digital HDTV stream. Not to mention the hardware needed to encrypt all that digital content in real-time to comply with HDCP.
We did get our HDTV, though not in the 1980’s as the article predicts.
High-Resolution TV
- here come wide-screen crystal-clear pictures
New video components speed TV systems that match 35-mm-film fidelity
By JOHN FREE
Washington, D.C.
For several days, groups of government officials, politicians, and journalists crowded into a darkened room at CBS’s offices here. We’d come to view a rare, one-time collection of video gear. “What we are going to show you,” CBS’s Joseph Flaherty, vice-president of engineering development, told my group, “is a combination of high-resolution TV, stereo sound, wide-screen TV, and enhanced-color TV.”
During the next hour I watched a variety of amazing TV images that had extraordinary clarity—more than five times the detail of television pictures you see on conventional home receivers. The high-resolution pictures, a dazzling match for sharp-focus 35-mm slides, were shown on special “Cinerama-type” direct-view sets and a large-screen projection TV. Other equipment used by CBS, such as microelectronic encoding circuits and a Sony-built digital video recorder, may have a key role—in improved forms—in delivering this new type of TV to you during the 1980’s.
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Wow, the entertainment industry used to have a much more enlightened approach to “hackers”:
While passing through the earphone stage, television needs what radio needed in the days of crystal sets—hams and tinkerers. RCA recently made available to amateurs certain specialized parts, including several Kinescopes, and before long complete television kits containing all the parts for receivers may be available. Once the art emerges from the laboratory, the nation’s hams and tinkerers will play an important part in its development.
Where is Television Now?
TEN years ago a woman sat under blinding lights in John L. Baird’s television studio in London while a group of men, assembled around a receiver in Hartsdale, N. Y., saw her face on a screen.
That radio transmission of a moving picture across 3,000 miles of ocean led many to believe that television, a new Twentieth-century wonder, was about to round the corner and, like radio, enter most American homes. But years passed and nothing of this sort happened. People still are asking, “When will we have television?”
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New Electrical Wonders Work Living Room Magic
How do they work? Take a look inside the wireless TV control, switchless lamp, cordless clock.
By Martin Mann
AMAZE your friends! Just look at the TV and make it change channels or silence the commercial—while your hands are in your pockets. Make a lamp light when you wave your hand and mutter abracadabra. Lift the electric clock, its second hand sweeping merrily —but look, no wires!
Magic? Yes, sir. But not the kind you laboriously rig up yourself. These are new commercial marvels, available in stores around the country.
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