|
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.
|