26 May
2010
26 May
'10
12:26 a.m.
Subject: Re: television standards (was Re: Pravetz
82)
From: thrashbarg at kaput.homeunix.org
To: cctech at classiccmp.org
Date: Wed, 26 May 2010 14:31:31 +0930
On Tue, 2010-05-25 at 20:21 -0700, Eric Smith wrote:
The major TV fallout from the war, is that the electronic scanning system of Philo T.
Farnsworth, was put on hold by the government war effort.
He had electronic scanning before the war, and spent the years after the war fighting his
patents with RCA. He won, but at a cost of his life due to depression.
Electronic television as we know it, 500 + lines of resolution was Farnsworth, and it was
in the 1930's,
Not Lodige Baird and his mechanical scanner, or Zyorkyin, who could not get his electronic
system to work, in the Westinghouse labs. He visited Philo too, and took all his secrets
from the open inventor.
I was at the Tektronix campus today, and one of the streets is named Zyorkin...
Randy
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Apparently 405 line service was originally called
"high definition", by
comparison to Baird's electromechanical system.
Correct. When they were setting up the first public television service,
High Definition was defined as anything with more than 240 lines.
Baird's standard (competing with the EMI Marconi 405 line system) was
240 lines, progressive at 25 frames a second. From what I remember
reading about it, it used an intermittent film process where the scene
was shot on film, rapidly developed with poisonous developing chemicals
and scanned with a mirror screw flying spot camera (from what I
remember, don't quote me on that).
Just a side note, in one documentary on the subject, it finished with a
television veteran saying that when WWII started, he was told the whole
reason why the television station was rushed into service was to get as
many CRT's as possible into production for the RADAR project. This was,
of course, top secret. He finishes by saying that had it not have been
for television, RADAR wouldn't have been so quickly developed, and that
it was RADAR that helped to win the Battle of Britain (again, this is my
memory speaking... perhaps someone would like to correct me).
Cheers,
Alexis.