TechnoBabble

It is hard to believe we are now less than 4 months away from saying good bye to analog television broadcasting. A form of broadcasting that has been around since the 1930's. Great Britian actually had the first form of broadcasting in the late 1920's and ealry 30's called the Baird System. It was extremely crude by today's standards. It used something called a Nipkow disk.

You may very well be asking yourself, what the heck is a Nipkow disk? In very generic terms, it was a disk with holes punched in it that moves out from the center in a swirl pattern. Light is shown though it and a photo sensitive material "records" the image and its transmitted to a receiver that is also has a nipkow disk for viewing. Of course you could it call it "No Def" TV since it was pretty hard to watch anything on it. There is a whole section of Google on it. If you are a geek, it is swell reading.

John Logie Baird in the 1930's improved on the Nipkow disk to provide a "standard" def of 30 lines resolution. The first BBC TV programs were shown to about 200 receivers using this system. Even though it was a huge jump in technology, we would call it "No Def" today as well.

About this same time, a farmer turned inventer named Philo T. Farnsworth was developing a totally new way to transmit pictures. The electron scanning tube or as we better know it today, Cathode Ray Tube or CRT came out of his experimentations. As a boy Farnsworth plowed row after row after row at his fathers farm in Rigby, Idaho; the plowing back and forth, back and forth stuck in his mind. Later when developing electro-mechanical television, this moving back and forth lead the way to making CRT system work by scanning one line of resolution at a time and then returning, the same way a field plowed. In 1927 he showed is invention, "image dessector," the for runner to the CRT, to an engineer from the RCA Company named Vladimir Zworykin.

Zworkin had been trying to develop a similar system at Westinghouse but had been unsuccessful. He had recently gone to work for RCA, who also was trying to develop an electro-mechanical television. Years later, after Farnsworth's death,  the courts ruled that Zworkin, while in the employ of RCA had stolen the Farnsworth form of CRT and made RCA pay millions in back royalties to Farnsworth's estate.

Along the way, in 1951, CBS developed a form of color television using a "color wheel." This was a spinning wheel with colored pieces of material that allowed light through to produce a color picture. The competing RCA NTSC color system we use today was chosen over CBS's color wheel.

I bring all this up to point out that even though we are about to bid analog TV good bye, many of the inventions from the early days of TV are still in use, such as the CRT is now used to project light in projection TV's instead of display light as the old CRT TV's and the color wheel is back, being used in DLP and LCD HDTV's.

Just goes to show you that what goes around comes around! Here comes February 17th!