Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round.
They all laughed when Edison recorded sound.
They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother when they said that man could fly.
They told Marconi wireless was a phony. It's the same old cry.
[00:00:21] Speaker B: Welcome back to 100 Years of Television.
This is episode number 34, Countdown 73 whirlwind for 100 weeks that started in October 2025.
This podcast is going to recall the top 100 milestones in the first 100 years of television and video.
The countdown is pegged to culminate on September 7, 2027. That will be the 100th anniversary of the day television as we know it first appeared on earth in its fully electronic form.
I'm Paul Schatzkin, author of the Boy who Invented Television, the definitive biography of Philo T. Farnsworth, who invented the world's first all electronic television system.
In our last episode we watched Walt Disney build an empire on the back of a cartoon mouse.
Today we're going to witness the convergence of analog and and digital with the work of John Logie Baird and others. Prior to 1927, the prehistory of television was electro mechanical. Much the same can be said for the first attempts at computing.
Counting and calculating devices stretch back as far as recorded history.
The first known use of gears for calculating numbers was was found in the Antikythera mechanism built sometime in the first century B.C.
discovered in a shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera in 1901 and still a source of great mystery to this day.
The modern quest for mechanized calculating began in earnest in 1642 when the French mathematician Blaise Pascal developed the Pascaline, the first relatively modern machine to use gears to perform additional and subtraction.
In 1801 another Frenchman, Joseph Marie Jacquard, devised a system to use punch cards that transformed the common textile loom into a programmable machine, arguably laying the conceptual groundwork for modern computing.
And in 1837 the English polymath Charles Babbage designed and built the Babbage Difference Engine, a fully mechanical general purpose computing device with components that predate the architecture of a modern CPU and RAM.
Electricity came to calculating in 1890 when American inventor Herman Hollerith built the tabulator, which used punch cards and electric circuits to process that year's U.S. census at Bletchley park outside of London. During World War II, British mathematician Alan Turing led the top secret development of the bomb, an electromechanical device that helped crack the Nazis Enigma code. A pivotal Turning point in the Allies final victory.
And in 1945, physicist John W. Mauchley and engineer J. Presper Eckerrit at the University of Pennsylvania built the Electronic Numerical Integrator and computer ENIAC for short. The first fully electronic general purpose programmable computer.
ENIAC used 18,000 vacuum tubes, weighed 30 tons and filled an entire room, but could complete in seconds calculations that previously took hours and days.
But what we think of as a computer today didn't really take shape until somebody had the bright idea to attach a cathode ray tube to an electronic computing machine.
That finally happened in the middle of the 20th century.
In 1950, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology unveiled Whirlwind, the first digital computer capable of real time processing.
Originally commissioned by the US Navy to simulate flight dynamics for pilot training, Whirlwind evolved into something far more ambitious. A high speed general purpose computer that could process data and display it in real time with the addition of a crt.
At mit, project director Jay Forrester, Chief engineer Robert Everett, Charlie Adams, David Sayre, and a rotating crew of engineers and technicians pioneered the use of cathode ray tubes to display digital data as it was output from the computer.
They repurposed a surplus radar display and developed digital to analog conversion circuits that enabled the system to render computer generated graphics directly onto the screen, thus creating the first human computer interface that operated in real time.
With the addition of the crt, the MIT team could see results as they were computed.
The addition of the CRT turned the computer from a static calculating engine into a dynamic system, a concept that would become central to every digital device to follow from radar consoles to video games, personal computers and smartphones.
This first integration of video and computing technology in 1950, raises an interesting question.
If electronic television had not been invented in the 1920s and developed through the 1930s and 40s, would Cathode Ray tubes have been refined enough to serve as a computer display?
The answer is quite plausibly, no.
Although the cathode ray tube was first demonstrated by Karl braun in the 1890s, after 1927, CRTs were shaped by the demands of television.
Without the image detector that Philo Farnsworth first demonstrated in 1927 and its successors, like RCA's Iconoscope or EMI's Emitron, there would have been no electronic signal, no picture tube, and no high resolution CRT display.
Once the concept was proven, the push was on to improve scanning methods, image resolution, phosphor sensitivity, and screen brightness.
All the improvements introduced in the 1930s, not the least Farnsworth's own 150 patents started on his workbench in San Francisco in 1927.
Without the engine of broadcast television pulling the train, without networks, advertisers and viewers all clamoring for brighter, sharper images, the CRT might never have achieved the resolution required for graphical computing.
And none of that would have been possible without an electronic camera that produced a high resolution video signal in the first place. And that was Farnsworth's image dissector.
The cathode ray tube that found its way into millions of living rooms in the 1950s became the default display for digital computing. During the same period, the CRT became a viable computer display, not just because computing demanded it, but because but also because television made it possible.
Starting with MIT's whirlwind, the evolution of graphical interfaces like Apple's Macintosh or Microsoft's Windows owe their existence to Farnsworth's first patent.
From the Antikythera to the iPhone, from radar systems to video games, the now common daily routine of modern computing.
Click, click, look, look, scroll. Scroll. Was first made possible by the scan lines meant for sitcoms, variety hours and the evening news.
So it is no exaggeration to say that every video screen on the planet can trace its origins to the sketch that 14 year old Philo Farnsworth drew for his high school science teacher in 1922.
This brings us to the end of number 73 in the countdown of the top 100 milestones in the first 100 years of television.
Stay tuned for the next episode when a red headed American comedienne and her Cuban born bandleader husband create one of the most revered programs in television history and revolutionize the whole business.
Thanks for listening to 100 Years of Television, a two year countdown to the centennial of television on September 7, 2027.
For more, aim your gizmo that digital device with the video display to 100yearstv.com this podcast was written, recorded, edited, engineered and uploaded by me, Paul Schatzkin and is a production of Farnovision.com if television was invented by somebody named Farnsworth, why don't we call it Farnovision?
[00:10:04] Speaker A: They all said we never would be happy. They laughed at us and how.
But ho ho ho, who got to laugh right now?
