Baird STILL gets the credit !!

[Mark Rowley]

Apparently today is the anniversary of the television. From all the T.V. shows and radio broadcasts I have been hearing yesterday and today, Baird is still recieving FULL credit for inventing the television. I am really confused at this. All conventional Farnsworth T.V.'s of today (and yesterday) have no resemblance to the Baird mechanical rotating disc unit which never saw any mass production.

After reading Paul's book and hearing all this nonsence, it really makes you feel bad for Mr. Farnsworth.

Mark Rowley

[Richard Hull]

Baird's system was the first television system to be regularly broadcast on this planet. The BBC bought and adopted his system in the mid thirties and even scheduled shows to the viewing public of which their were close to ZIP.

Once the Farnsworth system was introduced to the British BBC, they bought it and instantly switched over well before WWII. Farnsworth was the inventor and father of ALL ELECTRONIC TELEVISION. The Baird system was the first to be regularly broadcast.

Needless to say, Baird's system was never used in the US commercially. The US was way behind the Brits in TV broadcast technology inspite of supplying the ultimately adopted standard.

Oddly, RCA's Iconoscope , a much improved version and rip off Fransworth's image disector, was the first real, broadly usable television camera tube. Zworykin with RCA's money far out engineered Philo. It was inevitable. As it always is, the inventor is rarely suitably endowed or equipped to refine his own brainchild device to superior standards.

Farnsworth's greatness came in his getting the first all electronic camera and developing this and the sync encoding-decoding scheme to make all-electronic television a physical reality. RCA gets the credit for making it practical, affordable, and an economically viable medium. Genius drove Philo to his success, but RCA's greed, engineering prowess and marketing skills gave you and me television.

Richard Hull

[Paul_Schatzkin]

Actually, the Iconoscope was a dog. It did introduce one valuable principal - the charge storage principal - which Zworykin ripped off from the Hungarian Kalman Tihanyi. But the Iconoscope never really existed for any reason other than to circumvent Farnsworth's patents - at which it was a complete failure - and was abandoned by RCA as soon as they began experimenting the Image Orthicon (i.e. Image Dissector + OrthIconoscope). When RCA discovered the Image Orthicon (nicknamed "the Immy" which later became "Emmy" which is now the name of TeeVees achievement awards) was actually derived from a couple of Farnsworth patents, that's when they threw in the towel and granted Farnsworth the license he'd been trying to get out of them for like 10 years.

And, yeah, there were TeeVee transmissions in England, based on Baird's system, but saying that Baird invented television is like saying that the first guy who hitched a horse to a cart invented the automobile. Sure, the effect was the same, you could get from point A to point B, but the technology was not the breakthrough that the automobile or (electronic) television represented.

Television is unique in this respect, that there is a whole era of "pre-history" before they finally latched on to the real thing, but it is a mistake to mistake the prehistory FOR the real thing.

--PS

[Richard Hull]

The Iconoscope was the tube of choice in all TV cameras until the early 50's. It was certainly a dog, but IT WAS ALL THAT EARLY TV WAS. Thousands of cameras used them. To my knowledge not one major manufacturer ever used an image disector at its heart.


So all those early Uncle Miltie shows, the Honeymooners and Howdy Doody shows were shot into iconoscopes. The image orthocons were in second generation cameras. (NBC had 'em first) It also had limitations and was quickly replaced by the Videcon and Saticons which did not have the image latency problems of the iconoscopes and orthicons. A lot of the earlest shows that survive via the kenoscope process shows the limited contrast range of the iconoscopes. This is where the orthicon shown. It was the first camera tube to have decent gray scales, but still suffered horribly with image latency.

Still, the iconoscopes were a world better than the image disector in early broadcast work. Farnsworth never had a real base of manufacture for his disector tubes anyway until the early 50's when they were sold in quantity by ITT (Farnsworth's old Pontiac street plant) to the Defense department. I have seen boxes for these tubes and they were sold under the Federal, Farnsworth and ITT labels.

Besides, Philo was receiving royalties from RCA on every iconoscope tube made until his patent ran out. So there was never any real need for the image disector in the broadcast market.

I'll try and throw up images of first and second generational tubes in my collection.

Richard Hull