Danger Will Robinson! High Voltage! In order to work, a TV or monitor uses high-voltage currents which can electrocute you! For electrons to be attracted enough to the anode to leave the cathode in a [more…]
While the age of television meant you could electronically capture a moving image and broadcast it to receivers “live”, there quickly became an obvious need to store that moving image either for posterity or use [more…]
While the advertising model adopted by free-to-air television more than covered station-owners costs, media companies have always searched for solutions aimed at getting viewers to pay for programming directly. Telemeter was one such solution. An [more…]
During the Second World War, American women were recruited to fill factory roles previously occupied by men who had gone off to fight in Europe and in the Pacific. While many of these roles involved [more…]
Telephone Television The “Space Phone” built into some Zenith System 3 TVs from the 1970s to the 1990s unfortunately didn’t let you call space, but it did let grandma call her grandkids without having to [more…]
One of the original televisions offered for sale at the start of UK television service in 1936, the Marconi model 702 had such a long cathode-ray tube that it needed to be stood on end, [more…]
Now that the world had a functional all-electronic television system and a way to broadcast a signal to receivers, the question then became: who was going to pay for programming? In the United Kingdom the [more…]
Going a different way: long before Philo T. Farnsworth and David Sarnoff duked it out in the United States, a Scotsman had already been driving his idea of the future of television far away in [more…]
GLANCING AT HIS MORNING PAPER, DAVID SARNOFF QUICKLY REALISED HE HAD A BIG, BIG PROBLEM. Sarnoff, the president of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) had spent his entire adult life rising up through the [more…]
I GREW UP WITH THE TUBE FOR A NANNY. My day would start with Sesame Street, The Great Space Coaster, Reading Rainbow, Mister Rogers… and then later in the afternoon, trashy cartoons such as The [more…]
©2018 Paleotronic Magazine, a project of Teaching Electronics and Computing History (TECH) Inc., an Australian not-for-profit organisation.
Powered by Wordpress. Hosted by Linode. Made in Australia. Editor: Melody Ayres-Griffiths editor@paleotronic.com