Today, I am thankful for the one medium that affords me the opportunity to get a visual glimpse of reality.
Our capacity for imagination is an amazing thing. If you were to pick up a novel, you’d miraculously read the words off the page, have them translated instantaneously in your mind, and then reproduce a mental, photographic image of the events transpiring on the page. However, all of these cognitive images are based on your own perception of what you believe reality is. In essence, the mental image I might create from reading a passage from a book will invariable differ (and quite significantly, for that matter) from one that you might envision from reading the exact same passage. In essence, the only time we truly begin to conceptualize the same picture of the story is when we have a ‘visual’ to which we can align our brains to a common framework. The same holds true if you were to choose to listen to a book on Audiobooks or if you simply chose to listen any program on the radio. All these means of communication mandate that our brains create a mental image that, in all actuality, might not reflect reality.
Interestingly, all this changed nearly a century ago with the invention of a medium we affectionately call ‘television’, so named after the Greek word for ‘far’ & Latin word for ‘sight’ – or ‘far sight.’ In today’s high-tech world, if I want to watch a crucial interdivisional football game between my beloved Philadelphia Eagles and the lowly Washington Football team (still waiting on a name, Dan!), I can simply turn on the amazing, flat-screened, high-pixel device in my family room. Within seconds, I’m instantaneously connected, somewhat miraculously, with an event occurring in some sporting stadium hundreds of miles away. Even more remarkably, the visual image is transmitted in high-definition, color display in a near simultaneous manner (i.e., within seconds of when it might be occurring live). The idea of visual transmission seems so commonplace to us today as we sit at home in front of ‘the boob tube’ consuming popcorn and drinking a beer. Yet, television was really an idea nearly half a century in the making.
On this day (Aug 14) in 1888, a Scottish boy named John Logie Baird was born the youngest of four children into a religious household led by a Presbyterian minister based west of Glasgow. Despite his generally debilitated health as a youth, Baird was able to complete an engineering degree at the University of Glasgow. While in college, he became interested in the work of a German scientist named Paul Nipkow, who nearly 4 years prior to his own birth, began experimenting with the idea of using a mechanical rotating disk with holes in it to produce electronic impulses that might transmit a moving image onto a distant screen. Nipkow could never get the idea to work. When Baird finished university training and moved to England, he started experimenting with Nipkow’s notion of creating a pictorial transmission machine, one he called a ‘televisor’, that might be able to electronically transmit these moving impulses via a cable onto a screen. Baird used a makeshift of the Nipkow disk, which he created with an old hatbox, several bicycle light lenses, a tea chest, and a few other household items. Eventually, after some trial and error, he was able to demonstrate the transmission of a ‘ventriloquist dummy’ nicknamed ‘Stooky Bill’ at a frequency of about 5 pictures per second. By January 1926, he had significantly improved the device to the point that he was able to give an impressive demonstration of the device, now at a speed of 12 images per second, to The Times from his Soho flat. Well, the newspaper reporters loved it, and so did the pubic!
A few years later, Baird managed to transmit the image over long distances. He also ascertained how to add in different filters of the three primary colors so the transmission could be displayed in color. With the help of programming from the British Broadcasting System (BBC), Baird would develop the first television company. Eventually, a company in the United States called Radio Corporation of America (RCA) would improve the ‘television’ technology using a cathode ray tube and iconoscope camera tube. The Macroni Electric and Musical Industries would also join in on the fun. Before the world knew it, television sets became a reality in every home, as did numerous other broadcasting companies around the world.
Yes, it’s funny to think that the trusted television started by transmitting ventriloquist dummies on a crude black and white screen. Today, we can watch the ‘idiot box’ in the comfort of our homes, but with a different version of ‘dummies’ in full liquid crystal display.
Oh, how far we have come!
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