Imaging Science Seminar: Recovery of the Oldest Known Television Recordings

Imaging Science Seminar
Recovery of the Oldest Known Television Recordings

Dr. Roger Easton
Professor
Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science, RIT

Abstract:
Now here’s something promising. A new development in wireless broadcasting. They propose to add sight to sound. That raises interesting possibilities, don’t you think? ... By the way, they seem to be calling it ‘television.’ Not a nice word. Greek and Latin mixed. Clumsy.” (quote credited by British journalist Kenneth Adam to Charles Prestwich Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian from 1872 to 1929)
Despite the hazard evident from the attitude expressed in this quote, this talk presents a short history of the earliest video technologies, but is aimed primarily at considering the first efforts at recording broadcast video signals. As is usually true when new technologies appear, these were adaptations of then-existing hardware to a previously unforeseen use. Though signals were recorded, efforts to play them back were not very successful at that time, and remained so until the arrival of digital processing tools in the 1980s. The requirements and principles of the implementation are still relevant today, and the obstacles then faced by that technical community might should also be familiar in modern technology.
Rather than a talk about a current research topic, this is a third-person account of the history of early video recording technology, which has long been a side interest of the speaker. An earlier version of this talk was presented in the early 2000s, but this version includes some newly discovered results.