Mechanical Television: Incredibly simple, yet entirely bonkers
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 6 ส.ค. 2017
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John Logie Baird is often considered to be the inventor of television, but not of television as we know it. His mechanical television is a remarkable invention for its simplicity, but as you'll soon see, it would never have been all that practical.
Link to the video on Analog TV:
• Lines of Light: How An...
Links to various not-crap mechanical TVs:
• Televisor 3 - Mechanic...
• Mechanical TV Demo
And a video of a much larger, color mechanical television using mirrors:
• Mechanical color telev...
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Images of the Pantelgraph early facsimile system are used under Creative Commons attribution with the following copyright holder:
CC BY-SA 4.0 | 2012 | Alessandro Nassiri | Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci, Milano
All other images are either free of copyright, or are in the public domain. - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
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Didn't analog TV (except for France who always has to do things the other way around compared to the rest of the world) use negative modulation and as such the image would become darker as stronger the amplitude is?
Yes, and thank you for the clarification. I myself never caught that! Plenty of graphs showing an analog video signal show black at the bottom and white at the top, with some even placing corresponding voltage levels such as the graph seen here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composite_video
I have to admit I always assumed it was transmitted in this fashion, but upon further research, I see I was wrong! Thanks for watching!
The cool thing about mechanical TV is that you can transmit the signal on the shortwave bands, so the signal could cross the country, something impossible for analog VHF-UHF TV. Also, every version of mechanical television had to transmit the sound on a different frequency, so you needed a separate radio to hear the soundtrack.
Well, that's part due to the limited bandwidth, with the added perk that the mechanical TV can transmit image 100% of the time without the need for blanking time for the electron gun to reposition itself between lines and frames, while making synchronization hell in the process. BTW electronic TV has sound on a separate frequency as well at a certain offset from the video signal (though I believe some analog satellite TV systems carried digital sound in the blanking interval of the video signal)
+Phredreeke - I hope that you're using international system of units, instead of archaics ones to say such stupidity about French... French drive on the right side of the road, use SI units, and "what the hell" are they doing "the other ways around compared to the rest of the world ??"... USA is NOT the rest of the world... And Fahrenheit is a dumb temperature scale...
So unless you support your stance with facts, it seems you just like french-bashing, but the uneducated way (the other way around compared to the intelligent people).
The French were also the last nuclear power to ban above ground testing even after the Soviets and Chinese figured out that it was not a good thing to do. However, unlike Germany, they do understand that you can't electrically power a modern industrialized country of 50 million people with solar panel and wind farms, so they used nuclear energy, which they sell to Germany, who is shutting their plants down. So there are pluses and minuses with everyone. Secam was a good system, the only thing wrong was that nobody else adopted it, except I think that the Soviets used some modified version of it, everyone else used either NTSC, or PAL which was a modified version of NTSC.
I'm retiring after 35 years in TV and I've gotta say that's the clearest explanation of Nipkow for laymen. Impressive.
That's a long time to be in a TV man, respect!
@@VinnytotheK Yes, IN a TV.
It was okay till they started making flat screens. I couldn't suck my gut in any longer. It was getting too difficult for me to crawl inside.
@@buppie2000 Ah okay, wow! I can definitely see how it would be very difficult in this modern age. You hung in there for a long time!
@@buppie2000 Bud I feel ya. Now try being a fat man that drives a WV Golf. 😜
@@buppie2000another victim of modernization 😔
Hi. To join the club, my Dad (I'm in my late 60's) built a mechanical scanning disk tv. Long time ago (violins play ....) well before WW2. After the BBC long wave radio shut down at 11pm there were test transmissions. Would be viewers disconnected the loudspeaker and connected a neon bulb in its place. Then a rotating disk with 64 small holes regularly spaced and arranged in a 1 inch wide spiral around the circumference was rotated in front of the neon bulb. The result, if you managed to get the receiving disk synchronised with the transmitting one in the studio (done with a piece of string wrapped around the motor axle), was a 1 inch square rather reddish 64 line TV picture. I suspect the motor speed here in the UK would have been 3,000 rpm. Originally they transmitted still images of the Kings head. Very patriotic! Dad told me all the neighbours in the road were crammed in around this small set up trying to watch! BobUK.
Wow.
Hi, Robert - appreciated/enjoyed your piece - very interesting. I think I read the motor driving the receiving disc round, was designed to reach the required R.P.M. but a second winding was fed a frequency which locked the disc to the transmitted scanning,, once the correct "dots" were lined up, so to speak. Do you know if that would be part of the existing signal - or a separate one? I borrowed an ancient book but returned it! All the best.
Bev Wood it could be an audio subcarrier for sync. Jenkins early fax used a slotted disk interrupting a light and photo tube to generate that signal so I think he may have tried that on his “radiovisor”
@@techguy9023 Many thanks - this re-enforces the fact that so many contributing factors have come together - sometimes in a strange and unlikely way.
What the heck!? That's so cool!
The mental image of a six-story disc bursting out of its housing spinning at Mach 6, and rolling down the interstate at a furious pace, is probably the funniest thing I've heard all day
Watching a fax machine working its magic in the mid 1800's must have really been something, like damn.
just imagine seeing the pre-dreadnoughts in port
IIRC, there was one in the Jimmy Stewart movie, "Call Northside 777"
Not 1800s, but still insanely cool for 1948.
@@RamLaska There was a fax machine earlier than that, in "Charlie Chan at the Opera" (1936). By the 1930s, AP Wirephoto images (a form of fax) were being sent by news organizations around the world.
You'd need a lot of time, though. If I recall correctly, it would take something like 12 hours to transmit a picture. I mean,the very early faxes from the mid 1800's.
@@RRaquello Yeah that makes sense given that scanning mechanism was an electrically charged pendulum swinging back and fourth.
I'm a long time electronics buff, turned computer programmer (30 years ago) - and I learned a lot about the mechanical television from this great video and I commented because I wanted to tell you how impressed I am with your narration, articulate delivery, knowledge of the subject matter and good "techniques" like humor and sarcasm to make good points "Fax before Telephone - WHA??" etc.
Great Job!
My grandfather was a huge radio "nut" in the 1920s and built a couple different mechanical disk "TV"s, in the late 1930s he built (from a kit) an all electronic (CRT) set. He was obviously "bullish" on the prospect of TV, When TV was finally mainstream, he bought a "Proper" Westinghouse set, even though Pittsburgh had a grand total of 1 channel at the time! 👍 He'd be damned impressed (but not really surprised) by HD and 4K sets of today.
WAQWBrentwood
Your grandfather would mostly be damn impressed by the "digital video/digital audio" terms.
And then he would see the actual programming and opt to go back to the grave.
Anyone noticed that the owner of this channel has removed his background music from each video? Unless it's my idea.
@Joe Duke kek
Supposedly there were actual TV stations made for people with mechanical televisions.
I love how they used to draw radio waves as lightning bolts in old drawings.
A hangover from the early spark plus tuned circuit Morse code telegraph transmitters I suspect.
Well, aren't radio waves just lightning bolts with extra steps?
3 years ago: "I never dreamed I would get 21000 subscribers.
Today's subscriber count: 830,000.
Well done!
I know right?? I get so hype whenever he says that in older videos! He's easily one of my favorite youtubers!
And now over 1 million!
1.21 million
He's averaging between 24 and 25 thousand new subs each month! That is outstanding!
1.29m :)
A 75 foot disc that is taller than your building? Stop making excuses and get it done. We don't watch your channel for lame excuses.
HA! I must have missed something though. I didn't understand why the disc would have to be that big to get high resolution. Why couldn't the holes just be much smaller and closer together?
@@ChristmasEve777 From what I understood, he wasn't trying to increase the resolution, he was trying to get it to have a screen size of 15 cm square. The holes have to be at least as far apart as the screen is wide for only one to shine at a time. Proper number of holes times holes being 15 cm apart makes for a very large disc
🤣🤣🤣
@@ChristmasEve777 More resolution means more holes, a larger screen means larger space between the holes themselves, but in any case you can only have one hole on the screen at a given point, think of it as a CRT screen, at one point in time a CRT is only actually modifying the light value for 1 particular spot, so if you were to increase the screen size you would have to increase the space between the holes and by in large the size of the disc over all, in terms of resolution, you could make the holes smaller and put them closer together at least in the terms of space between the holes on the inner to outer portion of the disc, though my guess here is that due to the number of holes and the speed of the disc all being a needed constant to produce a picture well this probably wouldn't work to well
@@ChristmasEve777 Yeah he was after size not resolution. Resolution is just as hard to achieve though. If you wanted a 0.1mp equivalent display you'd need a 100kw light source just to have 1w of light get through.
My grandfather worked at the FCC. He told me about early TV systems that used a spinning disc. Very cool stuff! i gave you a thumbs-up. All good wishes.
My Grandad worked at Scophony Ltd who were early mechanical TV manufacturers before they became Thorn EMI. He went on to help design the Searchwater radar for the Nimrod anti submarine aircraft! collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/people/cp39370/scophony-limited
Love watching this three years on; ‘I’m absolutely thrilled that this channel has over 21 thousand subscribers...’ now it’s over 1 million!
Passed more 3 years the channel has now 2,27 millions subscribers.
I discovered this video just now when i thought i've seen them all. Hearing you being thrilled to have over 21000 subs in this video not believing this channel would ever grow that big and seeing that you've just hit one million subs in two and a half years since this video makes me very glad. Your content is pure love. Congrats!
I think we are all surprised at how many of us there are.
I build a mechanical TV and camera for a physics class in college, i only managed to send basic geometrics images, and the transmitter and receiver discs were hold together with a single axel and motor to eliminate sync errors. Excellent channel by the way, the analog TV video was amazing, i repaired several CRT TV's but some of the basic things had me wondering, brilliant video! greetings from Colombia.
Cool! Sounds real fun! :D
Wow, I didn't know that fax machines predated the phone and I had no idea about mechanical TV. Such a great video.
They just weren't called "fax" - short for fascimile. I think the police had some early versions for scanning and sending mug shots.
Great bar question: " If you define a fax machine as something that can scan a graphic, convert it to electrical impulses, send it over wires, and have another machine create a copy, guess when the first one was made, plus/minus 50 years!" This should be good for a free drink, but be ready to "prove" !
@@Gribbo9999 I heard it was the Pinkerton's detective agency using that before federal law enforcement agencies were really a thing.
They still ask for a fax in some banks. How about that.
Ross Burke they had morse key telegraphy through wired telegraph poles in the days of the wild west. I find it amazing that somebody could send a 'wire' between towns even back then.
John Logie Baird is still remembered in Australia every year with the TV Week Logie Awards.
Whenever i watch these videos, i always zone out, daydreaming of all the possibilities they must have thought of back then when they discovered these things
Two smaller discs could rotate together, synchronized with gears, and they could have holes drilled with a vernier pattern, which would reduce the disc size and rpm required, while increasing resolution.
Nerd
!
Build it!
Still a 37-foot disc for a 6" screen. Still way too impractical, even at 900 rpm that's still supersonic (1188 mph). And if it's faster than the speed of sound in the material it's made from = boom. It would make a better kinetic energy weapon than TV.
Rectangular holes will work beter
@@fvckyoutubescensorshipandt2718 A basic magnifying glass would allow a physically smaller disc and truncation frame for the same size viewing experience. Appropriate optics on the rear of the N disc would reduce wasted light.
I love the smart side of TH-cam.
It's not easy to find either bro . respect
@Don Bastardo Or even the side that makes one so depressed that one would have to get antidepressants. *Cough Cough*, CNN, *Cough*, NBC...
Only problem is my dumb brain has a hard time following along, though I do enjoy the videos.
Same. This and Today I Found Out are my favorite channels.
haha me too but also the stupid side is great.
OH MY GOD THIS IS WHAT ROLF HAD IN HIS LIVING ROOM. When you played the sound of the thing I instantly realised this.
LiFe HaS mAnY dOoRs, EdBoY
What time stamp are you speaking of?
@@davestout844 He's referring to an animated tv show.
Oh I know what Ed Edd and Eddy is, I just wanted to know at what time stamp of this video it's referring to.
Dave Stout it’s “Knock Knock, Who’s Ed?” But at the tail end of the episode, the monster movie marathon episode. Hope ya find it!
@@davestout844 I'm not sure but I think they are talking about 8:27
And now you have 100 times as many subscribers! It's been fun to watch this channel grow and your production quality increase (even in Novembers) but it's also nice to come back to these older videos and see you putting just as much love and care into them as you do now ^~^
This channel is amazing. Up there with Techmoan for me.
I love Techmoan too! Have you watched the 8-Bit Guy? He has similar videos, to a lesser extent.
I couldn't agree more.
Add LGR to your list as well
cjeckersley ooh I love teachmoan
Yep, this is excellent stuff covered in a way that reminds me of techmoan, 8 bit guy, and simon whistler, but still unique and engaging with high production standards. Enjoying it a lot :-)
Thanks for that. My Father machined the original mechanical discs for Baird long before WWII. I remember him describing the difficulty with that project.
My grandfather remembers the public demonstration of the Baird system in London. He seems to think it was in harrods. I'm unsure.
This is all incredible stuff. Thank you for making these videos, I hope you keep it up as your channel grows!
Very good explanation of mechanical television. I think what's great about it is that it's just plain ingenious. You really don't care about the definition. You're just amazed at it making any image at all. In the late '20's-early'30's it must've been downright miraculous, especially with the accompanied broadcast audio. Approximately 5,000 of these primitive receivers were sold. A relatively small number, but still more than you'd expect. I must add that typically a magnifying lens was used to enlarge the picture, and, another big negative to the definition is that these signals were transmitted over the airwaves. Likely, if you saw a dark silhouette against your reddish-orange background, you were doing good. Once word got out of all electronic television using a CRT in the early '30's, mechanical television just became a footnote in electronics history. Love to have one of those sets now though!
Well there were more advanced mechanical sets with over 100 lines in the mid 30s, and mechanical sets could reach 405 by 37 though I’m not aware id they were widely commercialized. They didn’t use the Nipkow disk though but rather mirrors and rotating drums/screws
The spinning wheel was used by CBS when they developed their first color TV system. It used a rotating color wheel to create color. The FCC made their system the standard until RCA demonstrated all electronic television. This explains why CBS refused to go to color broadcasting until the late 1960's.
The 1965 season actually, but other then at NBC, who was owned by RCA, there were very few colour programs produced before 1965 anyhow.
To an extent this is how DLP televisions worked when Projectors and Projection TVS were getting big
This is correct. I remember the CBS affiliate was the last one to go colour in our area.
And I understand from someone who was around at the time of the CBS color wheel vs RCA all-electronic system demonstrations that the color wheel actually produced superior color. Person who told me is no longer with us, unfortunately.
But that's not the same thing as in the video is it? Just a way of getting colour from a mono CRT? Like the colour 3D thing for the Milton Bradley Vectrex video game console.
The annual television awards in Australia (analagous to the Emmys) are called the "Logies" after John Logie Baird.
That is where the Logies took their name from? As a Scot that is a fantastic homage to one of our icons :)
Here in the Netherlands me have "De zilveren Nipkowschijf" (The silver Nipkowdisc) as a price for people who done great work for television.
i was waiting for some aussie to say something about that, good one mate
What a great channel to stumble upon. Love the way he delivers the info - in a quick, steady, monologue. Very interesting, subscribed!
Man, watching these videos (longtime fan btw!) makes me a) appreciate how incredible it was that the foundations of modern communications were created with such (relatively) simple components, and b) how sad it is that so much of our world is disposable by design.
Your videos are getting better and better. Presentation, depth and even some humorous bits thrown in. You're quickly becoming my favourite independent content creator! Keep it up!
Congratulations, even Ben Heck gave up on his mechanical TV, and yours works great for explaining how it works, great channel, keep the great videos coming
Thank you so much for making this video. The mechanical TV technology itself was obviously hopeless, but it did manage to finally answer for me how old TVs full of diodes, ICs, and resistors still qualified as "Analog"
I consider this video to be very good. You break the subject matter down in such a way as to be understood by a layperson...not an easy task. I used to service CRT televisions for Zenith back in the day and your presentation is a trip down memory lane. I think the Sony Trinitron was the apex of this type of technology.
Seth Meyers has never looked better.
His show is now momentarily bearable!!
He's pretty dotty...
Another great video. Fascinating stuff, really well explained and presented.
I have been subscribed for awhile and this video just popped up. So great to see how both the channel and your presentation style has grown.
This is well cool. Never knew virtually any of this. Thankfully there are people like you on TH-cam to inform and enlighten us.
television inspired by fax machines but created before telephones?
what the absolute fuck
Incredible as it may sound, you'll just have to accept that all of that is true.
Hate to say it but, mandela effect is apparently real as fuck
How is that the Mandela effect? Nobody incorrectly remembers learning the fax came before the phone. You just assumed that because it sounds more logical.
From over 21,000 subscribers to over 1 MILLION in 3 years.
So damn happy for you!
Just watched this vid and you had 20k subs! Much has happened since. Keep going, I love your work.
It's amazing to see how happy you were with over 21,000 subscribers. Look at you go now!
Outstanding content as usual! UP YOU GO, INTO THE CLOUDS WITH TECHMOAN!
this is seriously amazing dude great job
Wanted to find out more about these gems and you turned out to be the guy. Thanks m8
I discovered your channel recently and love the technicality of your talk.
I just re-watched this after a few years… Still nice, but you sure have made a few improvements on your set 😉
As a little side note, we still have a very specific use case for Nipkow discs to this day - we use them in scanning confocal microscopes. Such a microscope uses a pinhole to limit the contribution to an image by out-of-focus features in a sample, greatly improving on contrast and resolution. The principal is to image consecutive single diffraction limited spots and sequentially build up an image, just like in traditional television.
It is possible to use crossed galvanometer mounted mirrors and a fixed pinhole, but by using a Nipkow disc of pinholes, the scanning speed can be raised and a close to real-time image can be acquired. These devices are very common in especially biological research. Due to the high out-of-plane rejection rate, a scanning confocal microscope can even build up a 3D reconstruction of a sample by scanning the third axis as well.
Nearly 6 years later, and you've gone from 21k to nearly 2 million ❤❤❤
Fantastic Video! Thanks for making these!
Vertical hold!! I remember that! Oh god I'm ancient!! I used to fiddle with the v-hold dial on the back of my b&w tv set. When all else failed, just thump it a couple times on top with your first. Works every time! 🤣
Ha, I remember that. It was the era when "remote control" meant "having a child".
"Turn the telly over, mate" (meaning change the channel from one to ...the other one)
"Do the vertical hold thing"
And of course, "Give it a thump"
And in my house, dodgy volume pot sorted out with two of my Lego blocks jammed under the control.
Do you remember the fine tuning control that was around the rotary channel selector ? - known as the Big Wheel and only to be touched in extreme circumstances.
@@gdj6298 YES!!! Omg you're hilarious! you must be British!
@@gdj6298 I'm sitting in the waiting room at the doctor's office reading your reply, laughing out loud. My fellow wait-ees are looking at me like I'm insane.
@@hotwireman49 That's what too much telly does for you...
I don't know why the Lego is a permanent image in the back of my mind - it probably wasn't a long term thing because we rented our set (everyone did because tellies were a} expensive, b} not that reliable), so any problem, the guy would come and either mend it, or swap our clapped-out bit of crap for another clapped-out (but recently repaired) bit of crap.
A further memory from that era - if I was sitting in the way of the telly my Dad would say "Oi - fourteen-inch head!"
I've just taken out a tape measure. Fourteen inch screen. We might not have had colour but we must have had good eyesight.
Oh, and while I was at it, I measured my head. Don't ask.
I watched this video when it was new and decided to watch it agian. Holy crap, you've jumped from 22K subscribers to 424K in just two years! Well done, sir.
And now, a million.
Imagine having over 22,000 subscribers!
For real this is incredible. Thank you for sharing.
I love how thrilled you were at breaking 20k subs in this video. Keep up the great work man, best channel on TH-cam
Absolutely love these videos. Great explanations and examples shown.
This man built a television with a record, an led light, a solar light, and an mp3 player.
Thanks. I love this. Keep them coming!
You are amazing sir this has changed the way I think about the televisions development I had never knew about this concept or these existing for that matter this is truely a ground breaking video thank you.
Top job. I can't believe even this kind of educational video can receive a few dislikes! What's wrong with people!?! Keep up the good work man! Love your vids :)
Agreed
There's no dislikes anymore....
You and Techmoan need to do a colab video together. You both are the best tech youtubers. Keep up the great videos.
Cool video. I never knew about mechanical tvs. But watching the intro bright back memories. Reminded me of having to adjust the vertical, tune in a tv station, and getting up from the chair to go change a channel, or the volume. And where I lived there were only nine channels back then.
Again dude; took your time, walked us through it, loads of trivia, well communicated. Love it, thanks!
Technology Connections: The Vsauce of entertainment and telecomm
Adam Neely: The Vsauce of music
Vsauce: the Vsauce of Vsauce things
But who is the dark souls of vsauce?
Tom Scott: The Vsauce of interesting things you didn't know you needed to know.
@@krashd *The VSauce of things you might not have known.
techmoan: the vsauce of old audio tech
That was a terrific presentation. Extra points for encoding video as audio (listening to it provided fidget-spinner comfort), and then converting that back to video! You've earned your beer, sir. Next few rounds on me. P.S. How do you find the time to do all this sh*t? :)
after watching a few of your interesting retro tech videos, i thought you made pretty good content... then i found THIS super captivating video with not only interesting tech but FASCINATING history!!!!! subscribing now.
im so glad i found education channel that is actually intresting and discusses intresting topics. Keep up the great work!
Dude i wish You 22 milions subscribers :) You have calm pleasent voice and You are good in explaining things :) only advice :) more infographics :) :) greetings from Poland :)
That was really a neat experiment. Best use of an LED I've seen all week :)
Watching and commenting again 2 years later just because your back catalog is still so hot. Holy smokes though; from 22k subs to (let's round up) 500k in two years? That's a lot of lives that you've improved. Bravo!
This is an outstanding video- one of your very best.
"Not in a straight line, mind you, but by traveling along actual roads."
So what G-force would you get turning a corner at that speed?
Jeff C enough to make guac outa anything organic!
Hmmmmm... A 6 story disk spinning at mk6 to produce a subpar tv image? You have my attention
Wow, I enjoyed this very much. Your practical demo is very illustrative .
This was a great subject, that I had never really thought about. Thanks!
Alec: "I'm amazed that this channel got to 21k subs"
Me, looking at the current sub count: "That's cute..."
😂 🤣
11:42 21K subscribers eh?
You're sitting at 627K now, who knows you might cross the 1 million in 2020.
I hope so
Very impressive work!! Congrats from Brazil!
Subbed. High quality sufficiently complex and technical content delivered in an intriguing fashion. :)
We need colin furze to get on this 7 story disk.
verdatum Don't! Just don't! It will be absolute carnage. 😂😂😂
What if instead of a big disk someone used a belt with the little holes? Might solve the size problem to a certain extent. . . . . might be louder too.
It would be smaller, but not slower. The tape in your 15cm, 30hz, 480p tape-o-visor would have to go 7776Km/h.
I think you could improve things by using multiple holes driving separate lights that cover different regions of the screen. But I'm too lazy to think through the geometry. Another improvement would be to use miniaturization on the tape/belt and rely on projection to blow up the image. In other words, the light shines on to a lens that's focused on a screen. So long as you can make the holes tiny enough, and get a light to shine through it that's bright enough to project, but not so hot that the belt melts.
Damnit, I'm mildly tempted to make this latter idea.
If you have high-power lasers, you can make a "mechanical" television even easier. In that case, you can just spin one mirror horizontally and one mirror vertically on a motor at 60hz and turn brighten and dim the laser. Again, shooting them at a screen. But I think that's cheating.
@verdatum what you described is exactly how HTC Vive base stations work. In a way mechanical television did make a comeback after all.
Laser printers also use this type of scanning mechanism, just a single horizontal line though without vertical, but moving the drum roller serves that purpose.
Very informative video. Thanks for the upload.!
This may be the best explanation of how a television works out of the dozens of times I've heard one, but I still find a huge portion of these types of things to be magic.
is that a Tascam in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me? lol
Mechanical television did improve beyond the Nipkow disc version developed by Baird and others. It did it with interlacing, and near the end of the contest between RCA/EMI/ Farnsworth electronic television projection display systems capable of better than 240 lines without exceeding the speed of sound were developed. Indeed, well after analog electronic TV was well established a projection system for theatrical TV was still mostly mechanical in function as CRT size was far too small and far to dim to adequately fill a movie theater screen.
The most complex pre-war mechanical system was the Scophony system, i suggest you google it.
In the US at least, none of this is as interesting to us as the primitivism of the original concept.
Amen to that, and in a french-polished walnut A.T.C. case!
That was a very nice presentation T-C!
Come to think of it: DLP projectors are mechanical in fact! What's even more surprising, until powerful RGB LEDs came to play, these projectors used fast spinning cylinder with light filters to make it color (we get red image, then green image, then blue, it could be seen if one turns head quickly). So mechanical TV is alive and well on the new turn of evolution!
AllMyCircuits - Check out the Grating Light Valve tech. With its amazing fusion of Lasers (and pulse-width modulation to control color output) and electro-mechanical principles, it appeared to have to potential to relegate DLP to the dust bin, able to reproduce a much broader and more intense chroma range, give us more sync/resolution options, all while reducing power consumption and mechanical complexity. OK, they rely on a processor to create an interference pattern (the foundation of holography, possibly even all of reality as we perceive it, but that's another topic entirely) through which the laser traveled in order to produce an image. Given its compact form factor and flexibility (and the fact it was quickly optioned/licensed by various Japanese electronics manufacturers, including Epson and Sony), it seemed to be the most promising path to practical, lens free laser projection that could fit inside of (and be powered by the same battery) a Smartphone. It's currently being used for certain high-precision lithography processes (PCB/silicon etching, for example), but the inexpensive full-RGB-color-gamut TV's and projectors that seemed imminent have yet to really reach the market (though a Laser TV by - I think, can't recall for sure - Mitsubishi was shown at once of the CESes a few years back, and the only thing I saw next were patent disputes and said manufacturer claiming not to be onboard, accusing that company of basically hacking one of their sets to create the prototype. Still seems like a tech with lots of promise, but not much commercially out there using GLV chips at present :/
The best explanation I have seen, clear, easy to understand and simple. Thank you.
Great video. I enjoyed it very much keep up posting such interesting videos. Will be back to watch more in the future
Mirror Drums solved many of the problems regarding Nipkow disks size limit on resolution, in fact John Baird himself later ditched the disk because it was so limited. resolutions of 120-240lines were common using drums and the Scophony system could produce images of more than 400 lines which is about Laserdisk resolution.
dam furry get outa here
wait
Imagine the size of the motor to spin up a 75 ft disc, let alone the starting current draw!
A friend (which is not really a friend, more of a person I know) of mine does something with large electric motors in his job. I showed him this video and he said that a motor with a total of 45Kw would be able to do that!
In the Netherlands, there is a television award called after Paul Nipkow to honor him, called 'De Zilveren Nipkowschijf' (meaning: The Silver Nipkowdisk).
It is oldest and one of the highest awards in the television business over there.
This might be an "old" video but I feel compelled to comment on how much effort you put into it. Amazing! And what a clever way to simulate what was happening. You basically used a sound recorder and Audacity as an oscilloscope, too.
Probably made that American Caravan album sound better, too.
These videos are great, keep em coming :)
My only feedback is:
well you know how some people are aural learners and some visual learners? I really get the impression that you are an aural learner because sometimes you describe things using long sentences, which could otherwise be described with a diagram of some sort. I know you're already putting so much effort into everything to make these videos, but I feel often a diagram (or even animated diagram) would go a very long way.
Thank you again for this channel and have a nice day :)
Totally agree. I was almost begging for a (drawn) visual example of what he meant, shown at a slower pace. This was perhaps his first video that I could not follow. I still gave a like for the effort and topic, but this was a bad-ish video for me.
I agree.
having a real world demonstration is sometimes even more worth than any sort of words or a diagram.
but of course using all methods together might bring the most best results for a watcher.
And this is what constructive criticism looks like. Wish more people were able to wrap their head around the concept.
For example, at 2:51, you've just showed the record with the drilled holes and are describing placing "a squar(ish) mask in front of holes....you've created a device...".
Some sort of graphic or drawing of this needed.
Excellent description, very informative.
Wow - excellent work even you slapped it together quickly. Kudos
Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha - Stooky Bill
(Doctor Who - The Giggle)
Precisely where my YT username came from :)
Really enjoyed this presentation. Quite comprehensive but not too difficult to follow. Very well done:)
This must be my favourite video ever!
This is sooo coool!
*_Oh no, not again !!!_*
Now I have this powerful urge to sketch out this project as I've already considered several means of synchronization twixt disc and signal... even worse, for some reason I *_really_* want to machine a disc with 3 holes coming in at different angles on the back converging into one on the front... must.. not.. make.. RGB mechanical televisor...
If I wanted to invent a mechanical TV this is how I would approach it.
I would put a narrow light source formed by a prism projected onto the length of a long metal cylinder. That metal cylinder would have a mirror finish and when rotated would cause the reflected light to scan across the screen from left to right from top to bottom. Since the cylinder's surface needs to be the width of the slit of light times the number of vertical scan lines @ 1 rotation per frame it could be as small as about the diameter of 10 centimeters. The image would be formed by the varying brightness of the light source.
You basically stole the idea of a mirror drum, but described it terribly. www.earlytelevision.org/Yanczer/mirror_drum.html
Wow! That is cool stuff. My idea didn't come from this amazing invention. If I seen this page I would have said "check this machine out, I want to make one of these myself" instead. But my idea is a bit different than this, that is why it is so called "poorly explained" the difference with my mirrors, they would look more like thin strips like tinsel with a slight curvature and twist so that passing through the light beam just a few degrees would quickly scan across the screen horizontally and could give high analog horizontal definition.
I own a mechanical TV set. A mass-produced one. It's called DLP-projection and has a chip with numerous moving mirrors. Amazing technology. Every pixel is full color, instead of being devided in RGB. Later models even had overlapping pixels, making the picture super smooth, without any grain.
Power consumption is very low, especially with a LED light source. The screen doesn't crack when hit and channel logo's don't "burn in". You don't have to toss it after the screen is used up, as with LCD's & plasma's; you simply exchange the bulb.
DLP's lost the battle with high def LCD's.
Projection TV's in the 80's were horrible because of the viewing angle, and having to close you curtains on bright days. I've got a 2005 Samsung SP50LX which is awesome though. Even has HDMI.
Nobody steals it, cause nobody wants it. And it's very heavy and cumbersome, having a fixed pedestal. (Which includes a subwoofer; the sound destroys any flatscreen on the market.)
Its depth is about 36 centimeters, which isn't too bad for a 50".
I believe the last reincarnation was the Mitsubishi Laservue. Unparalleled picture quality, but steeply piced at $7000.
Too bad they pulled the plug. Read the reviews on Amazon to get an idea.
They are also great for gaming. Incredibly low latency.
11:44 damn... You've come a long way. That's really awesome :) you definitely deserve it and any continued success!
I love that in this video you're astonished by 21k subscribers but right now you're pushing a million. Congratulations.