vruz:
First Television Transmission: Felix The Cat, 1928
—via johnborthwick:neonsigh:
“During the early days of television development it was necessary to monitor and adjust the quality of the transmitted picture in order to get the best definition. To do this, engineers required an ‘actor’ to constantly be under the burning studio lights as they tweaked and sharpened the image, and Felix fit the bill perfectly. He was the right colour (black and white), impervious to the heat from the lights and worked cheaply (in fact a one-off payment was all that was required). RCA’s first experimental television transmissions began in 1928 by station W2XBS (New York-Channel #1) in Van Cortlandt Park and then moved to the New Amsterdam Theater Building, transmitting 60 line pictures. The 13” Felix the Cat figure made of paper mache was placed on a record player turntable and was broadcast using a mechanical scanning disk to an electronic kinescope receiver.”
…That was the first broadcast TV transmission in the US, not not the first ever. That honor goes to Scottish inventor John Logie Baird, about whom Warren Ellis wrote this amazing little piece (posted here before, but it bears repeating):
He Might Have a Razor on Him
First he broadcast the white-faced puppet Stooky Bill — a “stookie,” in Glaswegian, is a plaster cast — and then grabbed a kid called Bill Taynton and put him in front of the machine. I like to think that Taynton got a look at Stooky Bill and felt a shot of the Fear, because the light and heat of the machine had blasted it into a cracked yellow ember of its former self. Perhaps the master of the machine, John Logie Baird himself, thought of the day when the Trinidadians of the Santa Cruz Valley thought him a white Obeahman and attempted a terrified assault on his house of strange lights. Perhaps he thought of the night he blacked out Glasgow while trying to make a diamond with electricity.
John Logie Baird put Taynton in front of the machine, the spin of his altered Nipkow Disc growling in the small hot room, and worked his mechanical magic, making him the first man broadcast on television.
When Baird tried to tell the news editor at the Daily Express what he’d done, the hack got the Fear and hissed to his staff: “He says he’s got a machine for seeing by wireless. Watch him– he may have a razor on him.”
It’s still strange to me that these things (television, the internet), so ubiquitous to our lives, might have a history and that their history could seem so ancient, so alien. That image above is the direct, genetic ancestor of every slick transmission of today, every bit of CGI, every augmented reality graphic. But look at it…mechanically recorded, broadcast over the air, comprising 60 lines of scanning photon-beam. Imagine stumbling upon something like that, fiddling with a fancy piece of hardware in a New York department store, flipping a switch only to see Felix, there, artifacted and glitchy and slowly rotating, like nothing you’d ever seen. Imagine what the modern equivalent might be, exploring some far-flung corner of the wireless spectrum, or some deep darknet, only to find…something, something that you can’t quite wrap your mind around, a signal where there should be none. It’s the stuff of ghost stories.
