Hi everybody.

I've just finished watching the BBC4 documentary Television's Opening Night: How the Box was Born. It was shown a couple of nights ago.

I was surprised to find no mention of it on the forum. It is quite rare to find such programs directly related to our hobby shown on television.

It is the recreation of the first transmission of television 80 years ago, and though I have read much on the subject, I still found much that was new to me.

Worth a look.

Wayne.

I don't bother watching TV these days. Where and when did you view it?

I think it was aired a couple of days before Christmas.
I rarely ever watch anything live. I time shift programs and then cue through the ads at warp speed.

I have seen reviews of the program of topic on a British radio site, and they seem to be very critical about the authanticity of the items/props used in the re-creation of the original broardcast.
My feeling is that if the original eighty-year-old equipment is not available, do the best you can with what you can get.

Wayne.

You might be interested in the working model of the Baird system on view in Melbourne a couple of years ago.

https://vintage-radio.com.au/default.asp?f=2&th=371#3587

I think it was aired a couple of days before Christmas.

On free to air (channel?) or cable?

SBS two days ago.
Excellent informative program.
JJ

I think this is it:-

http://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/video/831125059945/the-first-night-of-television

One needs to open an account to watch SBS On Demand it appears.

SBS marketing wants to pry into me. I have a fictitious alter ego for such things.

Quite interesting.

Easy to see how the primitive Baird system, with its accompanying need for film processing in near real time, had no hope of becoming the norm compared to electron beam scanning. As some one opined: "Like using Morse Code when there's a telephone next door".

Still, the best that the 21st century engineers could do for a live "flying spot" scanner was 80 lines.
All they could show of the original 240 line flying spot scanner used in 1936, was a computer-animated recreation. In that, he disc had to be mounted in a vacuum chamber)..

"Easy to see how the primitive Baird system, with its accompanying need for film processing in near real time, had no hope of becoming the norm compared to electron beam scanning."

Vladimir Zworykin (and others() had realised at least 15 years before that Nipkow Disc based systems would never be practical much above 100 lines.

His Iconoscope concept works more like photographic film, where every point on the imaging surface gets exposed for the entire frame (or field) period, rather than for a few nanoseconds once every frame or field.

One of the many things I never knew was that Baird himself really had nothing to do with the "High Definition" test transmissions. His investors had kicked him off the board some years before. They must have realised that Baird wasn't quite the genius that everybody thought he was.

I would like to hear more about the system that Kingsley radio was experimenting with in Melbourne circa 1929 and the sets that ham radio guys were building in order to receive the test programmes.