Oldest recovered TV images (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Oldest recovered TV images (2013)

tvdawn.com

80 pointsmarcodiego33 comments

In addition to old images, there are very few old televisions floating around:

> To put this special set in some context, there are more 18th century Stradivarius violins in existence than pre-World War II TVs and, to make it that bit rarer, this TV has only had two owners. “I’ve handled 38 pre-war tells and this is the finest and even comes with the original invoice,” said Bonhams specialist Laurence Fisher. “It cost a huge amount and the owner must have had wealth and means…It is a very rare thing and there are collectors who would love to have it.”

* https://newsfeed.time.com/2011/04/05/do-not-adjust-your-set-...

Post-pandemic, if you're ever in Toronto, you may want to visit the MZTV Museum of Television:

> In the heart of Liberty Village lives one of the rarest televisions on the planet. This 82-year-old Lucite-encased TRK-12 upends what a TV should look like, thanks to its see-through body and screen-reflecting mirror.

> Only one of this exact model was made, for the 1939 World Fair, and the collector who owns it has been sharing its journey, among many others, at a museum devoted to his passion for the fascinating history of television sets.

* https://www.thestar.com/life/together/people/2021/03/14/mose...

* https://archive.is/4X17C

Incredible, thank you for sharing this. I live within walking distance of this museum and have a small collection of various early radio and television pieces, yet I had never heard of this place before.

There's another fascinating page on that site with some modern recreations of what 30-line TV at 12.5 frames per second can look like - surprisingly good!

http://www.tvdawn.com/other-projects/tvtests/

The video! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3CFkK5OORw

I can't make out what you meant by those two words, but that one looks surprisingly bad.

Ironically, oldest surviving discs can't be shown on the page because adobe flash didn't survive to this day: http://www.tvdawn.com/earliest-tv/phonovision-experiments-19...

It would be nice if the author released the audio from those discs.

After way too much googling, decompiling the swf, and finding a python v2 snippet to decode them, here are the urls for the audio files from that page. They seem to just be clips however?

http://www.tvdawn.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/SWT515-4-ex...

http://www.tvdawn.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/RWT620-4-ex...

http://www.tvdawn.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/RWT620-6-ex...

http://www.tvdawn.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/RWT620-11-R...

http://www.tvdawn.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/RWT115-3-ex...

I found the code here: "sixbitdecode" and "sixbitencode" and it is ported from the actionscript you can find in the SWF file. https://forums.mydigitallife.net/threads/sixbitencode.52185/

Awesome work!

It's quite interesting that he has asserted copyright over his restorations of the original content. Could I claim copyright over a public domain audio recording from the same time period, if I reproduced it from a wax disk to an mp3? What about early software recovered from a stack of punch cards, could I decode the format, put it up as a binary, and copyright it?

In the US at least, a mechanical conversion is not copyrightable. If there is a creative act e.g. colorizing an old photo by hand then that could be copyrightable.

In Europe, potentially yes.

There is some precedent for a fresh (though limited) copyright in previously unpublished manuscripts for example, and it is common for museums to control the copyright for the only high quality photograph of otherwise out of copyright art works and as such charge for it.

I wonder if we can get old TV shows by listening for the radio waves bouncing off distant reflective objects in space?

I'd wager Claude Shannon would laugh at the notion. Too much attenuation and not enough signal power reflected. Still it intrigues me, has anyone got the math?

It'd be like trying to use pluto for moonlight, just a lot worse.

The telediagraph was used in 1895. https://web.archive.org/web/20030804213322/http://homepage.n...

The first FAX was sent (Arthur Korn) in 1906. Western Union transmitted a halftone photograph in 1921. In my mind's eye, I see inventors' minds spinning all over the place. Transmitting pictures. Transmitting -moving- pictures. I Must Do That.

How is the video signal on the discs modulated? Because I assume they would need to be modulated on a carrier since the tonearm itself would otherwise act like a low pass filter.

Edit: meant high pass filter

I don't have a direct answer. I'm not sure how the signal is synchronized. But I will say that the tonearm of a record player exhibits the same behavior, yet the signal on a record is not modulated.

Yes, but audio records don’t have to encode frequencies below the human hearing range, whereas a video one should be capable of showing multiple consecutive black or white frames. The pickup doesn’t detect groove depth, it detects change in groove depth.

My guess is that they used AM since all you’d have to do was amplify it and send it straight to the lightbulb, no demodulation necessary.

Those are much earlier than I expected. I've often had that reaction to the earliest photographs / daguerrotypes too - from the 1840s!

I like to point out to people that a lot of the things in Jules Verne books that seems futuristic were contemporary.

People might be aware that submarines predates 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (the first submarine named Nautilus dates to 1800), though a surprising number aren't. In general, mechanical things seems to be the things people are most likely to believe are that old.

But when he described a fax-like thing in his story Paris in the Twentieth Century, people tend to be sure it was a fantastic prediction.

Only the book was written in 1863, and the first commercial fax-like service - the Pantelegraph - went into commercial operation between Paris and Lyon in 1863, and the invention happened many years before. Becquerel, Rossini and Napoleon III all were involved in demonstrations.

Outside of Jules Verne, my other favourite tech that people think is more modern than it is, is video telephony. But when you think about it, the crudest version you can build of video telephony is "just" a pair of TV cameras and a pair of screens. Hence the video-telephony network set up in Germany in the 1930's (but people are often surprised at how old "real" video-telephony is too; people are even surprised to hear about CU-SeeMe these days; then again my son is surprised I had electricity when I grew up given I predate Youtube)

I think a lot of it is because we think in terms of the modern conception of what something is. But as you can see if you look up the Pantelegraph, you can do "fax-like" fairly easy: The early variants tended be variants over the theme of breaking a current (like the Pantelegraph) or using magnetic ink with a simple scanning device that caused the resulting current to directly drive the rendering on the other side. And video-telephony a la Skype or Zoom is complex, but video-telephony a la the most basic camera and screen is simple once you have the cameras and screens.

We see the same with photographs. If you look at modern cameras, they're of course complex and it's easy to imagine them as modern (imagine what it will seem like to kids growing up without having seen mechanical cameras...) but look back at the processes and the simplest cameras and simplest photographic processes are almost literally a science experiment for kids now that we know how to do it, and the genius lay in figuring out the concept.

> the first submarine named Nautilus dates to 1800

It's possibly not what we'd call a submarine today but the first recorded use of one in warfare is from 1776.

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/worlds-first-sub...

> On September 7, 1776, during the Revolutionary War, the American submersible craft Turtle attempts to attach a time bomb to the hull of British Admiral Richard Howe’s flagship Eagle in New York Harbor. It was the first use of a submarine in warfare. > > Submarines were first built by Dutch inventor Cornelius van Drebel in the early 17th century, but it was not until 150 years later that they were first used in naval combat

Yeah, there were certainly predecessors. But note the "named Nautilus" part.

> Hence the video-telephony network set up in Germany in the 1930's

"with a resolution of ... 180 lines running at 25 frames per second."

I've seen video conferencing do much worse, 80 years later.(Looking at ya, Teams). Especially on those 25 frames per second. Actually, that's probably higher than what most video chats seem to use today (~10-15-ish fps?). And I mean 240p isn't actually that much more than 180 lines (and 144p is obviously less) if we're being real just for a second.

A lot of the limitations of early TV are down to achieving reliable transmission and mass production. As such, when you had point to point fixed cabled circuits, and only a handful of endpoints you could do pretty ok very early.

It's often said that "the future is already here, it's just not well distributed yet"

Specifically, that's a quote from William Gibson, though variants on the theme predates his quote:

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/01/24/future-has-arrived/

The works of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky might interest you, if you haven't seen them yet (I bet they have been on HN): his color photographs (using color separation) look like they're at least 60-70 years newer than they are.

Thanks! I thought I remembered something about that, and indeed they have:

Russia in color, a century ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4491766 - Sept 2012 (187 comments)

Russia in color a century ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1621517 - Aug 2010 (25 comments)

There may have been other threads too...

People wring their hands about media being harmful to children these days. Meanwhile back in 1927 they were expected to sleep after watching Stookie Bill.

Of course, is creepy as hell. not many things are as creep as a ventriloquist dummy

These are also the first images which aliens will receive from us in the future.

I'm afraid they may already have.

All we have to do to get the lost Doctor Who episodes is invent FTL drives, fly far enough away and wait for them to reach us!

Well, it's a good thing it wasn't reruns of Gilligan's Island. It's a shame though that it wasn't the Harlem Globetrotters.

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