In a way television was kind of cool. I loved it as a child, give or take.
Nowadays ..... hmmm. I no longer own a TV since many years. Sadly youtube kind of replaced television. It is not the same, quality-wise I think youtube is actually worse than e. g. the 1980s era. But I also don't really want to go back to television, as it also had low quality - and it simply took longer, too. On youtube I was recently watching old "Aktenzeichen XY ungelöst", in german. The old videos are kind of cool and interesting from the 1980s. I watched the new ones - it no longer made ANY sense to watch it ... the quality is much worse, and it is also much more boring. It's strange.
I remember when we organized our lives around television. On Saturday mornings it would be cartoons (including the first full-CGI television shows, Reboot and Transformers: Beast Wars), Wednesday evenings would be Star Trek: TNG, Fridays would be the TGIF block of family shows (from early-to-mid-90s USA perspective here). It felt like everyone watched the same thing, everyone had something to talk about from last night's episode, and there was a common connection over what we watched as entertainment.
We saw a resurgence of this connection with big-budget serials like Game of Thrones, but now every streaming service has their own must-watch thing and it's basically as if everyone had their own personal broadcast station showing something different. I don't know if old-school television was healthy for society or not, but I do have a feeling of missing out on that shared connection lately.
Planet Money recently released an episode that mentions some of these points around drop vs drip programming
https://www.npr.org/2025/12/24/nx-s1-5646673/stranger-things...
> It is not the same, quality-wise I think youtube is actually worse than e. g. the 1980s era
Is it though? I of course watched TV as a kid through the 80s and have some feelings of nostalgia about it, but is it true that YouTube today is worse?
I mean, YouTube is nothing in particular. There's all sorts of crap, but Sturgeon's Law [1] applies here. There is also good stuff, even gems, if you curate your content carefully. YouTube can be delightful if you know what to look for. If you don't filter, yeah... it's garbage.
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There is many times more things on youtube than were ever on TV over it's entire lifetime up to the YT era, even discounting old TV show content on Youtube. But it also feels like the ratio of of good-to-shit has not remained constant between the two.
Definitely good stuff on YouTube, but I do miss the curation and, as was talked about here recently I believe, shared experiences that brought. I'm also crazy addicted to YouTube in a way that I wasn't to TV, but that's another issue.
This is interesting. John Logie Baird did in fact demonstrate something that looked like TV, but the technology was a dead end.
Philo Farnsworth demonstrated a competing technology a few years later, but every TV today is based on his technology.
So, who actually invented Television?
Whatever we all television now, television then was literally "vision at a distance", which Baird was the first to demonstrate (AFAIK).
The TV I have now in my living room is closer to a computer than a television from when I grew up (born 1975) anyway, so the word could mean all sorts of things. I mean, we still call our pocket computers "phones" even though they are mainly used for viewing cats at a distance.
For what it’s worth, Philo Farnsworth and John Logie Baird were friendly with each other. I was lucky to know Philo’s wife Pem very well in the last part of her life, and she spoke highly of Baird as a person.
David Sarnoff and RCA was an entirely different matter, of course…
The article has a photo of a plaque putting Baird's death in 1946, less than 40 years old.
What happened?
He was 57, born in 1888. Died of a stroke.
You should read about the invention of color television. There were two competing methods, one of which depended on a spinning wheel with colored filters in it. If I remember correctly, you needed something like a 10-foot wheel to have a 27-inch TV.
Sure enough, this was the system selected as the winner by the U.S. standard-setting body at the time. Needless to say, it failed and was replaced by what we ended up with... which still sucked because of the horrible decision to go to a non-integer frame rate. Incredibly, we are for some reason still plagued by 29.97 FPS long after the analog system that required it was shut off.
Why is an integer frame rate better?
For one thing, it’s much easier to measure spans of time when you have an integer frame rate. For example, 1 hour at 30fps is exactly 108,000 frames, but at 29.97 it’s only 107,892 frames. Since frame numbers must all have an integer time code, “drop-frame” time code is used, where each second has a variable number of frames so that by the end of each measured hour the total elapsed time syncs up with the time code, i.e. “01:00:00;00” falls after exactly one hour has passed. This is of course crucial when scheduling programs, advertisements, and so on. It’s a confusing mess and historically has caused all kinds of headaches for the TV industry over the years.
Originally you had 30fps, it was the addition of colour with the NTSC system that dropped it to 30000/1001fps. That wasn't a decision taken lightly -- it was a consequence of retrofitting colour onto a black and white system while maintaining backward compatibility.
When the UK (and Europe) went colour it changed to a whole new system and didn't have to worry too much about backward compatibility. It had a higher bandwidth (8mhz - so 33% more than NTSC), and was broadcasting on new channels separate to the original 405 lines. It also had features like alternating the phase of every other line to reduce the "tint" or "never twice the same color" problem that NTSC had
America chose 30fps but then had to slow it by 1/1001ths to avoid interference.
Of course because by the 90s and the growth of digital, there was already far too much stuff expecting "29.97"hz so it remained, again for backward compatibility.
60 interlaced fields per second, not 30 frames per second. The two fields do not necessarily contribute to the same frame.
In the UK the two earliest channels (BBC1 and ITV) continued to broadcast in the 405 line format (in addition to PAL) until 1985. Owners of ancient televisions had 20 years to upgrade. That doesn't seem unreasonable.
I had a communications theory class in college that addressed "vestigal sideband modulation," which I believe was implemented by Farnsworth. I think this is a critical aspect to the introduction of television technology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-sideband_modulation#Sup...
VSB came later. From https://www.tvtechnology.com/opinions/hdtv-from-1925-to-1994
In the United States in 1935, the Radio Corporation of America demonstrated a 343-line television system. In 1936, two committees of the Radio Manufacturers Association (RMA), which is now known as the Consumer Electronics Association, proposed that U.S. television channels be standardized at a bandwidth of 6 MHz, and recommended a 441-line, interlaced, 30 frame-per-second television system. The RF modulation system proposed in this recommendation used double-sideband, amplitude-modulated transmission, limiting the video bandwidth it was capable of carrying to 2.5 MHz. In 1938, this RMA proposal was amended to employ vestigial-sideband (VSB) transmission instead of double sideband. In the vestigial-sideband approach, only the upper sidebands-those above the carrier frequency-plus a small segment or vestige of the lower sidebands, are transmitted. VSB raised the transmitted video bandwidth capability to 4.2 MHz. Subsequently, in 1941, the first National Television Systems Committee adopted the vestigial sideband system using a total line rate of 525 lines that is used in the United States today.
There were a great many small breakthroughs over time. Where you draw the line is up to you.
Farnsworth…
Wernstrom!
Baird did. Farnsworth invented the all-electric version (sans mechanical parts).
A kin to Ed Roberts, John Blakenbaker and Mark Dean invented the personal computer but Apple invented the PC as we know it.
> but every TV today is based on his technology.
Philo Farnsworth invented the cathode ray tube. unless you're writing this from the year 2009 or before, I'm going to have to push back on the idea that tv's TODAY are based on his technology. They most certainly are not.
He invented electronic rasterization, a form of which is still in use today.
1897 Ferdinand Braun invents the Cathode Ray Tube dubbed "Braunsche Röhre"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenjiro_Takayanagi
'Although he failed to gain much recognition in the West, he built the world's first all-electronic television receiver, and is referred to as "the father of Japanese television"'
He presented it in 1926 (Farnsworth in 1927)
However father of television was this dude:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manfred_von_Ardenne
Better resolution, wireless transmission and Olympics 1936
No, Braun invented the cathode ray tube.
Neil Postman's theory still holds up and is extended to the Internet
> In the introduction to Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman said that the contemporary world was better reflected by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, whose public was oppressed by their addiction to amusement, rather than by Orwell's work, where they were oppressed by state violence.
And modern America asked itself, why can't it be both?
Odd we never adapted to it.
Video has a strange hypnotic power over most people and messages seem to bypass normal mental defenses.
I'd say we did, you need more and more for the same effect.
Here is the first ad ever, for a watch : https://youtu.be/ho2OJfXkvpI
For comparison, here is the latest ad for the best selling watch as of today : https://youtu.be/kdMTc5WfnkM
In case anyone accuses you of not comparing like to like, even a contemporary Bulova commercial is much more similar to the latter than the former: https://youtu.be/trp7p634qAU?si=fGvyxHp_cayuw5xa
Everyone's trying too hard to stand out, but honestly the first one would stand out more today, despite being a still image!
Wow, I haven't watched any ads for a while and that was pretty jarring.
The Baird vs Farnsworth debate reminds me of similar discussions in tech. The first demo rarely becomes the dominant standard.
What strikes me is how fast the iteration was. Baird went from hatboxes and bicycle lenses to color TV prototypes in just two years. That's the kind of rapid experimentation we're seeing with AI right now, though compressed even further.
On the one hand I look at some tech lifecycles and feel everything moves so slow (cars, energy and train infrastructure etc..). And then I look at other stuff and I cannot phantom that someone who was born 100 years ago saw a TV (or media electronic screen) from conception to modern miracle. As someone in his 20s I can't imagine what I'll see in the next 80 years!
Unfortunately technological progress is not always exponential. An human landed on the moon 56 years ago and people back then thought space travel would be a routine thing today so it'll be interesting to see how things go
> Television, he notes, has introduced the phrase "now this", which implies a complete absence of connection between the separate topics the phrase ostensibly connects.
This idea is why I always take media with a grain of salt. The decontexualization makes it easy for people to be reactive towards something, that isn’t logical
Eg “now this is why <insert person or group> is good/evil”
People call me the devils advocate when I point out these nuances but I just think we need to be much more critical when forming and holding opinions.
Isn't "now this" just a synonym for "moving on" or "next order of business" or "apropos of nothing"? I don't think the concept of jumping to a completely new topic is something TV introduced.
Your example isn’t what your quote is referring to.
“Now this” is just a segue between unrelated topics.
Eg “and now a word from our sponsors”.
What are you quoting?
Sounds like something from Neil Postman’s excellent book Amusing Ourselves to Death.
Related to discussion on Baird vs. Farnsworth, there's a plaque honoring Farnsworth on Green Street in San Francisco. https://noehill.com/sf/landmarks/cal0941.asp
High definition is nearly 90 years old? I guess their definition of high is quite low by more modern standards.
Going from 30 lines to 300 lines is a big leap!
Cinema was "HD" by design. So, in some way, 35mm movies are HD quality and predate PAL and NTSC standards.
Sure, but that's not TV.
In interesting plot point in the novel/movie Contact (early, so not much of a spoiler):
> […] This puts her at odds with much of the scientific community, including Drumlin, who pushes to defund SETI. Eventually, the project detects a signal from Vega, 26 light-years away, transmitting prime numbers.[a][b] Further analysis reveals a retransmission of Adolf Hitler's 1936 Olympic speech, the first TV signal to escape Earth's ionosphere.[1]
And 100 years ago my great-aunt and grandmother (both RIP) were little kids and my great-grandmother, born in the 19th century and which I knew very well for she lived until 99 years old, was filming them playing on the beach using a "Pathe Baby" hand camera.
I still have the reels, they look like this:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Films_Path%C3%A9-Bab...
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path%C3%A9-Baby
And we converted some of these reels to digital files (well brothers and I asked a specialized company to "digitalize" them).
100 years ago people already had cars, tramways (as a kid my great-grandmother tried to look under the first tramway she saw to see "where the horses were hiding"), cameras to film movies, telephones, the telegraph existed, you could trade the stock market and, well, it's knew to me but TV was just invented too.
On the one hand, it's fascinating to know just how much of what shapes our lives was already there a hundred years ago in some form.
On the other hand, it's just as fascinating to realize that all that, and ~everything that shapes modern life, did not exist until ~200 years ago. Not just appliances, but medicines and medicine, plastics and greases and other products of petrochemical industry and everything built on top of it, paints and cleaners and materials and so on...
Inspired one of my absolute favorite Zappa grooves.
I am the Slime
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiCQcEW98OY
I am gross and perverted
I'm obsessed and deranged
I have existed for years
But very little has changed
I'm the tool of the Government
And industry too
For I am destined to rule
And regulate you
I may be vile and pernicious
But you can't look away
I make you think I'm delicious
With the stuff that I say
I'm the best you can get
Have you guessed me yet?
I'm the slime oozin' out
From your TV set
You will obey me while I lead you
And eat the garbage that I feed you
Until the day that we don't need you
Don't go for help, no one will heed you
Your mind is totally controlled
It has been stuffed into my mold
And you will do as you are told
Until the rights to you are sold
That's right, folks
Don't touch that dial
Well, I am the slime from your video
Oozin' along on your livin' room floor
I am the slime from your video
Can't stop the slime, people, look at me go
I am the slime from your video
Oozin' along on your livin' room floor
I am the slime from your video
Can't stop the slime, people, look at me go
Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: Frank Zappa
I'm The Slime lyrics © Munchkin Music Co
Related: Baird's Mechanical Television
https://paleotronic.com/2018/09/15/gadget-graveyard-bairds-m...
Also this site, which shows how the recorded Phonovision broadcasts were eventually recovered:
http://www.tvdawn.com/earliest-tv/phonovision-experiments-19...
> It’s entirely possible that my plangent noises about the impossibility of rebelling against an aura that promotes and vitiates all rebellion say more about my residency inside that aura, my own lack of vision, than they do about any exhaustion of U.S. fiction’s possibilities. The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naïve, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows. Today’s most engaged young fiction does seem like some kind of line’s end’s end. I guess that means we all get to draw our own conclusions. Have to. Are you immensely pleased.
- David Foster Wallace, E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction
My buddy has an old Portacolor, but it's only 60.
Really? But Marquee Moon isn't even 50 years old yet. What were they doing for the first 50?
Long live the new flesh
Thank you Mr. Farnsworth.
Philo Farnsworth did make considerable contribution to television with his image dissector, but he didn't make the first TV. He was the first TV patent holder in the US though.
And in Futurama, a man with the same family name invents a universal remote. The [drumroll] longer finger!
