Television

Now we come to television. This is a scanning-wheel television, where there’s a pinhole here. The size of the picture is about an inch-and-a-quarter by an inch-and-a-quarter.

These pinholes spiral in toward the center, see, they’re going down, so you get all the way around, and all of a sudden they snap up to the top again.  So, they scan the picture as it spins.  It has to be synchronized with the transmitted signal.

Fred – “And what year is this?”

1928, that sort of time…National got into it.

Fred – “Did it exist in Rhode Island?  Was there a broadcast in Rhode Island?”

I don’t think there was any TV in Rhode Island, but there might have been…I don’t know.  But there were quite a few stations around Boston.  In fact, I had a wealthy relative of a relative of mine who gave us a number of things.

This, by the way, is a scanning-wheel television here…there’s a picture…it’s inside this thing…this drum has the pinholes in it, but he used a National receiver with one of those scanning wheels.

Text from the transcript of a tour of New England Wireless & Steam Museum’s Wireless Building given by Robert W. Merriam on a winter day in 2012. Transcription by Craig H. Moody, K1CHM. Edited by Fred Jaggi.

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