[Thursday] Fw: Mechanical TV - great historical videos

[Michael Thompson]

One of the new volunteers at the computer museum has been working on a project like this. We talked about making a spinning disk TV from scratch as a demonstration device. Probably controlled by a Raspberry Pi. Lots of people are working on projects like this, so we could leverage some of the existing work.

> On May 30, 2019, at 8:37 AM, Chris Prata via Thursday <thursday at newsm.org> wrote:
> 
> I cant find anything about the radio signal specs, but we know that the early Baird Televisor was 30 lines at 12.5 frames per second... pretty low specs...
> 
> Looking for the radio specs, (frequency, bandwidth, etc) that would be helpful...
> 
> Also hope to identify the sets we have and find those specs as well. We'll have to reproduce whatever the Televisor was expecting in the way of radio signal.
> 
>  
> From: Michael Thompson <michael.99.thompson at gmail.com>
> Sent: Thursday, May 30, 2019 7:47 AM
> To: Chris Prata
> Cc: NEWSM Thursday Group
> Subject: Re: [Thursday] Mechanical TV - great historical videos
>  
> Alex and I have talked about this quite a bit. An Arduino or a Raspberry Pi would probably be fast enough to supply a low resolution video signal. I am not sure how much horsepower would be required to take a WebCam image and downgrade the image to something that could be displayed on the mechanical TV in real time. It would be possible to take an image from the camera every few seconds or faster, and then display it. The delay might even make the effect more realistic.
> 
> On Thu, May 30, 2019 at 12:53 AM Chris Prata via Thursday <thursday at newsm.org> wrote:
> We have two mechanical disk televisions which I hope we can resurrect. It would be nice if we can display a visitor's face via camera on a mechanical tv  as they are standing in front of it, and maybe some 1930's tv footage on the other, perhaps even broadcast at low power from a period-transmitter as was done then. This is ancient technology that just needs to be preserved and displayed! 
> 
> In the 1990's, some of John Logie Baird's long lost Phonovision video disks were discovered by another Scotsman.  One recording was of entertainer Betty Bolton and when it was discovered was played for her on a TV special. (Still looking for that)  (Betty died in 2006 at almost 100 years old). Also see in this video the setting up by BBC of a dual transmitting station to compare Baird mechanical vs electronic Marconi-EMI television systems.
> 
> These videos show old vacuum tubes being handled as well as mech TV, and a transmitting station actually being constructed in the mid 1930's by the BBC.
> 
> 1999 CNN News Feature:
> https://youtu.be/J2mb4R9W9TI
> 
> BBC TV History Feature:
> https://youtu.be/CnBNz52goXk
> 
> 
> It would be wonderful if we could add early TV to the museum for all to see. (and see themselves on!)
> 
> 
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> 
> -- 
> Michael Thompson
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