• Hi Guest!
    You can help ensure that British Car Forum (BCF) continues to provide a great place to engage in the British car hobby! If you find BCF a beneficial community, please consider supporting our efforts with a subscription.
    There are some perks with a member upgrade!
    **Upgrade Now**
    (PS: Subscribers don't see this gawd-aweful banner
Tips
Tips

My new TV!

Share this page

NutmegCT

NutmegCT

Great Pumpkin
Bronze
Offline
After 20 years of searching, finally located and bought an original 1929 Western Television Company "Visionette"

Western-Mechanical-Television-a.jpg


Spinning Nipkow disk with 45 lines in three interlaced segments.

Difficult to find TV stations these days using a mechanical scanner, so the Visionette uses WAV signals recorded on DVD or CD.

Over 850 of these Visionettes were made. This one is #74 - quite a find.

My Visionette in operation:


OK - back to my cave.
Tom M.
 
Is it cable ready? 😀
 
You know, folks watching that would have looked at 1950s analog as an amazing improvement on picture quality just like we did when switching to HD a few years ago and folks with Ultra do over hd now. How quickly we forget what came before.
 
Our first TV had a 5" screen, I think it was a Philco. The heavy wooden cabinet was 3 feet wide with doors on it. We were the cats meow being the first one on our road with one. The next modification was a bigger and higher antenna and the next was when pop put a rotator on it! 3 channels but had to use the rotor to get the third channel! CBS, NBC ABC. Programing came on at 6 in the evening and went off at 11. (y) :LOL:
 
Last edited:
"Television won't be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night." — Darryl Zanuck, 20th Century Fox.
 
3798j said:
"Television won't be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night." — Darryl Zanuck, 20th Century Fox.
Click to expand...

Not exactly Nostradamus was he?
 
Same type folks called "talkies" just a passing fad as no one wanted to hear actors speak. Although when some had to, you really didn't want to...
 
Before NBC started broadcasting Disney and Bonanza in color, dad got an RCA color TV. He built a color bar generator so we could learn how to calibrate the three color "guns" on the tube. When the Sunday color shows started we had relatives and neighbors filling the living room. That was when the NBC channel in Pittsburgh was WIIC, channel eleven.
 
Fred Allen (ol' buddy of Jack Benny):


"Television is the triumph of equipment over people… the minds that control it are so small you could put them in the navel of a flea and still have room for the heart of a network vice president."


bada boom
 
We had the first TV set in our neighborhood - an MPW, named for our neighbor across the street, Marshall P. Wilder, who built it in his basement. It was about 1947 or 48 I believe. He was an engineer for CBS. There were only 3 channels - Channel 2 (CBS), Channel 4 (NBC) and Channel 5 (Dumont). Channel 7, 9, and 11 came later, then 13. It had a huge cabinet and a tiny screen. It was replaced by a Dumont. We called it the Dumonster it was so much bigger.
 
AngliaGT said:
Doc,

Remember using a "Degausser" on a tv?
Click to expand...
I do - and I seem to remember that an electric iron would work if you didn't have one. Can anyone verify?
 
The iron will do interesting things to that CRT, but it's a poor substitute. Most important part was don't plug the iron/degausser in when it's near the TV. Plug it in when its' about 3 feet from the screen, then slowly approach the screen, do the "magic movements", slowly back away, then unplug.

Slowly I turn. Step by step ... inch by inch ...

DE GAUSS THE SCREEN!

 
We had my electronics-whiz cousin come degauss our TV after my little brother held a big shop magnet up to the screen. The magnet left a big spot of funny colors. My parents were amused......
Tom, that's an amazing find. What does the ship's-wheel knob do? is that the tuner? or does it start spinning when the hypnosis program begins?
 
It's actually a pretty amazing, but simple, device. The spinning disk has a spiral pattern of holes, which pass across the neon bulb. The bulb fluctuates light and dark depending on the signal sent from the camera.

The "ship's wheel" allows the viewer to manually adjust the speed of the wheel, and placement of the picture, to match the sending unit (camera). Pretty clever, those old Scots:

1929_Mechanical_TV_System.JPG


(the spinning disk idea was created by a German, Paul Nipkow, prior to 1900; he called the disk an "image disector".) The first government sponsored German television station, mid 1930s, was named "Paul Nipkow" in his honor. Sadly, that government was the 3rd Reich.)
 
This brings me back. I was a TV repairman in the 70s. I remember trying to explain to a customer that she could not keep here big speaker on top of the TV set!
 
NutmegCT said:
Plug it in when its' about 3 feet from the screen, then slowly approach the screen, do the "magic movements", slowly back away, then unplug.
Click to expand...
I went to get an MRI back when computer monitors were still CRTs. Even in the front office where you checked in, the screens were effected. I imagine you'd have to degauss after every patient. That office just lived with the "tie dye" look.
 
Back
Top