Tag Archives: RCA

Another Magical Tee Vee Moment ► Philo T. Farnsworth

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Dateline September 7, 1927 – On this day Philo Taylor Farnsworth demonstrated his radical new invention: electronic television. Prior to this all televisions (which were still in the experimental stage) used a clunky mechanical system with a rotating disk. Farnsworth’s radical design used image dissection, an electronic scanning of a series of lines. He was only twenty-one.

More amazingly, he came up with the idea when he was just a 14-year old farm boy. The brainstorm came to him while plowing a field; the plow moves across a field, then back the other way for the next row. He drew his idea on a chalkboard for his science teacher John Tolman, who was so impressed with it that he made a contemporaneous sketch of it. This proved fortuitous years later when he was sued by RCA over patent infringment. The teacher’s sketch made in 1922 won the case for Farnsworth.

Indeed it was Another Magical Tee Vee Moment. Here’s just one more:

Electronic television is no longer with us, having gone the way of the horse and buggy. A whole generation has now grown up viewing tee vee on a cathode ray tube that necessarily made the living room tee vee deep in dimension. Now tee vees can be hung on a wall like a painting.

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Day In History ► Day In Music ► June 21st

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Dr. Goldmark examining creation of a 33 1/3 record.
Pic used by Fair Use, even tho’ Corbus thinks it owns it.
Dateline June 21, 1948 – Dr. Peter Goldmark, of CBS, demonstrated the first 12 inch LP, “Long Playing” record, that spun at 33 1/3 revolutions per minute, as opposed to the 10 inch 78 RPM record. You could only shove about three and a half minutes of music on one side of a 78. A symphony or opera issued on 78, would come in an album with any number of platters to spin out the entire length of the piece. In contrast the LP would hold about 28 minutes of music a side. With this the format wars wars ON! RCA refused to pay CBS for the license to press LPs, so it came out with its own format, the 45 RPM disc, 7″ wide with a bigger hole in the middle. The 45 could hold more music than a 78, but not nearly as much as a LP. No one really won this format war. These two systems remained viable formats side-by-side until the digital compact disc, CD, almost put vinyl out of business.
Dateline June 21, 1969: The worst song ever released!!! On this day One Hit Wonders Zager & Evans release the biggest piece of crap in all of recorded music, and that includes “An Evening With Wild Man Fisher.” Ladies and gentlemen, I give you “In the Year 2525.” REMEMBER: I tried to warn you.

What’s your least favourite song?