Radio Pictures

 

 

WHAT THE MOVIES DID, around the corner, for a quarter, television came to your house and, in any room you wanted—living room, kitchen, bedroom—did for free.

All the science fiction stories of the ’20s and ’30s dealt with television (a word coined by Hugo Gernsback) as this great medium that would bring high-tone radio programming—opera, great plays and novels, educational shows—into your home, with pictures.

You would be enlightened, ennobled: you could see great actors and actresses, the world’s greatest plays; far-off places, scientists, philosophers, all at the touch of a button and the click of a dial.

They envisioned enlightenment streaming from the great broadcasting centers and (even before Arthur C. Clarke thought of geosynchronous communications satellites) events broadcast simultaneously around the world. You could go anywhere, see anything, never leave home. The wonders of the world would come to you.

So how did we get Mr. Ed, a horse, selling you oats? My Mother the Car? The Love Boat? American Gladiators? Johnnie LaRue’s Jumping for Dollars? Who was responsible? How had the dream gone so bad in so few years?

Along with all that great stuff it was capable of (and there has been plenty) it has probably served up more steaming heaps of caca than have been shoveled in the history of the planet, even more than the movies could ever dream

Where had those dreams of the uplifters gone?

What follows are attempts at a stammering explanation in this hydrogenous age, as Dylan Thomas used to say before he croaked at age thirty-nine . . .

 

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As soon as there was photography, there was an attempt to make the picture move. Motion pictures were one answer—all the experiments of Muybridge, Friese-Greene, the Lumières, Edison, the invention of the Maltese Cross and the loop, to cause the camera (and the projector, which at one time were the same machine) to pause at the precise point to add to the persistence of vision at 1/24th of a second.

Parallel to this, and once photoactive chemicals were found, others tried to find a way to instill motion some other way. They knew it involved holding an image a fraction of a second, then the next image, and so on. They knew it probably involved electricity. Their experiments are almost as old as photography. (Go find and read R.A. Lafferty’s brilliant take on this in “Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies,” which originally appeared in the late Terry Carr’s Universe 8.) They tried them all: selenium, all the other -iums which take a charge, become luminescent, and can be made to hold an image.

Making it move was another matter. Anything which electrically disrupted the image also obliterated it. Hence the slow development of all kinds of systems, electrical and electronic, mechanical, or a combination of the two, some of which are described in the following three forays.

A few months after I’d meticulously researched, from hundreds of places, the backgrounds for the first two of these stories—voilà! There are big-ass books and two television series that put it all together, in one place, at one time; easy pickin’s. My method was more fun and wasted lots more time, and I got most of it right.

So, as I said, here’s to all the old SF writers who envisioned the uplift of the (human) race through broadcasting, who wanted a future where great culture was yours at the flick of a switch. And to all the mad Russians in their mothers’ basements (Zwyorkin) and Idaho ploughboys seeing in the contours of a field the way to make an image appear on a phosphor-dot screen (Philo T. Farnsworth) and Scots who got so close, and had the thing that could have worked, a good mechanical TV, up and broadcasting, only to take one look at the all-electric orthicon tube, and see the jig was up; he saw the Future, and he wasn’t in it (John Logie Baird).

And dozens of others, whose lives were heartbreak and who died unknown somewhere, the places where people laugh when the children say, “My father invented television.” For the bitterly ironic thing is, they’re telling the truth.