Posted by qassiov 1/26/2026
After making the call he noticed the crowd was still there so he parked his car and decided to investigate. There was a black and white TV broadcasting a Detroit Tigers game in the window of a radio repair shop. He told me that he came away impressed.
The family stayed with black and white until the late seventies. I remember the entire family watching the first moon landing. For the longest time I didn't know whether NASA was recording in color or not ;<).
It's not their exact words and I also forgot who said it. It's probably better for them we don't remember.
We never had the TV set in the lounge - it was meant for special occasions like tea and cake for family gatherings.
We still have a TV but it hardly used - everybody has iPads in the house.
When I get depressed and look out at the world, I'm actually amazed at what I'm living through—the internet, space travel, electric and autonomous cars, smartphones. It's really amazing.
Perhaps someday we'll have individualized space flight like we have ownership over our cars and private planes.
Don't know what you're getting at by saying the galaxy will be ruled by mega-corps. Seems pretty democratic so far, and most of the things achieved couldn't have been without organization.
All of these rapid technological advancements are a function of tremendous increases in energy available .
We passed peak conventional oil years ago and only see proven reserves increase because we redefined 'shale oil' as included under proven reserves. But shale oil has much lower EROEI than traditional oil. We can already see geopolitics heating up before our eyes to capture and control what remains, but to continue to advance society we need more energy.
On top of this we are just now starting to feel the impacts of the effects of the byproducts of this energy usage: climate change. What we are experiencing now is only a slight hint of what is to come in recent years.
In the next 80 years we'll very likely see an incredible decline in technology as certain complex systems no longer have adequate energy to maintain. The climate will continue to worsen and in more extreme ways, while geopolitics melts down in a struggle for the last bits of oil and fossil fuels (interestingly these combine in the fight for Greenland because a soon-to-be ice free arctic holds lots of oil, not enough to advance civilization the way it has been going, but enough to keep yours running if you can keep everyone else away).
I sincerely suspect within the next 80 years we will see the full collapse of industrial civilization and very possibly the near or complete extinction of the human race. You can see the early stages of this beginning to unfold right now.
There was a prototype 819-line analogue ''high definition'' system used to record The T.A.M.I. Show in 1964, with excellent results, but the recordings were committed to film for distribution since there was no apparatus for broadcasting it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.A.M.I._Show
There were also experiments by NHK of Japan with analogue HD broadcasting, but digital TV was so close on the horizon that it was mooted.
''High definition'' has been a relative term in the professional TV world all along, but became consumer buzzwords with the advent of digital TV in the early 2000's. Nowadays we know it to mean 720, 1080, or higher lines, usually in progressive scan.
Yet motion pictures are still stuck at 24 FPS to this day and there are even people who have strong opinions about this being a good thing.
Also just because NTSC was 29.97 Hz doesn't mean that the video content actually was - almost everything shot on film was actually effectively 23.97 Hz - telecined to 59.94 fields per second but that doesn't actually change the number of unique full frames.
As an example, the Wright brothers built a biplane that had wing warping instead of ailerons and a canard design. That bears little resemblance to most modern airplanes, but people have little trouble crediting it as “the invention of the airplane” —- questions of whether the Wrights were first or not notwithstanding.
Can ”TV” be thus simplified so that an electromechanical device with spinning discs qualifies?
Which the Wrights did with both controlled and powered in the 1903 Flyer.
(The Wrights invented the first 3-axis control system, and designed & built the first aviation engine capable of sustained flight.)
While the Wrights were first, by several years, its invention was inevitable.
Maybe? But most people think of it as "invented the airplane," and the two terms have different connotations in common use. Likewise, the title here says "television," not "real-time capture, transmission, and display of moving images" -- and similarly, I think the terms have different connotations.
There were precursors to Edison's light bulb, and people use that to denigrate Edison's achievement. But the technical reality of the Edison bulb is his bulb was practical, and the precursors were just curiosities.
Sure, and (as far as I know) Edison's basic pattern at discovery was much the same as what we use today (less so these days obviously):
1. Fill a sealed container with non-reactive gas or vacuum
2. String something conductive and heat-tolerant through it
3. Run enough current through it to make the thing glow
I think a system that involves mechanical elements is farther from what most people think of when they think "TV"