Friday, October 29, 2010

Early TV

I just realized I was a bit hazy on exactly when television started. I had the feeling it was maybe around 1950, but that's only when it became mainstream. Both Europe and the US actually had TV in the thirties! It was just very, very low-fidelity, and way expensive. And nation-wide broadcasts only came to the US in 1951. Nation-wide anything is a big deal in the US because the country is so dang friggin' huge. In Denmark, which you can drive across in like five hours after the latest bridge was built not long ago (one of the world's longest), anything is "nation-wide" from the start, almost. Well, there are local newspapers, though I wonder how they are doing these days. ... Not so great for my own town it seems, the paper they used to have doesn't even have their own web site, seems the paper was "et up" by a bigger one servicing all the towns on Sealand (Sjælland, the island where Copenhagen is), I guess it's gone.

1 comment:

Marcelo Metayer said...

In The Three Stooges episode "A Plumbing We Will Go", shot in 1940, they get into a luxurious house to fix some water pipes. In the mansion, as a new wonder of technology, there is a TV set, with a round screen. Quote from Wikipedia: "Meanwhile, in the living room, the host is showing the crowd her new television set. They tune into a broadcast coming from Niagara Falls, and water pours out of the television's now-broken screen."