The History of Television Through the Pages of Popular Science Magazine
"Television is going to be big, or it isn't going to be at all." The crack staff at Popular Science said this in 1944, and beyond the seeming obviousness of its either/or scenario, there's a lot to think about here.
The Jetsons promised us flying cars and sentient robots by 2062. 2001: A Space Odyssey promised galactic travel - beyond today's dinky power wheels stuck in mud up in Mars - that's now already a decade overdue. And while I've jumped into damn near 300 hot tubs since I first saw the trailer for Hot Tub Time Machine, Duran Duran is still socially unacceptable listening. Technology has totally failed us.
Except for the television. Where all other advancements have come to a grinding halt in our grayed, spark-less, impotent and crumbling-from-the-inside science and technology sector, television has, by all measures, delivered on its promise.
Looking back on 70+ years of Popular Science Magazine, we can trace the timeline of the TV as it grew from pipe dream radio descendant to the reason why people like Snookie and Dog The Bounty Hunter are rich instead of in jail. Think of it as an HD History Channel special. Just don't think of the alternative history.
September 1928 - The Real Facts About Television
Television! That was the lede, and how could they not have been excited? People were clamoring to know when they'd be able to watch "swiftly moving events." Though if they'd woken up from an 80-year coma just in time to see last week's Oscar ceremony, they'd still be disappointed. [Read the full text here.]
January 1929 - Your first Television Set
Back in the Great Depression, and before we had third world nations to do all our icky manual labor, you had to work if you wanted to watch television. Not that there was much on (and you thought winter Saturday figure skating was bad?), but if you wanted a glimpse of the future, it required sweat, a high quality radio and some neon tubes. Also, holding your thumb against a disk to keep the picture straight, and the ability to adjust motor rheostats, whatever that means. Already, we've moved way beyond this. Now you can order a television right from your television thanks to endless home shopping channels. Question: how many of you would watch TV if you had to build it? [Read the full text here.]
April 1934 - Myriads Dots of Light Give New Television
The cathode ray: the television technology for the "man in the street!" Man, they were so progressive those days, giving out TV to any old bum who wanted it. And in 1934, that was half the country. Really, this was television pointalism, with thousands of dots making up the picture. The kind of TV which us poor writers and media types still have. Suck it, plasma and LCD, we're retro-cool. [Read the full text here.]
December 1942 - Television Program Gives Housewives Hints from PSM
Before there were soap operas and Ellen Degeneres to keep the little lady occupied while she kept house, there was a gigantic, horribly sexist robot that coldly reminded women how to properly toil in domestic servitude. Oh, those were the days, a kinder and more gentler era! This very magazine broadcast 15-minute segments starring a hapless housewife who is inevitably rescued by a frightening Rosie Jetson/Ronald McDonald ancestor, who teaches the distressed woman how to take "a nail out of a door jamb without marring the wood, removing the base of a broken light without cutting or electrocuting herself, and... other feats." Forward thinking! [Read the full text here.]
August 1944 - Post-War Television
"Entertainment has remained the most important function of the mass communication services. It is important to instruct people, but in a nervous and complex civilization like ours it is even more important to amuse and thrill them." Suck it Tom Brokaw, even the Greatest Generation needed their Jersey Shore fix. Or something like that.
Here, the prediction is that with new technology, the small, poor pictured television of pre-war will blossom into a cutting edge entertainment medium, with live telecasts of sporting events and studio shows, all on a screen up to 24 inches. Technologists of the time were also predicting we'd be wiped off the face of the earth by the mighty Soviets, so let's be glad they batted .500 in the prediction game. Although many would argue the return of Leno was more or less a fulfillment of the latter prophecy.
Oh, and here's the first mention of cable, which was seen as prohibitively expensive versus broadcasting over the airwaves. Cablevision customers most definitely agreed, especially on Oscar night. [Read the full text here.]
February 1947 - Television on the Job
Not only does it bring corrupt quiz shows into the home, TV can be used to modernize and streamline industry and teach us about science stuff! Televisions used in factories help monitor workers, and direct feeding cameras dropped under the sea can help us discover things we've never seen before. Very prophetic: now when workers are fired because they've been caught slagging off on closed circuit TV or simply replaced by one guy who can monitor an entire factory, they can sit at home and watch Planet Earth: Deep Sea Caves stoned out of their minds. [Read the full text here.]
February 1949 - What You Need To Know About Television
By now, the galloping post card, as they called it (what?!), had fully transfixed the nation (and this pre-cable, mind you). "Children are transfixed into silence," they say, which I hate to break it to them, will end half a century later when Mighty Morphin Power Rangers encourages kids to act like assholes.
As a helpful buying guide, so readers can keep up with the Joneses (who seem so perfect, but really live in a trap suburban marriage that is killing them all from the inside), PSM offers a rule of thumb: a three inch screen ($100) is good for one person sitting a bit over a foot away, but it's the ten inch, $325 screen that is the hot seller. That's best for a family of three or four. If you want to entertain guests and somehow stashed money under your mattress during the war, spring for the $650 16-inch screen, which is good for an audience of seven or more sitting up to 96 inches from the screen!
Today, setting aside the wall-covering projection screen units because people who own these are assholes, the highest end TV on BestBuy.com is a 65 inch, HD LCD unit from Samsung, which will cost you a cool $4500. Which may seem like a lot, until you factor in inflation - a $650 charge in 1949 comes out to $5787 today. For a 16 inch screen, plus wooden cabinet. Then again, you can't get a combination television/record player/long and short wave radio these days. There's a surcharge on convenience. [Read the full text here.]
September 1951 - What Color Does For TV
So, wait. The world wasn't actually in black and white until the 1950s? People lived in full range of hue and television technology was simply too raw and unadvanced to capture the beautiful points on the light spectrum that colored our lives, then and now? Racial problems were more complicated than gray vs. darker gray? Well, shit. It must have been an exciting time when color TV came out.
Following the first color broadcast by CBS, a ballet whose signature pigmented moment came with a dancer's exchange of red roses for black (symbolizing death, which was a strange and morbid start), things started getting crazy for the TV consumer. Hell, you could "tell which team is which just by the colors of the uniforms," and see Ivan T. Sanderson's exotic birds' feathers. Literally, feathers of exotic birds; this was a wholesome time, so they say.
So much easier, broadcasting in color. Costumes considered by how the colors matched, not how they'd translate to black and white! Camera setups reduced 25-30 percent! It was a watershed time, and the new, color-enabled sets manufactured by a CBS subsidiary hit stores that fall. Of course, it'd take about 20 years and an uncomfortable mid-series transition in the Andy Griffith show to go fully mainstream, but without this technology, how would we fully appreciate the blanch of Edward Cullen's face when we're pummeled by the Twilight on Showtime commercial for the 400th time? [Read the full text here.]
February 1962 - Is Color TV Worth It?
What is that, you say? The proposition of color television? Ha! A mere passing trend, flashing opiates for the masses! Hardly a reason to replace the old, trusty tube and cabinet, what with its distinguished gray tones that produce classic, distinguished programming.
Wait, a 50's-era sex symbol, in flesh tones? Call up the Sears, honey, it's time to get that three man delivery/installation crew over here pronto! Oh, and have them leave the clearly labeled "color TV" box outside, right in front of the driveway, so all the neighbors can see it and hey, if they choose to do so, interpret it as a subtle shot in a hollow, passive-aggressive suburban consumer war. I'll be watching quiz shows - without having to adjust the antennae or color saturation! [Read the full text here.]
January 1973 - How 2-Way Cable TV Will Change Your Life
MITRE Corporation had a dream. Using a little push-button telephone, wired to a TV, you could retrieve news, balance bank accounts, make doctors appointments, find phone numbers and download pictures of funny puppies while masturbating to Japanese girls banging dinosaurs and keyboard-playing cats. Or something like that.
The earliest consumer internet was dawning, with "wired-city" connections laid out in Overland Park, Kansas and Orlando. Soon, everyone could check stocks and shop at home and work remotely from wired offices outside of cities. Agoraphobics and miserable suburb dwellers, this is all you!
Not sure anyone could have predicted the full breadth of the Internet's capability, but again, this is probably the only instance of the latter half of the 20th century that science was spot on. One Motorola executive even predicted Conan O'Brien's downfall and Gawker.TV, claiming the wired city will do away with the need for standard broadcast, and that we should set a date to close down all ordinary TV stations. Except for Fox News. Those viewers are still in the February 1949 section. [Read the full text here.]
December 1982 - Camera Chip Senses TV Images in Total Darkness
Infa-red camera technology: the ability to film in complete darkness. Little did they know, this is what would catapult Paris Hilton to international fame and acclaim. Thanks, scientists!
October 1983 - Hand-size, but here at last: flat-screen color TV
Here we go, the high flyin' 80's and the beginning of our descent into Japanese-fueled consumer hell! Bringing the technology from calculators to those pocket-sized, black and white UHF/VHF receiving televisions you'll now find as you clean out your grandfather's garage, Seiko and a host of industrious Japanese companies began producing the first color screen LCD TVs. Sure, they were tiny and largely impractical, but it took new types of liquid crystals and stuff to make it happen!
The Japanese expected a pretty penny for the convenience of watching a tiny, tiny screen in full color from your backyard or toilet seat - the Sony Watchman (the less successful and now embittered brother of the Walkman, natch) ran $350 ($744 in today's dollars) and the 007-inspired Seiko TV wristwatch set a giant geek back $499. [Read the full text here.]
November 1990 - Stay Tuned For Smart TV
Hate to see how they'd react to digital cable and satellite television; the SOS call from an overwhelming sea of 40 to 50 channels called desperately for help in making the increasingly impossible choice of what to watch. Bring in the robots, they had ESPN and superstations! [Read the full text here.]
Little color screens were cute and all, but the 90's were really the gateway period for our crippling (awesome) TV addiction. No longer content with paper TV listings and the Preview Channel (THEY STILL HAVE THIS?!?!), sufferers of "channelization" (this was a real ailment, apparently) needed help.
The stuff PSM predicted must have seemed straight up wacky. TV that offered digital menus of searchable programs? With the ability to record shows when asked - or even automatically? The brainpower to notice viewing trends and suggest new shows? Yeah, it came true - we call it digital TV and DVR. Now, anyone without TV like this is a social outcast, not to mention undateable.
But this is where we finally start to get disappointed by empty promises. PSM was offering visions of TV's with Apple-style icons that played CDs and uploaded album art (iTunes for TV?); and more bitterly missing of all, voice controlled DVR. If only we could be lazy enough to not even have to move our fingers to record shows we're too lazy to be awake to watch (sorry Conan!).
September 1991 - Little Dish TV
Saved by the Bell was in its campy hey-day, and rural folk would be damned if they couldn't join in with Zack and the Gang just because they removed themselves from society to the point that cable wires couldn't reach them. Even Thoreau needed Bayside.
So here came small dish satellite TV, bringing the base entertainment of regional superstations into the homes of even the boldest frontiersmen. While big satellites littered crazy people's homes since the 70s in America, the smaller dishes, new wavelengths and compression technology (boring!) was new to our shut ins and shut outs. With seven regional superstations and audio channels and access to Pay-Per-View movies, a $300 fee to buy a dish (or an installation and monthly rental fee) and a $35 monthly subscription was totally a great deal!
This was, however, an important development. The dish: how the west was won, and then reduced to a hollow landscape of boxed dinner-eating zombies crippled by years of Gilligan reruns.
November 1992 - Interactive Television
One could most certainly say that television, as we know it today, truly came of age in the early-to-mid 1990's. One would sound weird for assigning human characteristics to cold wires and theoretical technology, but nonetheless, it wouldn't be inaccurate. PSM devoted much of this issue to the TV technology that we're just beginning to fully appreciate today.
Actually, what PSM promised here was far more than what the television delivers today; some of that, like the stoner's dream of custom pizza ordering, the already-promised-twenty-years-ago online shopping and news aggregation, would be left to the internet. Add in the potential to subscribe to magazines beamed over the television, and holy crap, it's the first conceptual iPad! Suck it, Steve Jobs!
Also, digital signals began to replace the shitty "ghosting" analog broadcasts. Sure, it took 16 years, but here we are today, with clear screens (except for old people, who had the rug pulled out from under their crappy old TVs).
Finally, wide screen TVs. This was a bitch - it forced us to replace all of our DVDs because now we could see a bit more of the peripheral shot and if we didn't have wide screen, people wouldn't want to hang in our dorms and watch movies because clearly we didn't appreciate cinema enough. How else could Eternal Sunshine really be watched?
[Read the full text here.]
June 2005 - Holographic TV
So this was a misfire. Perhaps inspired by Princess Leia's desperate plea to Obi Wan bursting forth from R2D2's projector, scientists got to work bringing holograms to television. Instead of the Rebel Alliance, we ended up with Wolf Blitzer and Candy Crowley in our homes during the 2008 election. A rare misfire. [Read the full text here.]
September 2006 - TV Before Your Eyes
Let's be real here. Who wasn't beyond sick of having to strain their eyes to see a big screen a few feet away, let alone having to see things other than television shows?
Finally - Finally! - a solution to this horrible problem. TV glasses! The iCuiti iWear, released in 2005, plugged right into the video iPod to bring the look of a 35-inch TV a mere inch from a viewer's face. The catch: horrible social animus due to looking like you belong on the Starship Enterprise. But not to worry! By 2007, they'd have normal looking specs that beamed high definition video right into your eye!
That's what Lumus promised, but the technology isn't quite there yet. You still have to wear your geekiness on your sleeve and agree to abstain from any physical contact with the opposite gender to wear their TV glasses. But hey - porn beamed right into your eye, that's even better! [Read the full text here.]
March 2007 - The Other Cable TV
Internet marketplaces and set top boxes streaming shows directly from computer to television: how tech geeks are inadvertently killing traditional television, undercutting the hip shows we love and giving us more and more cheap reality TV! But, it's made by Apple, it has to be good, right?!
Ugh. Sorry Conan. And Arrested Development. And the rest of the world, for causing Jay Leno to come back. Our bad. [Read the full text here.]
This article was made possible by the wonderful free archives at Popular Science.
Jordan Zakarin is a full time web editor, freelance writer and founder of ridiculous websites WhyMyExSucks.com and SuperAwesomeIdeas.com. He's not good at telling jokes, grows patchy facial hair past three days and is available to write on any of a wide range of topics he is a certified expert in, from sports to entertainment to politics. He's appeared on television for SportsNet New York and likes to tell people that he was on PBS' Zoom as a child, though it's a blatant lie. You can find him at JordanZakarin.com.
The author of this post can be contacted at tips@gawker.tv
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3 dic 2010
The History of Television Through the Pages of Popular Science Magazine
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