2008 Issue

UTAH ENGINEERS COUNCIL JOURNAL 41 TELEVISION — continued use. Farnsworth’s contributions (photo- multipliers, image intensifiers, sniper-scopes etc.) were fully engaged, but their origin not well recognized. The end of the War saw Szegho, his re- search lab, Al Buttino (Philo’s expert glass blower), a half dozen of Radar’s indicator experts and a fully working CRT plant all scrambling to put TV on the market. Szegho had 60 patents. He contributed a score of CRT advancements. Few have ever heard of him. That applied as well to other workers and companies. RCA was claiming the credit, which continued even through the introduction of Color TV. The fifth major showing of TV occurred in 1946. Two large (about 36 inch) rear projection sets were made at Rauland. One was put in the studio so that audiences could see the picture right alongside the action. The other was put in one of those famous Carson Perie and Scott windows facing State Street. TV would be shown on Christmas Eve. Although the set performed flawlessly, the view looking out that window was better than that looking in. The street was chock full of people steadily marching toward that window, and they stretched as far as the eye could see. A further example will illustrate how things sometimes actually worked. At the War’s end a company much into audio, mov- ies, and with an eye to TV, set up General Precision Laboratory in Pleasantville, NY. It was staffed with people from the MIT Radiation Laboratory which had developed micro-wave Radar, especially its CRT indi- cators. The company developed products for TV, principally studio equipment and industrial TV. It introduced 1000 line high resolution TV (Hi-Rez) for closed circuit use long before HDTV appeared. As color TV achieved reality there came the need for a color film recorder. It would scan the film to provide the stream of red, green, and blue video signals. That would be a good product and the decision was made to manufacture it. Even before development, ABC put in an order for the first 2 units. A demo pro- totype was added and development began. The machine had difficult challenges but in due course three production prototypes emerged. The next step was to generate sales; that is done by demonstrations at trade shows. Only one competitive machine – from RCA – emerged. The demonstration made clear to all that the GPL machine was smaller, simpler and more reliable; but it also had noticeably higher performance. The sales should have come in quickly, but they did not. The grapevine revealed that potential customers were quietly reminded that they depended on RCA for a lot of customer ser- vice. Perhaps they did not want to abandon it. I’m not sure, but I believe that even the two units ABC ordered were cancelled. Recall that ABC was separated from RCA to eliminate monopoly. Yet in practice they could not make a simple internal decision. In the age after TV development and before IC logic, IC memory and computers had sufficiently developed, there were many demands which could be implemented using the CRT and the Image Dissector. Only a fraction of them were developed but that fraction could do an amaz- ing range of tasks. To note just a few - both character generation and recognition (document reading) started with the Dissector. It did industrials and laboratory measurements, astronomi- cal, microscope and medi- cal tasks. It was used in guided missile development and even was used to mea- sure the speed and path of SDI anti-missile missiles. But Farnsworth envisioned TV for a lot more useful things than just entertain- ment and we will close with one of the most important. He had become a skeptic. Then he saw the picture of Armstrong on the moon through his camera and declared this has made it all worth while! What he and many others did not fully know was that TV had done much more. Its monitors and controls had guided and watched over every step on the path to the moon; and the astronauts were not leaping into the unknown. They had experienced and learned every step of that path, mostly on high resolution TV type simulators. As color TV achieved reality there came the need for a color film recorder. It would scan the film to provide the stream of red, green, and blue video signals.