I just screened the original version of The Fly the other night, and one line in particular has me a bit puzzled.
When Patricia Owens’ character tells Vincent Price that her husband is ready to demonstrate one of his new inventions, he asks, “The flat screen?”
What the hell? Has flat-screen television been coveted for that long? This was a full decade before the first simple plasma screens were developed! Was this a Hollywood dig at a perceived flaw in a threatening new technology?
Did I hear the line wrong? (I rewound it a couple of times, and I pretty sure that’s what he said.) Mssr. Delambre makes a goofy analogy between his “disintegrator-reintegrator” and broadcast television as well, so maybe it was posited as a parallel development.
I guess the general question is “When did flat-screen television become a development goal?”
During early TV experimentation they were imagining that successful TV would be like an array of marquee lights, but with very small bulbs. I think a few experimenters built flatscreen devices using arrays of tiny neon pilot lights. It was too expensive of course, and the Crystalline Valve hadn’t yet replaced Hollow State Electronics, so successful television ended up being mechanical:
Gallery: rotating-disk TV receivers http://www.earlytelevision.org/mechanical_gallery.html
I wonder how early it was that SF authors were having their characters observe the image of an approaching alien spacecraft on the “forward viewplate”?
Speaking of arrays of very small bulbs, how small can we make LEDs these days? Could we make a video monitor out of LEDs? I mean, we have red, green, and blue LEDs now, and that’s really all you need to get all the colors…
There are companies that manufacture displays using thin, tiny, flexible sheets of LEDs. There are all kinds of things they could be used for, like window TVs, flexible laptops, heads up displays in cars, and so on. http://www.universaldisplay.com/ among others.
There are companies that manufacture displays using thin, tiny, flexible sheets of LEDs. There are all kinds of things they could be used for, like window TVs, flexible laptops, heads up displays in cars, and so on. http://www.universaldisplay.com/ among others.
bbeaty, E. E. “Doc” Smith made mention of it in some of his Skylark books which date from the early 1920’s or so. I doubt he was the first, I imagine that honor would go to either Welles or Verne (though one could make the argument that some of the ancient myths had such a device in them that operated through magic instead of technology).
The word “television” was actually invented in the novel Ralph 124C 41+ by Hugo Gernsback in 1911. I believe there were vague ideas about how something like television might work in the late 19th century (with mechanical components and transmission over wires). I recall seeing several '50’s SF movies with things that we might now call flat-screen television, always faked with bad special effects.
I don’t think that Hugo “invented” the word although he probably helped to popularize it.
The OED cites it first in 1907 in Scientific American. And in another publication in 1909. And actually “televista” meaning the same process was from 1904. It was an exciting technology which was being developed.
I forgot to check the OED. Other sources I’ve read claimed that it was Gernsback that first created the word, but clearly they’re wrong. It’s derived in an obvious way from “telephone” and “telegraph,” so it may be an independent creation by Gernsback.
Golly, and I thought James Joyce was being prescient when he wrote about a stump speech being “televised and distributed via talk-tapes” in Finnegans Wake.
At any rate, the word harkens back to the days when new words had obvious meanings because of their simple greek or latinate etymologies- A convention that’s been all but destroyed by hare-brained and subliterate marketing droids. Feh.
BBC Television had gone on the air in November 1936, three years before Finnegan’s Wake was published.
The BBC and the German radio authority RRG had been using magnetic tape recordings for its radio broadcasts since the mid-1930s. So these were existing technologies for Joyce.
The problem with early fictional illustrations of television is that it was usually shown as a large screen embedded in a wall. Whether it was truely a flat screen, or whether there was a giant orthicon tube behind it, we can’t tell. Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) has a giant screen TV in the factory washroom that the boss appears on to berate Chaplin for dwadling.
Lodge also believed in ether, long after Einstein’s theories had disproved it. However, in this particular case his predictions were quite accurate, and no doubt he would have been happy that the U.S., rather than Germany, would be the first to developed atomic weapons.
I also forgot to mention that the Gernsback quote on TV glasses included an illustration that said the TV pictures would be in 3D.
Ah, yes. In the first book, The Skylark of Space, E. E. “Doc” Smith conceived of:[ul][li]Arenak, a transparent metal 500 times harder and stronger than the hardest and strongest steel;[/li][li]Mind reading devices that could scan the neurons of a living brain and thereby acquire all knowledge stored in said brain in a matter of minutes;[/li][li]Metal X, a mystery metal which, when exposed to an X-ray source, could turn any copper it was in contact with directly and totally into energy at the staggering rate of E = mc[sup]2[/sup];[/li][li]Faster-than-light space ships that could simply ignore Einstein’s laws of relativity; … and …[/li][li]… FLAT-SCREEN TV?![/ul][/li]<singing> One of these things is not like the others…