Television, A Revolution in Communications.

It’s a disturbing thing to watch the Television shows coming out of the FBU. The use of pre-recorded laughter to demarcate what the audience is meant to find funny speaks volumes about their highly atomised society that TV producers must artificially create the same experience that any American takes for granted when watching a show with their Genosse. - American TV critic Robert Lloyd​

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As a steward of the public’s airwaves, I believe it is both our right and our duty to ensure that the programmes that we have been entrusted to allow into every single home are of proper moral character. - EBC Commissioner of Programme Standards (1968-1989) Mary Whitehouse.​

Perhaps no technology did more to shape the postwar cultural divides between the Alliance of Free States and the Communist International than the invention of Television. Where each bloc had a roughly equivalent experience with the artform of the cinema, it was with television that the UASR and FBU would diverge sharply, both in how the technology of television was approached and the artform of the television broadcast was presented.

If one is to understand how the same technology could diverge so sharply, it becomes necessary to understand the conditions that allowed Television to thrive after the war. Indeed, ever asking a Brit and an American to draw a picture of an old television set would get you sharply different answers.

To a Brit in the 1950’s, a television was a box with a glass screen that sat in a house’s drawing room. Whereas to an American, a television was a type of projector that would display live video.

If you ask somebody who invented television, you’ll get a multitude of answers. If you ask a Brit, they’ll say Issac Shoenberg. If you ask an American, they’ll say it was John Logie Baird and Philo Farnsworth. If you asked a West German, they’d tell you it was Vladimir Zworykin. And if you asked a Russian, they’d say that it was Constantin Perskyi.

The story of television in the UASR can be traced to two people. Philo Farnsworth and John Logie Baird.

John Logie Baird, The Father of Television

Born in 1888, John Logie Baird was the youngest son of a Scottish Presbyterian Minister. In his childhood, Baird frequently struggled with bouts of illness growing up, with flare-ups that would leave him incapacitated for weeks at a time. Baird was an inventor from early on; as a boy he had built a battery operated telephone network between his home and the homes of his friends, and had even managed to wire up his family’s home with electricity well before their town would be electrified.

Baird’s desire to invent had eventually led him to Trinidad and Tobago in 1919, where he began operating a business selling jams and preserves of tropical fruits, as in the days before refrigeration, most fruit could not be transported to Europe before spoiling. It was here that a chance encounter with some visiting American socialists who had helped him defuse a tense labor standoff between Baird and his Tobagoian workers would prove to be a key turning point in Baird’s life.[1]

Two years later, with his health issues flaring up again, Baird was forced to return to Britain. Leaving his fruit preserve business in the hands of his employees, and having built up a considerable sum of money owing to his personal thrift, was able to live comfortably in Hastings where he could dedicate himself to his inventions full time.

It was here in Hastings that Baird had encountered the works of German inventor Paul Julius Gottlieb Nipkow. Specifically Nipkow’s interest in the use of a selenium cell which could be used to transmit images of light using electricity. A concept that Russian scientist Constantin Perskyi had termed “Télévision” from the Greek root “tele” for distance and the Latin root “visio” for sight.

Baird’s initial experiments with Television were an electromechanical system that used a rotating disc for both scanning and projection.[2]

Baird’s early mechanical Television sets were noisy, unreliable and were only capable of producing a handful of lines in resolution. These problems were further compounded by the fact that the earliest mechanical television cameras required massive amounts of light to operate.

One of Baird’s first improvements was the flying spot system, which massively reduced the amount of light required to get an image. Rather than illuminating the subject and collecting the light reflected off the subject into the camera, Baird’s flying spot system placed the light source behind the lens of the camera and the photodetectors outside the camera. The system in operation then would create a narrow beam of light that would fly across the subject’s to illuminate it in a specific spot, where the selenium photodiodes would convert the light into electricity and transmit it to the receiver.

Baird’s work was stymied by the lack of materials, particularly selenium photodiodes were in short supply and of noticeably poor quality in Hastings. But JLB refused to be deterred in his pursuit of moving images. He worked to squeeze more and more light sensitivity out of selenium photodiodes and in mechanical improvements to the Nipkow discs to improve the resolution and clarity of the projected images.

His efforts yielded fruit in 1925 when he successfully demonstrated his system at a Selfridge’s Department Store in London. The wireless transmission of images, as crude as the early systems were, managed to win over the crowd.

Baird’s demonstrations of television grew in spectacle and complexity. In 1926 Baird was able to demonstrate what he had termed “Noctovision,” an infrared camera system that was capable of penetrating through fog and smoke. In May of 1927, Baird was successfully able to demonstrate a wire-line transmission from London to Glasgow. By 1928 JLB had been able to achieve transmission of images using natural light, without any need for supplemental illumination, as well as demonstrations of both color and stereoscoping televised images using his electromechanical system.

Baird’s demonstrations of television had made him a darling of the press outside of Britain, but press coverage inside of his home country was next to non-existent. By 1930, Baird had felt that his Television system was commercially ready.

At the time, the British Broadcasting Company was the sole operator of radio transmitters, and for Baird’s television to be able to be adopted by the masses, he needed the help of the BBC to allow for Television programming.

The head of the BBC at the time was John Reith, who had been a childhood classmate and bully of Baird. Under Reith’s tenure, the BBC steadfastly refused to allocate broadcasting time for an invention that they had deemed to be commercially unviable.

After giving serious consideration to petitioning the Postmaster General to make the BBC give him a chance, Baird decided to seek out better prospects for television abroad.[3] After a brief tour of Europe, which he met with a Russian exile in Germany who had been working on his own television system, Vladimir Zworykin.[4] Zworykin’s frustrated description of a “second rate copy of [his own] work that had been stolen by the US Navy” called the Image Dissector had intrigued Baird, and so in May of 1933, as the second civil was winding down, John Logie Baird boarded a steamship from Cork Ireland to Halifax Nova Scotia, and from Halifax he made his way to the newly established Union of American Socialist Republics.

Philo Farnsworth, The Father of Electronic Television

Philo Farnsworth was born in 1906 to a Mormon Family as the eldest of several boys. From an early age he was fascinated by the potential of electricity, and envisioned how it might revolutionize daily life. As an adolescent, Farnsworth was an adept hand around electricity, repairing a burnt out electric motor and using it to turn his mothers hand washer into an electric washing machine.

As a high school student, Farnsworth had sketched out an electronic television system, and had even shown it to his high school science teacher, who further encouraged him to continue his work.

Having graduated high school, he followed his father’s advice and joined the US Naval Academy in Annapolis Maryland[5]. As a student of the Naval Academy, Farnsworth excelled in math and engineering. His interest though, would be towards electronic television.

Having caught the eye of the USNA’s Dean of Engineering, in 1927 the Naval Academy allowed Farnsworth to set up a demonstration of his electronic television system.

Over the summer of 1927, Farnsworth and a team of engineering students at the US Naval Academy hammered away at the problem, turning Philo’s sketches and schematics into a working television system. Tests were done and refinements made.

Finally on August 6th, 1927, to an audience of faculty, Philo T. Farnsworth demonstrated the first ever full-electronic television system, wirelessly broadcasting a images of the Naval Academy’s crest, followed by a live shot of the USS Reina Mercedes cruising across Chesapeake Bay from a transmission station across the bay in Stevensville.

The demonstration of Farnsworth’s invention had been a tremendous success, with a repeat demonstration, this time one that had Farnsworth show a series of silhouette images of various ship types, to demonstrate the value of sending a television camera with a forward observer to transmit live images back to a fleet.

While there had been many who had demonstrated electromechanical television systems, Farnsworth’s all-electronic system had the potential for miniaturization, which is what drew the Navy’s attention.

With the approval of the US Naval Academy’s Engineering Faculty, Farnsworth was able to continue his work on television, making gradual improvements to the image dissector tube that increased its sensitivity to light and as well as reducing size and weight.

In 1929, Farnsworth arranged another demonstration of his improved Image Dissector system, this time to an audience from the Naval Research Laboratory. Farnsworth’s demonstration this time was a wireless broadcast from his research lab at the US Naval Academy to a receiver at the NRL. In the short demonstration, one of Farnsworth’s assistants spoke into camera along with a microphone that had been connected to a radio transmitter. The radio transmitter had been a standard shortwave radio set, but by having a shortwave radio set up alongside the television set that had been tuned to it, Farnsworth had demonstrated synchronized audio and video.

It was a simple trick, but it had completely changed how the NRL had seen this television thing. Now it was more than just remote transmission of images, but a way to speak face to face over a distance.

The demonstration had impressed the Naval Research Laboratory, and in 1929, Ensign Philo Farnsworth joined the Naval Research Laboratory in order to continue work on his Television project.

While Farnsworth worked on improvements to the image dissector, another engineer by the Name of Vladimir Zworykin had been working on a similar electronic television system for Westinghouse before being personally hired away in 1930 by David Sarnoff to work at Marconi Wireless Music Company’s research and development division in Camden, New Jersey to create a television system.

Zworykin had been developing his own version of electronic television, with a pickup tube called an “Iconoscope” that was used to convert light into electrical signals and a cathode ray tube display known as a “kinescope.” While Zworykin had a design that theoretically could work, he had yet to have a practical demonstration of his system, unlike Farnsworth.

On March 22nd 1931, Zworykin finally made a successful demonstration of his Iconoscope image sensor and Kinescope display to David Sarnoff and the other executive officers at Marconi.

The image was noisy and lacked contrast, but it worked.

An apocryphal quote that has made its way into many retellings of the story, After seeing Zworykin’s Iconoscope demonstration, Sarnoff simply said three words, “Good, it worked.”

Zworykin was given an increased budget and a larger staff, at the cost of an urgent deadline. Sarnoff wanted the opening ceremonies for the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles to be the event broadcast by television. WIth a deadline that was little more than a year away Zworykin was under pressure from Marconi to deliver a working system for the games.

With Camden working on the Iconoscope and the NRL in Washington working on the image dissector, it was only a matter of time before the two collided.

That collision came in October of 1931, when Zworykin filed suit against the US Navy for patent infringement. Zworykin alleged that Farnsworth’s image dissector tube was a reverse engineered copy of his own Iconoscope. Zworykin and the Marconi Wireless Music Company demanded that Farnsworth cease work on the image dissector as Marconi was already working on it, and that the Navy should have just licensed Zworykin’s work rather than, as he claimed, reverse engineered his work in order to produce an inferior copy.

The Navy quickly fired back on behalf of Ensign Farnsworth, and soon dug up every detail of his work on Electronic Television, going as far as to solicit statements from his former high school science teachers to prove that he had the idea for electronic television well before Zworykin.

Zworykin had claimed that he had the original idea back in Russia, but that his notes and research were destroyed in the Russian Civil War. The earliest record of Zworykin working on the Iconoscope at Westinghouse was a demo in 1926, where he had shown a diagram of a television system to executives at Westinghouse who told him to focus on more practical matters. Notably, none of the tests or demos at Westinghouse involved a working television system, unlike Farnsworth’s successful 1927 test.

While Marconi was able to put their considerable legal weight behind Zworykin, the weight the US Navy had been able to put behind Farnsworth was even greater, and in August of 1932, the court ruled in favor of Farnsworth and the Navy. Farnsworth’s image dissector had pre-dated Zworykin and the Navy could continue to develop electronic television.

With the patent court’s ruling, Zworykin could have continued his work on the iconoscope at Marconi, but Marconi’s management was resentful of Zworykin for getting them into this situation and costing them the Los Angeles Olympics, as they believed that Zworykin’s insistence on taking Farnsworth to court had delayed work on the iconoscope project so much that Marconi was unable to inaugurate television broadcasting with the Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

On October 2nd, 1932, Vladimir Zworykin was fired from the Marconi Wireless Music Company.

A month later, Zworykin boarded a steamer bound for Hamburg Germany, where he soon fell into the employment of Telefunken, who wanted to Televise the opening ceremonies of the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin.

Television After the Revolution

As the guns fell silent on the May revolution, those working on Television awoke to a new reality. The Naval Research Laboratory was now the Workers and Farmers Revolutionary Navy Research Institute.

The newly christened WFRN still wanted Farnsworth to continue his work on television, as they had seen multiple applications for the remote viewing technology. Some saw it as a way to improve bombing accuracy by placing a television camera inside the nose of the bomb and allowing a bombadier to remotely guide the bomb towards a targeted ship, or for a forward observer to carry a television camera and transmit images of an enemy fleet back in real time for targeting.

John Logie Baird, newly arrived from Halifax, made a beeline for Debs-DeLeon to meet with Farnsworth to discuss collaboration. While the two men initially got off to a rocky start, Baird was fascinated in Farnsworth Image dissector while Farnsworth was more interested in Baird’s flying spot method for use in converting 35mm and 16mm film into a television broadcast.

With the legal dispute between Farnsworth and Zworykin mooted by Zworykin’s self-imposed exile in Germany, and the revolution, the research into Television that Zworykin had done at the former laboratory in Camden New Jersey was sent over to Farnsworth and Baird in DC.

With this new research, Farnsworth was able to design a new image pickup mechanism that combined parts of his own Image Dissector tube and Zworykin’s Iconoscope to create the Orthicon tube, so named because of a set of focusing magnets near the picture element that deflect the electrons to be orthogonal to the imaging surface. While the requirement for bright lighting hadn’t been solved yet, the images produced by the Orthicon were vastly less noisy than the original Iconoscope thanks in large part to the work of a former Marconi engineer named Albert Rose.

First demonstrated in 1935, the Orthicon tube offered clear pictures, but the WFRN was losing patience with Farnsworth. They wanted practical applications, while Farnsworth and his team were still trying to perfect the fundamentals. The Workers and Farmers Revolutionary Navy was focused on rebuilding the ships that had been scuttled or lost in the Civil War. Farnsworth’s experiments with Television, while promising, had yet to be incorporated into a practical application that they could use.

On January 1st, 1936, the WFRN’s Television Lab was placed on indefinite hold and Farnsworth was reassigned to work on the development of RADAR systems. Baird and Rose relocated their work to Camden in order to continue their work into developing television. While Farnsworth was unable to make a tv camera would function in the lighting conditions asked for, several image dissector based cameras did make their way into WFRN ships for the purposes of monitoring boilers and furnaces, their insensitivity to light here being a feature and not a problem to be solved.

Meanwhile across the Atlantic, Zworykin had been tapped by Telefunken to create a television system for the domestic market. His first work upon arrival in Berlin was to create the Superikonoskop , an improved version of the Iconoscope that provided clearer pictures through the use of coatings designed to induce the emission of secondary electrons.

By 1936, Zworykin had a camera tube that was commercially viable, and Telefunken had Cathode Ray Tube displays in commercial production. In magazine advertisements, posters, and store displays, no proper Aryan home could be without a Volkfernsehapparat. Germany’s Deutscher Fernseh-Rundfunk (DFR) soon began broadcasting 90 minutes of content three days a week from the DFR studios located at Fernsehsender Paul Nipkow (Paul Nipkow Broadcast Center) in Berlin. Due to the expense of the early television sets, Fernsehsalons (television parlors) opened around Berlin which offered places for people to go and see the wonder of the real time moving image.

In Britain, John Reith, the General Manager of the BBC, had been one of the strongest opponents to allowing television to share the BBC’s airwaves. But after a visit to Germany in 1936 to visit the Paul Nipkow Broadcast Centre and the number of television parlours in Berlin, Reith, a man who was already an admitted admirer of fascism, was a convert to the power of Television.

Not to be outdone by the DFR, the BBC itself had been developing their own Television system under the aegis of Issac Shoenberg, a Jewish emigre who had come to the UK from Russia in 1914 and who had been a naturalized subject since 1919. Shoenberg was an employee of the Marconi company, who had a patent license from their former US branch to use Zworykin’s work on the Iconoscope. Working under the tight deadlines, Shoenberg developed a 405 line television system for the BBC using license copies of Zworykin’s original iconoscope designs.

By November of 1936, the BBC’s own television broadcasting was ready, broadcasting out of a converted wing of Alexandria Palace in London.

The initial broadcast was a newsreel from British Movietone News, followed by a live variety programme featuring Adele Dixon singing a specially composed song, “Television” alongside Buck and Bubbles, a comedy and dancing group. This in turn was followed by a selection of 16mm and 35mm films, including a specially made documentary film called “Television Comes to London,” the very first BBC television documentary.

The broadcast was a success and members of the British bourgeoisie began buying television sets so as to show off the newest technology. For members of the proletariat though, the cost of owning a television set was prohibitively expensive, and thus they would be forced to frequent Television Parlours around London.

As the BBC’s television broadcasts grew in popularity, the signal power used went higher and higher, soon blanketing the entire country and beyond, with 405 line broadcasts being received around continental Europe. In one memorable instance in November of 1938, a rare incidence of upper atmospheric weather conditions allowed the BBC’s 405 line signal to be picked up by researchers working at a Television Research Lab in the Metropolis ASR.[6]

The BBC would continue their television broadcasts up until the British Declaration of War against Germany on February 14th, 1942, with the last programme broadcast before the war an “Oswald the Lucky Rabbit” cartoon short.[7]

Fearing that German bomber pilots would use the radio signals emitted by the BBC transmitters to locate London itself, all television broadcasting was shut off and the BBC’s Radio broadcasting was moved out of London, first to Bristol, then to Bedford. From here, the newly-christened Entente Broadcasting Company sent its message of resilience and resistance to the French people struggling under Petain’s occupation.

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[1] While everything else about Baird’s life is accurate up to this point, IOTL there was no labor dispute and Baird came back to Britain after 18 months, having closed his business making fruit preserves and bringing the remaining stock back to Britain.

[2] For a video explanation of how Baird’s Mechanical Television worked, please watch this video by Technology Connections:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5OANXk-6-w

[3] Here is the major divergence in his story. After being rejected by the BBC, Baird IOTL went to the Postmaster General and forced the BBC to allocate broadcasting time for his Television, which they reluctantly did.

[4] IOTL Zworykin had fought for the Whites in the Russian Civil War and was abroad in America when the Omsk Government fell.

[5] Here is a major divergence for Farnsworth’s life. IOTL, his father had passed away from Pneumonia in 1924. Here, that doesn’t happen, as a consequence, Farnsworth does not leave the Navy within months of joining like he did IOTL.

[6] This actually happened IOTL:
View: https://youtu.be/0kk0ytK_nqA

[7] IOTL the last BBC TV broadcast before the war was a Mickey Mouse short film. IOTL the BBC stopped broadcasting television in September of 1939 after Britain declared war on Germany. *[WPA]: Works Progress Administration *[NBI]: National Bureau of Investigation