Pre-war Television 1937

[whitedaddy4u]

Ahhh, that BBC "Enunciated English", even the woman singing. LOL.

[pmscott6135]

Yes, the 405 line system seen here used very similar structure to the 625 and 525 systems that are still in use today. Vertical line scan was really a facet of the mechanical era of Baird or Jenkins et al.

The 405 line system that provided public television broadcasting for the BBC from November 1936 was in continuous operation, barring WWII, up and until 1984.

[flvnow]

Was this a vertical scan unit or horizontal as per the USA & German sets. Pity there aren't any of the projection sets of the era still around

[pmscott6135]

Perhaps, but we live in very different era.

[willianOr1]

mais que merda de programação,

[pmscott6135]

You are right. There is next to no recorded material from British pre-war television broadcasts. This video show a few exerts from a demonstration film.The acts shown

did appear on television but what you are seeing was captured by a film camera and not a television camera. The film was made in 1937.

[wellohmeeeeeee]

Is this a film showing? - made at the time about TV, or a recording of the contemporary broadcasting TV edited together? or filmed TV ? hope that clear.

I thought no TV actually exsisted as video tape or equivlt did not exsist?

[robertrivasphotos]

the reason those sets did not sell well is because cats would jump on the console and place their tails whenever Bob Hope was on! ; )

[goombabear]

cool

[hotsickle]

OInK !

[NESHero]

@TheAwesomeGameGuy202 I think you can yes, through an ariel adaptor (RF is it called?).

I maybe wrong.

[AidanLunn]

@TheAwesomeGameGuy202 yup - I think Aurora 625 - 405 line standards converters have a composite video input, which is outputted from all the consoles you mention.

[AidanLunn]

The 2 people who dislike this prefer their El Crappo LCD sets.

[Muzikman127]

@TheAwesomeGameGuy202 yeah and in full HD!

[borgduck]

We owe a lot to these pioneers!

[pmscott6135]

Yes, any type of video source than can be displayed on present day 625 line televisions can be displayed on this 1937 television. The picture will not be in colour though.

[natedash11]

@pmscott6135 i always wanted to play video games on an old tv.

[Tom3421]

@pmscott6135 When was created first color tv in history and where in USA or GB ? I know the beginning of making color movies in GB was about 1920.

[jammerbarn]

Wow, I can really tell you put some time and talent putting this video together. Great TV. I want one ! I didn't know there was broadcast tv before WWII. Guess I remember seeing the mickey mouse thing once, but just assumed it was for a worlds fair of the future or something. Thank You for making this.

[JoeyJoeJoe5000]

Man, I am such a spoiled youngster of the modern era! I can't even imagine sitting down and watching any of that, so boring XD It's also funny that we are watching a video of someone video taping some incredibly old TV programing, and posting it on a popular Internet website just for laughs, demonstration, and nostalgic purposes! lol

[pmscott6135]

Even in the 1980s there were mirror lid televisions. Check out the Citizen pocket TV from 1984

hampshirepictures.co.uk/retrot­echnosmall/lcdtv2s.jpg

and Casio TV-1000 in 1985.

taschenfernseher.de/bilder-neu­/tv-1000-gr.jpg

[0M9H4X]

yeeeeeeah.

tubes so long and the need for a mirror because the picture was inverted.

that is TOO old for me. im more crazy about the 80s :D

[iEugene1994]

@0M9H4X This is pretty new and nice technology , read about mechanical TV .

[davidls11]

It'll never catch on.

[m4rk90me]

i think I would be a little scared of this thing the first time.

[S0lidState]

Who in these days had a TV ?, how often were the programs broadcast and how many channels ?, was this a German unit ?

[pmscott6135]

@S0lidState

Only rather wealth people.

Only one channel and a couple of hours each day.

No. It was designed and built in England. Germany was not far behind with its TV development though.

[borgduck]

@pmscott6135 Germany would carry on with tv through the war (probably propaganda), , but Britain stuck to radio broadcasts.

[jacksonutton]

the tv pictures a tat blurry but its a old 30s tv

[pmscott6135]

@jacksonutton

Old CRTs can loose some of their vacuum over the years and this can result in astigmatism so you find that you can focus in the horizontal plane or the vertical plane but not both together. My tube does suffer from this effect.

[mistertentpole]

Check out that MAD mad editing between those girls! the demo tape there has craZy fast pace!

[pmscott6135]

@mistertentpole I must admit that the original film is significantly longer and much of the mad editing is due to me.

[paulj0557]

Let's give mankind some credit. LOOK at what he could do with glass wood and metal. Not to mention the style the 1930's gave us. God I'm in love with those women back then, the way they looked, the way they talked, and the way they walked. Yowee! What I would give to see crimped hairdos come back.

[iSquishy89]

How did you record stuff back in 37?

[pmscott6135]

@iSquishy89

Voice and music recording was done on gramophone records or wire recorders or on film.

The only means for recording video was on film.

[dgr8zod]

@pmscott6135 And the only means of preserving broadcasts, was again, film; Overdriven CRT's and cameras with near blind film. Kinescopes.

[pmscott6135]

See web link in the notes attached to this YouTube.

[iSquishy89]

What would happen if you hooked up current cable tv to this tv?

[pmscott6135]

@iSquishy89

Modern standards converters make it easy to view modern video formats on this old set but it will always be in black & white and displayed with 405 lines.

[HGbunny]

This is so cool.

[guy2008rules]

Is this the BBC or something?

[pmscott6135]

@guy2008rules

Yes, It's the the BBC. There was no other television broadcaster in Britain in 1937.

[inxs95]

this is an hd televition jaja

[dstea]

I wish i lived in the earlier 'olden' days... things back then seemed more fun and meaningful in life. Unlike the materialistic BS we have nowadays..

[GTAMYSTERIES46]

The oldest T.V. still running is a 1936 T.V. Take great care of it! this may be the 2nd oldest T.V. in the world still running! Great video!

[anonUK]

/watch?v=gou1cspUfdY&feature=r­elated

[intelinside1990]

This is simply amazing! I love old stuff :D

[ludvan64]

He says "Outside Broadcast". Was it a real outside broadcast? If so this film would be a very early telecine recording. From what year does the film date?

[pmscott6135]

@ludvan64

I think the golf demo was given in the Ally Pally park. They took the camera out on a long cable for such OBs. There was also a cable to various parts of London which was used for the 1937 coronation amongst other things, so yes, they did do real live OBs and not just telecine.

[charade97]

I recall seeing colour TV in London in a demonstration by the Institute of Radio Engineers in 1958 at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in Keppel Street. Brilliant colour picture of a glamorous model who was present at the time in the Manson Theatre.I think it was 20 years before Britain actually had colour TV.

[Sheri451]

I'll bet you had to be rich to afford a television back then. Cool! classical music.Men and their golf. Was that Bojangles dancing?Here in the South they'd have edited the man dancing, cuz they were all a bunch of redneck racists then. It's hard to understand the woman singing. Two years later poor England was being bombed by the "F" ing Nazis

[guggle86]

1937 TV Blooper - the caption for the tap dancer is missing a t - Johnny Nitt!! He was great - so is this excellent clip. Thanks

[pmscott6135]

...and achieved using technologies from the early 1930s.

Google hmv901 to see Test Card C reproduced.

[pchapman905]

The picture quality is quite remarkable. It's neat to think that all the fundamentals of (analog) television had already been worked out before the war. I bet you could hook up a modern video game system (with a scan converter) and it would be perfectly playable.

[coulditbekronau]

Play PS3 on that thing

[OonaCanute]

Fascinating!

[RetroCaptain]

Good Day!

Very good, you had the set restored! It works very well...and playback of dvd, I presume, w/o flagging! Wow.

I plan to do something similar. Old time shows on dvd playback through a 1950's Electrohome, as a regular use set..

Do the work yourself?

I really enjoyed that!

[pmscott6135]

Yes, with the exception of rewinding the EHT transformer, I was, fortunately, able to restore the set myself, such as it is.

[paulj0557]

Is this how well it looked in 1937? It looks very good really. I can see how if the war hadn't spurred the efforts toward bombs planes ships and tanks that we might have had TV widespread in the early 40's. Can you imagine a transition from that incredible tastiness of the 20's then 30's in film straight to television? Man oh' man wouldn't that have been wonderful? The way it went was fine,just not into technicolor musicals. In fact I skipped over TCM for years thinking it's all there was.NOPE!

[oc5nsli341nforce4]

It is a shame that very little of pre-war German TV survived. Both are fascinating how every thing was invented from scratch in those days.

[pmscott6135]

There very much more pre-war German TV programming still existing than there is British.

The Germans were using the intermediate film system and much of the footage can be seen.

[bobparis]

Has anyone posted this film on YouTube--without passing it through an old TV?

[pillowbugg]

How much would these cost back then in today's dollar value?

[pmscott6135]

£3,281.33 using the retail price index

£3,494.91 using the GDP deflator

£12,764.41 using the average earnings

[Jonhny2]

@pmscott6135

So expensive, and the TV stations of those days (1930s) broadcasted for only a few hours a day. So the TV was useless most of the day.

[alexander4488]

Does that audio come from the actual TV?

[pmscott6135]

Yes, but the quality is nothing like as good as that which was broadcast at the time because the sound track here originates from the optical track of the film.

Peter

[alexander4488]

We want to hear the original audio from the TV, whether it's good or not.

[pmscott6135]

The video is recording the sound from the television's own speaker and sound receiver.

[alexander4488]

I wanna see a PS3 game play on this.

[mig189189189]

Awesome video. Keep on with that good work!

[jsl151850b]

I would have preferred to see the film

directly encoded rather than camcorded

off an antique TV.

But... very interesting film!

This should be at the Alexander Palace Television Society YouTube channel.

Mahelf...

The CRT is showing a mirror image by being wired backwards.

The mirror makes text legible.

This is because the early CRTs were so

long standing it on end made the cabinet the size of a large radio of the era.

[pmscott6135]

What I was trying to do was to give an impression of what watching television was like in 1937. The old set was a part of this experience. Unfortunately the sound quality from the film is much inferior to that directly transmitted in 1937.

Peter

[franchute63]

very nice. congratulations!

Roger

[UK31337]

The BBC were still showing information films like this as late as 1960.

[Jo0ngle]

Beautiful set - nice to see it working!

[cocgle]

You can really the difference in the British accent from then to now.

[AppallingRetroTrash]

I still talk like this.

[alyn1949]

Any chance of posting the complete bbc demonstration film please? as it is not on the aptsarchive.  Many Thanks Alyn (G1TBL)

[TethResh]

:) >>>TY  :)

[martybhoy72]

Anyone know why they said "it wasn't for home viewing?" Are they talking about v as a whole or just the film?

[pmscott6135]

One reason might have been that the technical quality of tele-cine was at that time was inferior to that of the direct broadcast so they were highlighting that this was the type of programme material but not representative of the quality.

Certainly, the sound quality from the film is very obviously worse.

[qfproductionsuk]

Nice to see him, to see him nice, Bruce Forsythe presenting Come Dancing at the end! Well not quite ;) but the show started a decade later (minus Bruce).

[pmscott6135]

"This is not intended for home viewing". You probably are breaking the law!

I hope you didn't watch it at home!

[hebneh]

Didn't you hear the announcement at the start of the film? "This is not intended for home viewing". You probably are breaking the law!

Britain had widespread television way before the USA, but the latter really took off after WWII and exceeded all other countries.

I must say the various subjects here seem far too "light" for the BBC's usual fare, yes? More highbrow things were usually forced on the populace.

In the USA, tech changes after the war made all prewar sets unusable and obsolete.

[pmscott6135]

Don't forget that Lord Reith wouldn't have anything to do with television so there was probably little funding and he certainly wouldn't have taken any interest in the content which he no doubt knew was beyond contempt.

[TVonthePorch]

"In the USA, tech changes after the war made all prewar sets unusable and obsolete."

Not true. Firstly, the "tech change" to which you apparently refer was the final standarization of 525 lines with FM sound. This was implemented in July, 1941--*before* US involvement with the war.

Secondly, the idea that the receivers sold up until that time, which were designed for 441 line reception with AM sound, were rendered blind and deaf by the standards change is just absolutely false.

[TVonthePorch]

Slope detection allows the demodulation of FM audio in a set designed for AM. It works even better if aligned with that in mind, but that's a mere adjustment, it doesn't require any circuit modification. A much simpler matter is resetting the horizontal hold to sync up to the higher line frequency. With the possibility of a standards change in mind, prewar sets were deliberately designed with ample sweeps-frequency range just so that they would not be rendered obsolete by such a change.

[mediamadman747]

Thanks for posting.

[wellohmeeeeeee]

Did they go out into the streets pre war?

Does that still exsist?

[BNCA70]

is it true that after the war when BBC TV started again, the announcer said "as I was saying before I was so rudely interupted..." refering to having to be pulled off air in 1939?!! I think it's just an urban myth but I love it anyhow!

[pmscott6135]

It's a nice story but completely untrue. She actually said 'Good afternoon everybody. How are you? Do you remember me, Jasmine Bligh?' Boring but true.

[Mahelf]

Furthermore it is well established that on 1 Sept. 1936, AP was airing a Mickey Mouse cartoon that was suddenly interrupted just before the transmitter went off-air without any explanation. And when the service re-opened in 1946, they resumed with that same cartoon so that viewers could see the end... seven years later ! The announcer then apologised for that long interruption caused by WWII... !

[UK31337]

It was 1st September 1939 actually :P But the rest is correct; they really did apologise for the interruption :D

[Mahelf]

Yes indeed... 1939 (exactly 70 years ago today, by the way) and not 36... I hit the wrong key.

Something is titillating me : this set works with a mirror lid : how did they manage to correctly diplay texts on the mirror so that we can read them like on a direct view tube ? I hardly imagine the use of two mirrors inside the set. How could they display a reverse pic on the tube so that the texts correctly appear on the mirror ?

[cuddlyable3]

Mahelf instead of being "titillated" you need to learn how the electron beam is made to scan the screen of a CRT. Then you may see how trivial a matter it is to reverse the direction of scanning.

[Mahelf]

I know French & British TV history, much about BBC-ITV 405, ORTF 819. I remember what territories served BBC 405 e.g. in Tacolneston, Brougher Mountain, Thrumster & Meldrum, or ITV 405 in St-Hilary, Burnhope, Mounteagle & Sandy Heath, or dismantled ORTF 819 in Nancy-Vandoeuvre, Strasbourg-Lauth, Ajaccio-La Punta or Rouen-Les Essarts (replaced by Malzéville, Nordheim, Coti Chiavari or Grand-Couronne) and their former channels. But sorry I'm not a specialist in electronics, "Nobody's perfect !"

[MrUnidyne]

@Mahelf "The BBC wishes to apologize for the previous interruption in service." The interruption being World War Two!

[OlegKostoglatov]

@Mahelf What I find surprising is the rational that the British government used for shutting down TV broadcasts during the war year, that the Luftwaffe would zero in on the television signals to navigate during bombing runs. Even at that time television broadcasts were in the very high frequency range, therefore almost line of sign, therefore it was very doubtful that any German bomber could have received a TV broadcast let alone used it for navigation.

[OlegKostoglatov]

@Mahelf Point in fact the German Luftwaffe could receive and did use regular AM radio stations as points of reference for navigation but they never shut those down, obviously this fact escaped the bureaucrats at the British home office.

[seamanrob]

@Mahelf. Not quite true. Its a well trodden myth that the BBC cut off broadcasting with a cartoon in mid flow. On that day at 1205 they broadcast Mickey's Gala Premiere, which was a cartoon lasting 8 minutes, then the test and tuning signals until 1235 when they closed without announcements. Then in 1946, they did not apologise for the war, the announcer simply said, its XYZ, remember me? After twenty minutes of welcoming everyone back, they repeated the same cartoon again. So you know.

[altfactor]

@Mahelf It was September 1, 1939 that BBC television shut down for the duration of the war.

Reportdely, it was because the transmitter's 50-megahertz frequency could have been used by German bombers to "home in" on London.

Also, I've heard an urban legend that the cartoon was broadcast in its entirety before the plug was pulled.

[seamanrob]

@altfactor, @Mahelf - I too confirm 1st September... and this webpage shows the transcripts for that day .teletronic dot co dot uk forwardslash bbcclosedown.htm (so you can confirm that urban legend you talk about altfactor).

[starletdempsy]

@Mahelf Wow, that is fascinating.

[pmscott6135]

@Mahelf

Not quite! Nice Miyth though. Firstly the service started in November 1936 and ran until 1st September 1939. It's true that a Mickey's Gala Premier was the last program to be run but it was not interupted and ran to completion at 12.13 after which "Sound & Vision Tuning Signals" were transmitted until 12.35 that day.

The cartoon was run again on re-opening but that was 20 minutes into programming.

[pmscott6135]

@Mahelf

Not Quite! A nice myth though. Firstly the service started in Nov 1936 and continued until 1st Sept 1939. The cartoon 'Mickey's Gala Premiere' was the last programme. It started at 12.05 and was shown in full, ending at 12.13 after which "Sound and vision tuning signals" were transmitted until 12.35 on the day.

Station didn't go off the air until 12.35 and no formal closedown took place. On re-opening in 1946 the cartoon was again shown but not until 20 minutes into programming.

[INeedToLiveLonger]

@Mahelf Incredible story, was Mickey Mouse playback continued from "paused" moment or they played it back from very beginning?

[SmoothieJohn]

Amazing footage!

I was searching for the film made by the BBC c.1960 called "This is the BBC", but can't find it. It was mostly B&W but showed experimental colour for the final 5 mins.

Has it been lost?

[AssociatedBroadcast]

Great clip.Thanks for uploading and sharing

[albionrulesok]

Thanks for that Peter, fascinating, just wondering have you had it running in 240 line mode?

[pmscott6135]

There is no problem in adjusting the line / frame rates to 240 / 25 but my set doesn't have the additional circuitry for maintaining line rate through frame synchs and I don't have a source of Baird standard signals. It would be nice to try it though.

[laurdy]

out of all the lines on a tv picture i think only about 240 are recorded so maybe you could try conecting directly to the play head amplifier

[pmscott6135]

I thought there were only something like 28 lines without vision content, which would imply 377 recorded.

[laurdy]

what i meant was the picture recorded on a VCR, i think out of 625 lines only 240 lines are recorded (when recording on extended play) so i thought you could use a VCR as a 625 -> 240 line converter

[pmscott6135]

I confess I don't know much about VHS EP but I thought it simply involved a reduction in track width from 49 microns to 16 but line structure remained the same.

[lrd9999]

Thanks for making this available. Is the mirror flat, or is it there to magnify the picture?

[pmscott6135]

No the mirror is flat and there isn't any magnification of the 12" tube in this set but there were a couple of other models in the EMI range of the period that did use 9" tubes with magnifiers.

[fromthesidelines]

The BBC originally began regular television transmissions from Alexandra Palace in the summer of 1936, and continued them until they were abruptly terminated when World War II began in Europe {Germany invaded Poland} on September 1, 1939.

[Teflon65]

This sort of thing amazes me. It's even more amazing to me that you got it working.

[pmscott6135]

It amazes me too. ;-)

[hmasmelbourne]

Wow, it's amazing to think how something we take for granted must have seemd amazing back then.

[thomasking55]

Well done on the TV

[pmscott6135]

Thanks very much. The TV satsified some of my excitements of childhood and still excites to this day.

[SouthwesternEagle]

Childhood? That's from 1937. How old are you?

[pmscott6135]

My childhood was during the 1950s but it excited me to see an HMV901 in our local museum just because TV seemed to be a modern thing but the HMV was very much designed and built using technology from the early 1930s.