Kinescope - History

History

The General Electric laboratories in Schenectady, New York experimented with making still and motion picture records of television images in 1931.

There is some evidence to suggest that the BBC experimented with filming the output of the television monitor before its television service was placed on hiatus in 1939 due to World War II. BBC executive Cecil Madden later recalled filming a production of The Scarlet Pimpernel in this way, only for film director Alexander Korda to order the burning of the negative as he owned the film rights to the book, which he felt had been infringed. However, the evidence for this is purely anecdotal, and indeed there is no written record of any BBC Television production of The Scarlet Pimpernel during the 1936–1939 period.

According to a 1949 film produced by RCA, silent films had been made of early experimental telecasts during the 1930s. The films were shot off television monitors at a speed of eight frames per second, resulting in somewhat jerky reproductions of the images. By the mid 1940s, RCA and NBC were refining the filming process and including sound; the images were less jerky but still somewhat fuzzy.

During World War II, television cameras were attached to American and German guided missiles to aid in their remote steering. Films were made of the television images they transmitted for further evaluation of the target and the missile's performance.

The first known surviving example of the telerecording process in Britain is from October 1947, showing the singer Adelaide Hall performing at the RadiOlympia event. The wedding of Princess Elizabeth to Prince Philip also survives, as do various early 1950s productions such as It is Midnight, Dr Schweitzer and the opening two episodes of The Quatermass Experiment, although in varying degrees of quality. A complete 7-hour set of telerecordings of Queen Elizabeth II's 1953 coronation also exists.