Recording
In the days of commercial mechanical television transmissions, a system of recording images (but not sound) was developed, using a modified gramophone recorder. Marketed as "Phonovision", this system, which was never fully perfected, proved to be complicated to use as well as quite expensive, yet managed to preserve a number of early broadcast images that would otherwise have been lost. Scottish computer engineer Donald F. McLean has painstakingly reconstructed the analogue playback technology required to view these recordings, and has given lectures and presentations on his collection of mechanical television recordings made between 1925 and 1933.
Among the discs in Dr. McLean's collection are a number of test recordings made by television pioneer John Logie Baird himself. One disc, dated "28th March 1928" and marked with the title "Miss Pounsford", shows several minutes of a woman's face in what appears to be very animated conversation. In 1993, the woman was identified by relatives as Mabel Pounsford, and her brief appearance on the disc is one of the earliest known video recordings of a human being.
Read more about this topic: Mechanical Television
Famous quotes containing the word recording:
“Self-expression is not enough; experiment is not enough; the recording of special moments or cases is not enough. All of the arts have broken faith or lost connection with their origin and function. They have ceased to be concerned with the legitimate and permanent material of art.”
—Jane Heap (c. 1880–1964)
“Write while the heat is in you.... The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“He shall not die, by G—, cried my uncle Toby.
MThe ACCUSING SPIRIT which flew up to heaven’s chancery with the oath, blush’d as he gave it in;—and the RECORDING ANGEL as he wrote it down, dropp’d a tear upon the word, and blotted it out for ever.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)