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BailoutBill t1_iyda5pw wrote

Reply to comment by ucanttrustapenguin in TIL The inventor of the television was a 15 year old farm boy who got the idea for scanning an image in rows from the back and forth motion of plowing a field. by chapstickninja

The way I understand it, Baird didn't use the scan technique that Philo came up with and all modern screens use. So, Baird had earlier visual displays, but his tech ultimately was not used to develop modern screens.

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ramriot t1_iydckgh wrote

They both used a scanning line technique for camera & display. The key difference as I understand was that Biard's system was electromechanical while Farnsworth's was an all-electronic system. Baird was admittedly 1st, Farnsworth produced 2d something possibly independently that was more commercial & open to ongoing improvement.

If we follow the same logic for say the Phonograph then we acknowledge Edison for the cylinder phonograph but call Bell's Volta Laboratory the inventor of the modern disc phonograph.

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Scottland83 t1_iydk7ek wrote

The French had scan-line fax machines in the 1850’s right?

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ramriot t1_iye6a14 wrote

With synchronized pendulum clocks that could perhaps produce a single halftone document copy in perhaps 10 minutes. Bit of a far cry from producing & transmitting 15-25 greyscale images a second.

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Scottland83 t1_iyeepya wrote

But same concept using scan lines and one-dimensional signal.

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ramriot t1_iyf2ms9 wrote

Certainly the pantelegraph of the 1860's was conceptually a scanning device to output a serial transmission. One could argue by the same logic that taking words in lines on a page, converting & transmitting them as telegraph code serially & assembling the output back into words on a page is the same concept, something Morse & others were doing in the 1840's.

In the end all discovery is seeing a little further by standing on the shoulders of giants. Which means we acknowledge what went before but also acknowledge the thing that makes something patentable i.e.

  1. Patentable subject matter, i.e., a kind of subject-matter eligible for patent protection
  2. Novel (i.e. at least some aspect of it must be new)
  3. Non-obvious (in United States patent law) or involve an inventive step (in European patent law)
  4. Useful (in U.S. patent law) or be susceptible of industrial application (in European patent law[1])
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ucanttrustapenguin t1_iydb96o wrote

He still didn’t invent television. He invented a different technology used in television

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BailoutBill t1_iydc1mz wrote

He didn't invent visuals on a screen. He invented the first devices that evolved into modern devices we refer to as televisions: https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/the-top-ten-patent-wars-television-10-73080/#:~:text=Philo%20T.,until%20shortly%20before%20they%20expired.

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ucanttrustapenguin t1_iydckah wrote

So how was a television broadcast demonstrated before he demonstrated his technology?

The OPs headline is incorrect. You can’t say he invented “television” when he didn’t and wasn’t the first to demonstrate a television broadcast.

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BailoutBill t1_iyde7f3 wrote

You're confusing the term "television." Technically, Baird invented what was called, at the time, a "televisor." It used tech invented by a German and used some sort of spinning disk. Farnsworth used line scanning. Televisions use line scanning.

https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/who-really-invented-the-mechanical-television/

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ucanttrustapenguin t1_iydin1c wrote

The worlds first television broadcast happened in 1925. Farnsworth demonstrated his tech in ‘27.

He didn’t invent television or television broadcasts. He pioneered a technology that brought it forward. The inventor of the mobile phone didn’t invent telephones. IBM didn’t invent computers. Edison didn’t invent the lightbulb.

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Hawkeye_x_Hawkeye t1_iyddewa wrote

>The OPs headline is incorrect. You can’t say he invented “television” when he didn’t and wasn’t the first to demonstrate a television broadcast.

This is like saying the inventor of the home computer didn't invent it because the Turing machine already existed.

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Alan_Smithee_ t1_iyeshto wrote

Not at all.

He didn’t invent television; it was invented by Baird.

He came up with a new and improved approach, which became the standard.

But Farnsworth was himself screwed over by David Sarnoff of RCA.

Amazing how US technological history is so full of tales like that.

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trailercock t1_iyf5r90 wrote

From what I underatand, Farnsworth did prove the concept could work or at least diagramed how electronic television could work in 1914 while he was still in school. So he probably was the first known person to publicly communicate the concept of electronic television.

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Alan_Smithee_ t1_iyf96gp wrote

Nonsense.

Baird based his television on the work of Paul Nipkow, a German scientist who patented his ideas for a complete television system in 1884. Nipkow likewise used a rotating disk with holes in it to scan images, but he never achieved more than the crudest of shadowy pictures. Various inventors worked to develop this idea, and Baird was the first to achieve easily discernible images. In 1928, Baird made the first overseas broadcast from London to New York over phone lines and in the same year demonstrated the first color television.

So many inventors and scientists had been discussing the concept for years.

Farnsworth is credited as developing the first fully electronic system.

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Pandarandrist t1_iyee8fg wrote

No, it's like saying the inventor of the "home computer" didn't invent "the computer".

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PM_UR_NUMBER_IN_HEX t1_iydee7m wrote

a turing machine is fictional device used for proofs and was created after the computer

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Hawkeye_x_Hawkeye t1_iydeuoi wrote

According to the wiki, it was invented in the 1930s. Its not fictional, it's a theoretical model of a working machine. The concept existed prior to the existence of computers. Would the inventor of image broadcasting owe credit of their invention to the inventor of the camera?

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PM_UR_NUMBER_IN_HEX t1_iydgfk2 wrote

I am a computer scientist. Computers are extremely old. The first program was written before workable computer existed and well before the 1900s. Unless you have unlimited tape the machine can't exist. It's just supposed to be the simplest possible computer.

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Sparkybear t1_iydsl5i wrote

Theoretical and fictional mean the same thing. A device with infinite memory is a thing of fiction, but because it's a useful concept for theories tested in math and science we label it theoretical instead.

Beyond that, the first computer was built by Babbage in the 1830s, 100 years before the Turing machine was thought up, unfortunately he died before he finished his general purpose analytical machine, but his differece engines are generally considered the first iterations of modern computers.

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BobbyP27 t1_iyddwnf wrote

The Baird system used spinning discs with holes at progressively different radii so that the as the disc spins, the holes trace curved lines progressively across the image. The disc in the camera and the display have to be synchronised. The system is different from the method that eventually caught on, but the principle of progressively scanning an image line by line absolutely is a feature of the Baird system.

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