Even good television leaves viewers passive and isolated — Transition Voice.
“Fish don’t know they’re living in water, nor do they stop to wonder where the water came from. Humans? Not much better, as we share a world engulfed by television. And the deeper our immersion becomes, the less likely it seems we’ll poke our heads above the surface and see there must have been life before someone invented TV.”
Those are the opening words of a recent Associated Press piece on the little known history of the television and its inventor Philo Farnsworth. Far from being a household name like a Thomas Edison or an Alexander Graham Bell, Farnsworth lived and died in relative obscurity in regards to being recognized as the inventor of television.
Unlike the flat screen LCD and plasma televisions that are all the rage today, the no-longer ubiquitous cathode ray-tube-based television (those bulky TVs with the big bulge at the back) is based on an idea of Farnsworth’s whereby a series of combined horizontal lines would produce an image.
A dollar sign of things to come
The first demonstration by the self-taught inventor came in 1927 at the age of twenty-one when he transmitted the image of a single line to a receiver in the next room, while the first image ever transmitted was, lo and behold, a dollar sign.
Illuminating factoids aside, what particularly interests me is the locale in which Farnsworth first got his idea.
– See more at: http://transitionvoice.com/2014/11/lemminged-to-be-herded-off-the-peak-oil-cliff-by-filmmakers/#sthash.fLfBjNZu.dpuf
