If TV had invented in the 1920's

nova2010

Banned
What the impact globally? How to influence the great depression or politics of 1930's or even WW2?
 
well considering it was invented in the 1920's uhm.. rewording of post would be more appropriate.

as in what if TV took off in the late 20's early 30's.

first you would need to eliminate the great depression, since disposable income was rather non-existent during that period.

next you still need to build the infrastructure to support said Television network and create the programing.

So lets say TV is introduced a few years earlier .. by 1929 and the great depression you have an installed base of several thousand TV viewers in large cities..in the USA (not counting rest of world) things would get ugly during the depression and war as materials would not be available for such luxury items.

you would need TV to start after WWI for best results giving 10 years for installed base to grow.

Heck even into the early 70's TV was still a 1 per house, maybe 2 type item. Programing didn't really hit a stride until the early 60's.

There were news crews embedded in WWII, they made the newsreels and radio broadcasts. Different culture though.. the idea of showing wholesale slaughter in the raw the we do today would be unthinkable and uncivilized. so it would be used mainly for propaganda purposes as movies and radio were and TV is used even today
 
well considering it was invented in the 1920's uhm.. rewording of post would be more appropriate.

as in what if TV took off in the late 20's early 30's.

first you would need to eliminate the great depression, since disposable income was rather non-existent during that period.

next you still need to build the infrastructure to support said Television network and create the programing.

So lets say TV is introduced a few years earlier .. by 1929 and the great depression you have an installed base of several thousand TV viewers in large cities..in the USA (not counting rest of world) things would get ugly during the depression and war as materials would not be available for such luxury items.

you would need TV to start after WWI for best results giving 10 years for installed base to grow.

Heck even into the early 70's TV was still a 1 per house, maybe 2 type item. Programing didn't really hit a stride until the early 60's.

There were news crews embedded in WWII, they made the newsreels and radio broadcasts. Different culture though.. the idea of showing wholesale slaughter in the raw the we do today would be unthinkable and uncivilized. so it would be used mainly for propaganda purposes as movies and radio were and TV is used even today
And it was in Colour aswell! Keep in mind that the first public TV channel was in 1936.
 
To have TV commercially / financially viable in the 1920s, an earlier development of commercial radio would be singularly useful, if not outright necessary. I recall reading of some experimental voice/music broadcasts as early as 1915, and I know signals were sent by wireless in August 1914 (interception of said signals helped the Germans win at Tannenberg). For whatever reason, my sense is that commercial radio would have to exist by about 1910 to foster development of TV by the late 1920s.

The first proto-TVs in the '20s were clumsy affairs with a screen the size of a stamp and a rapidly spinning wheel that acted roughly like the shutter on a movie projector; it wasn't until later that the CRT was developed to the point where a reasonably sized picture was available. On top of that, the cameras were very inefficient, and required lighting of brutal intensity to pick up much of anything.
 
To have TV commercially / financially viable in the 1920s, an earlier development of commercial radio would be singularly useful, if not outright necessary. I recall reading of some experimental voice/music broadcasts as early as 1915, and I know signals were sent by wireless in August 1914 (interception of said signals helped the Germans win at Tannenberg). For whatever reason, my sense is that commercial radio would have to exist by about 1910 to foster development of TV by the late 1920s.

The first proto-TVs in the '20s were clumsy affairs with a screen the size of a stamp and a rapidly spinning wheel that acted roughly like the shutter on a movie projector; it wasn't until later that the CRT was developed to the point where a reasonably sized picture was available. On top of that, the cameras were very inefficient, and required lighting of brutal intensity to pick up much of anything.

All that aside, let's suppose that there were sufficient driving forces to develop the technology, and that economic conditions were such that it was more or less affordable. I'd bet that the first private owners would be much like they were in OTL: places of public accommodation; i.e., bars (presuming no prohibition). Probably sports would have constituted a lot of early programming, but I'd guess it would have been primarily football: baseball owners were largely hostile toward broadcasts, especially of home games, early on. Think about how the infant NFL might have done in the '20s even with primitive coverage--or how college football might have fared.

I don't think TV would have helped the political situation too much: assuming (a shaky assumption, I'll admit) the rise to prominence of the same individuals in OTL, it would have certainly given a boost to demagogues like Huey Long and Adolf Hitler. I question how well FDR might have done on TV, or to what lengths people may have resorted to mask his disability.

Getting back to the infrastructure: I suspect TV would have been essentially a northeast corridor phenomenon in the US (a few stations in New York, plus one or two each in Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, and Washington) with islands, if you will, in Chicago, LA, SF, and a few other cities. It would have been something only heard about for decades in much of the south and the plains states, though. I also suspect it would have been an evenings-and-weekends only phenomenon: say, a few hours between 7:00 PM and 10:00 PM local time, and at first, anything apart from sports would have been essentially radio programming in front of a camera.
 
To have TV TECHNICALLY viable (as anything more than a laboratory curiosity), means HUGE tech advances. That would impact WWII, for instance, as the kind of electronics that could deal with TV would make airborne radar a gimme. Imagine WWII STARTING with proximity fuzes, radar guided night fighters, radar guided cannon on ships....
 

Al-Buraq

Banned
To have TV commercially / financially viable in the 1920s, an earlier development of commercial radio would be singularly useful, if not outright necessary. I recall reading of some experimental voice/music broadcasts as early as 1915, and I know signals were sent by wireless in August 1914 (interception of said signals helped the Germans win at Tannenberg). For whatever reason, my sense is that commercial radio would have to exist by about 1910 to foster development of TV by the late 1920s.
Militarily, the first use of radio was in the Boer War. The Kruger government ordered six sets from Siemens on 24th August 1899 with the intention of having a command and control system for the artillery around Pretoria. They cost GBP127 each (GBP 12000 or $15000 today). The sets were confiscated by British customs in Cape Town as war was about to break out. Lord Roberts had five Marconi sets in his baggage train to defeat the Boers habit of tapping into the telegraph wires (the railways lines tended to be the lines of advance). The Army refused to pay the fees for Marconi engineers to accompany Roberts' columns so very little value was gained. The Royal Navy took over these sets and used them succesfully in intercepting ships smugging arms to the Boers in 1900-1902. In typical British fashion, this devastating secret weapon was kept secret until the 1930s!
The IJN used radio during the Battle of Tsushima in 1905. The US Navy got its first sets in 1906 for use on the "Great White Fleet" and it was the USN's complaint about amateur interference that led to attempts to control radio by the US Government with the 1912 Radio Act and the closing down of all private operators in 1917.
But all of these were 2-way communications radio. Apart from a couple of small scale amateur operationsin Holland and Argentina, there was no broadcast radio anywhere until after the First World War.


The first proto-TVs in the '20s were clumsy affairs with a screen the size of a stamp and a rapidly spinning wheel that acted roughly like the shutter on a movie projector; it wasn't until later that the CRT was developed to the point where a reasonably sized picture was available. On top of that, the cameras were very inefficient, and required lighting of brutal intensity to pick up much of anything.[QUOTE/]

TV documentaries tend to harp on the primitive pictures of the early Baird and other electro-mechanical broadcasts and ignore how (comparitively) good systems were by the mid 1930s when Britain, Germany, France and the USSR (but not the US) had regular public broadcast systems operating. Systems that were just about as good as those provided post-war and well into the 1950s. It is often forgotten that, by 1939, there was video disc recording, "live" outside broadcast, telecine facilities and limited cable (via co-ax) distribution. There was also projection and re-lensed TV to give picture sizes up to a metre (36 inches to you).


All that aside, let's suppose that there were sufficient driving forces to develop the technology, and that economic conditions were such that it was more or less affordable. I'd bet that the first private owners would be much like they were in OTL: places of public accommodation; i.e., bars (presuming no prohibition). Probably sports would have constituted a lot of early programming, but I'd guess it would have been primarily football: baseball owners were largely hostile toward broadcasts, especially of home games, early on. Think about how the infant NFL might have done in the '20s even with primitive coverage--or how college football might have fared.
Britain and Germany made most of the running on early TV in technical development. The Germans (because of the men with the cool uniforms) usually don't get their due (look here)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_cQrjsyh1o&feature=related
While Britain, Canada and the US suspended TV in the war years, Germany broadcast throughout--even extending the service to some occupied countries.
What everyone was lacking was content. As far as sports coverage was concerned, think contemporary newsreels. No zoom lenses, no playbacks, no multiple camera angles--there had to be a learning curve. ( Most of the techniques of sports coverage we take for granted were invented by Leni Reifenstahl for the 1936 Berlin Olympics film).
Boxing worked well for TV and was the main sport broadcast in the US in the experimental period. Not for nothing was the BBC news bulletin called until 1955 "Radio newsreel" and consisted of a man in a dinner jacket reading from a paper script supported by the odd still photograph or brief film clip.

The business model also had to be found. In Germany and the USSR most TV was operated in a type of mini-cinema/theatre rather than the home. I know that in the UK a dual EMI/Baird TV with built in radio cost GBP500, rather more than a small car, in the US a 12 inch RCA model cost $445.
(Then again my first mobile phone cost me $3000!).
The US never had State broadcasters of radio in the early days and stumbled across advertising by mistake (see history of the soap opera) which meant that programming had to highly populist, but it did provide a model for TV. (Does any US radio channel still broadcast plays, panel shows, educational and arts programmes?).


I don't think TV would have helped the political situation too much: assuming (a shaky assumption, I'll admit) the rise to prominence of the same individuals in OTL, it would have certainly given a boost to demagogues like Huey Long and Adolf Hitler. I question how well FDR might have done on TV, or to what lengths people may have resorted to mask his disability.
You have a point here that deserves a lot more examination.
Look at the newsreels of the 1930s. Politicians were still talking to camera as if they were addressing public meetings without a microphone and no one ever interviewed them--their was no intimacy and definitely no close ups. Even when they tried a friendly, behind-the-desk chat, they look shifty and false. It is significant that the just pre-TV era saw the last of the lofty giants of politics, Rooseveldt, Churchill, Stalin, de Gaulle, Mussolini, Hitler. As TV became widely established in OTL, politicians became ordinary, rather grubby little men, until a new generation of Telegenic politicos arrived.
How demagogues and totalitarians may have developed TV as a propaganda tool in a period of demagogary is worth some speculation.
In OTL, after initially being enthralled, viewing populations tend to recognise propaganda lies however well-packaged (at least they did in the USSR, Eastern Europe, China and South Africa-- in Britain and America, I am not so sure).

Getting back to the infrastructure: I suspect TV would have been essentially a northeast corridor phenomenon in the US (a few stations in New York, plus one or two each in Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, and Washington) with islands, if you will, in Chicago, LA, SF, and a few other cities. It would have been something only heard about for decades in much of the south and the plains states, though. I also suspect it would have been an evenings-and-weekends only phenomenon: say, a few hours between 7:00 PM and 10:00 PM local time, and at first, anything apart from sports would have been essentially radio programming in front of a camera.
How very perceptive. Early British TV was exactly that--radio with pictures and as late as the mid 1950s was only on for about three-four hours per night. I am old enough to remember a still picture being broadcast during the period between Children's Programmes (about 3.00PM) and the early news (at 6.00 PM) labelled "Intermission".
(For the old people, it was either a kitten with a ball of string or a teddy bear in a box)
 

Al-Buraq

Banned
To have TV TECHNICALLY viable (as anything more than a laboratory curiosity), means HUGE tech advances. That would impact WWII, for instance, as the kind of electronics that could deal with TV would make airborne radar a gimme. Imagine WWII STARTING with proximity fuzes, radar guided night fighters, radar guided cannon on ships....
Quite right. British enthusiam for TV in the 1930s was coloured by the fact that it was fronting for radar development. On the outbreak of WW2 the services were closed down with the excuse that the Luftwaffe could use the transmitters to home in on British Cities (as if you couldn't find London without tuning into to the BBC and anyway you can see the Crystal Palace transmitter from thirty miles away.)
The real reason was that the transmittting towers and some frequencies were taken over for radar defence.
 

Al-Buraq

Banned
To have TV TECHNICALLY viable (as anything more than a laboratory curiosity), means HUGE tech advances. That would impact WWII, for instance, as the kind of electronics that could deal with TV would make airborne radar a gimme. Imagine WWII STARTING with proximity fuzes, radar guided night fighters, radar guided cannon on ships....

FYI the RAF had airborne radar in 1939. The AI (Airborne Intercept set).
To keep it secret the press claimed the successes of "Cat's Eye" Cunningham against night bombers in the winter of 1940as due to unaturally keen eyesight bolstered by a diet high in carrots. From then on and throughout the war, RAF crews were given extra rations of carrots!
 
FYI the RAF had airborne radar in 1939. The AI (Airborne Intercept set).
To keep it secret the press claimed the successes of "Cat's Eye" Cunningham against night bombers in the winter of 1940as due to unaturally keen eyesight bolstered by a diet high in carrots. From then on and throughout the war, RAF crews were given extra rations of carrots!
Hmpf! I had thought it was later. Still, the other points apply.
 
FYI the RAF had airborne radar in 1939. The AI (Airborne Intercept set).
To keep it secret the press claimed the successes of "Cat's Eye" Cunningham against night bombers in the winter of 1940as due to unaturally keen eyesight bolstered by a diet high in carrots. From then on and throughout the war, RAF crews were given extra rations of carrots!

You watch QI, don't you?
 
The Farnsworth picture tube was invented in 1929, and that was the turning point for a practical medium. Unfortunately, it was the Great Depression that held back TV, so a solution might be to bring it about three or four years earlier, when the US economy was strong.

One POD is to send Vladimir Zworykin to Brigham Young University in 1923, so he could meet student Farnsworth. Let them create a viable, marketable television in 1925 and butterfly away the patent conflicts.
 

Blair152

Banned
If TV had been invented in 1920

There's no "if" about it. TV WAS invented in the 1920s. It was invented in 1925 by Philo T. Farnsworth, who was a high school student at the time. It
didn't become popular until 1939 when it was part of the 1939-40 World's Fair.
 
There's no "if" about it. TV WAS invented in the 1920s. It was invented in 1925 by Philo T. Farnsworth, who was a high school student at the time. It
didn't become popular until 1939 when it was part of the 1939-40 World's Fair.

Sure, but 1929 was the year Farnsworth did it without moving parts. Television was an invention beset by patent conflicts, arrogance and lack of cooperation by two primary contributors (Farnsworth and Zworykin) and it took the combined work of both to produce a marketable system. So, get these two in the same lab before RCA gets its greedy hands on Zworykin, and you can accelerate the time line for commercialization.
 
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