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Stooky Bill was the name given to the head of a ventriloquist's dummy that Scottish television pioneer John Logie Baird used in his 1924 experiments to transmit a televised image between rooms in his laboratory at 22 Frith Street, London.
John Logie Baird invented some of the first experimental television systems. In 1924 he developed a mechanical television system to transmit moving images by means of electrical signals, which he demonstrated on 25 March 1925 at a London department store, Selfridges. It consisted of a spinning disk set with a spiral pattern of 30 lenses. As each lens rotated past the illuminated subject, it focused the light from a spot on the subject on a selenium photoelectric cell. This converted the brightness of the image at each spot into a proportional electric signal, which could be sent to a receiver by radio waves. As each lens swept past the subject, it scanned a successive line of the image. At the receiver, a light shining through the holes in a similar rotating disk recreated an image of the subject.
Due to the low sensitivity of the photoelectric cells, Baird's first system was not able to televise human faces, because they had inadequate contrast. Baird therefore used a ventriloquist's dummy, the brightly painted face of which had greater contrast, and made it move and talk before the scanner. The incandescent lights illuminating the subject to be televised also generated so much heat that Baird could not use a human for the testing. Eventually the hair became singed and the painted face became cracked by the heat. Stooky Bill and another Baird dummy, "James", have been jokingly called "the first television actors".
Stooky Bill is now on display at the Science and Media Museum in Bradford, England.
"Stooky" or "stookie" is Scots for stucco or plaster of Paris, or for a plaster cast used to immobilise bone fractures. [1] The term is also used for someone who is slow-witted or awkward in their movements.
Stooky Bill was a major plot point in the Doctor Who 60th anniversary special "The Giggle", in which he was used by the villainous Toymaker to spread insanity through every screen on Earth. [2]
Television (TV) is a telecommunication medium for transmitting moving images and sound. The term can refer to a television set, or the medium of television transmission. Television is a mass medium for advertising, entertainment, news, and sports.
John Logie Baird was a Scottish inventor, electrical engineer, and innovator who demonstrated the world's first live working television system on 26 January 1926. He went on to invent the first publicly demonstrated colour television system and the first viable purely electronic colour television picture tube.
Color television or colour television is a television transmission technology that includes color information for the picture, so the video image can be displayed in color on the television set. It improves on the monochrome or black-and-white television technology, which displays the image in shades of gray (grayscale). Television broadcasting stations and networks in most parts of the world upgraded from black-and-white to color transmission between the 1960s and the 1980s. The invention of color television standards was an important part of the history and technology of television.
A Nipkow disk, also known as scanning disk, is a mechanical, rotating, geometrically operating image scanning device, patented by Paul Gottlieb Nipkow in Berlin. This scanning disk was a fundamental component in mechanical television, and thus the first televisions, through the 1920s and 1930s.
Mechanical television or mechanical scan television is an obsolete television system that relies on a mechanical scanning device, such as a rotating disk with holes in it or a rotating mirror drum, to scan the scene and generate the video signal, and a similar mechanical device at the receiver to display the picture. This contrasts with vacuum tube electronic television technology, using electron beam scanning methods, for example in cathode-ray tube (CRT) televisions. Subsequently, modern solid-state liquid-crystal displays (LCD) and LED displays are now used to create and display television pictures.
Narrow-bandwidth television (NBTV) is a type of television designed to fit into a channel narrower than the standard bandwidth used for official television standards.
The intermediate film system was a television process in which motion picture film was processed almost immediately after it was exposed in a camera, then scanned by a television scanner, and transmitted over the air. This system was used principally in Britain and Germany where television cameras were not sensitive enough to use reflected light, but could transmit a suitable image when a bright light was shone through motion picture film directly into the camera lens. John Logie Baird began developing the process in 1932, borrowing the idea of Georg Oskar Schubert from his licensees in Germany, where it was demonstrated by Fernseh AG in 1932 and used for broadcasting in 1934. The BBC used Baird's version of the process during the first three months of its then-"high-definition" television service from November 1936 through January 1937, and German television used it during broadcasts of the 1936 Summer Olympics. In both cases, intermediate film cameras alternated with newly introduced direct television cameras.
The iconoscope was the first practical video camera tube to be used in early television cameras. The iconoscope produced a much stronger signal than earlier mechanical designs, and could be used under any well-lit conditions. This was the first fully electronic system to replace earlier cameras, which used special spotlights or spinning disks to capture light from a single very brightly lit spot.
The concept of television is the work of many individuals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The first practical transmissions of moving images over a radio system used mechanical rotating perforated disks to scan a scene into a time-varying signal that could be reconstructed at a receiver back into an approximation of the original image. Development of television was interrupted by the Second World War. After the end of the war, all-electronic methods of scanning and displaying images became standard. Several different standards for addition of color to transmitted images were developed with different regions using technically incompatible signal standards. Television broadcasting expanded rapidly after World War II, becoming an important mass medium for advertising, propaganda, and entertainment.
Phonovision was a patented concept to create pre-recorded mechanically scanned television recordings on gramophone records. Attempts at developing Phonovision were undertaken in the late 1920s in London by its inventor, Scottish television pioneer John Logie Baird. The objective was not simply to record video, but to record it synchronously, as Baird intended playback from an inexpensive playback device, which he called a 'Phonovisor'. Baird stated that he had several records made of the sound of the vision signal but that the quality was poor. Unlike Baird's other experiments, there is no evidence of him having demonstrated playback of pictures, though he did play back the sound of the vision signal to audiences. Baird moved on leaving behind several discs in the hands of museums and favoured company members. Until 1982, this was the extent of knowledge regarding Phonovision.
Scophony was a sophisticated mechanical television system developed in Britain by Scophony Limited. A black and white image was produced by an early form of acousto-optic modulation of a bright light using a piezoelectric crystal and water or other transparent liquid column.
WRNY was a New York City AM radio station that began operating in 1925. It was started by Hugo Gernsback's Experimenter Publishing Company to promote his radio and science magazines. Starting in August 1928, WRNY was one of the first stations to make regularly scheduled experimental television broadcasts. Experimenter Publishing went bankrupt in early 1929 and the station was purchased by the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company to promote aviation. WRNY was deleted in 1934, as part of a consolidation on its shared frequency by surviving station WHN.
Kenjiro Takayanagi was a Japanese engineer and a pioneer in the development of television. Although he failed to gain much recognition in the West, he built the world's first all-electronic television receiver, and is referred to as "the father of Japanese television".
A field-sequential color system (FSC) is a color television system in which the primary color information is transmitted in successive images and which relies on the human vision system to fuse the successive images into a color picture. One field-sequential system was developed by Peter Goldmark for CBS, which was its sole user in commercial broadcasting. It was first demonstrated to the press on September 4, 1940, and first shown to the general public on January 12, 1950. The Federal Communications Commission adopted it on October 11, 1950, as the standard for color television in the United States, but it was later withdrawn.
The technology of television has evolved since its early days using a mechanical system invented by Paul Gottlieb Nipkow in 1884. Every television system works on the scanning principle first implemented in the rotating disk scanner of Nipkow. This turns a two-dimensional image into a time series of signals that represent the brightness and color of each resolvable element of the picture. By repeating a two-dimensional image quickly enough, the impression of motion can be transmitted as well. For the receiving apparatus to reconstruct the image, synchronization information is included in the signal to allow proper placement of each line within the image and to identify when a complete image has been transmitted and a new image is to follow.
The following timeline tables list the discoveries and inventions in the history of electrical and electronic engineering.
Telechrome was the first all-electronic single-tube color television system. It was invented by well-known Scottish television engineer, John Logie Baird, who had previously made the first public television broadcast, as well as the first color broadcast using a pre-Telechrome system.
Nolly is a British three-part biographical miniseries, created by Russell T Davies, starring Helena Bonham Carter as Crossroads star Noele Gordon. The series premiered on 2 February 2023, on the new streaming platform ITVX. It was broadcast on ITV1 for three consecutive nights from 27 December 2023 to 29 December.
"The Giggle" is the third and final of the 2023 60th anniversary specials of the British science fiction television programme Doctor Who, written by Russell T Davies, directed by Chanya Button and broadcast in the United Kingdom on BBC One on 9 December 2023. It features the final regular appearances of David Tennant as the Fourteenth Doctor and Catherine Tate as Donna Noble, introduces Ncuti Gatwa as the Fifteenth Doctor and guest stars Neil Patrick Harris as the Toymaker, a character last seen in The Celestial Toymaker (1966). The episode also features Jemma Redgrave and Bonnie Langford as UNIT commander Kate Lethbridge-Stewart and Mel Bush, respectively.