Brief Technical History and Audiovisual Parameters of Electromechanical Television

Abstract

The purpose of the research is to characterize the most important milestones in the technical history and audiovisual parameters of electromechanical (mechanical) television of the 1840s–1930s as an audiovisual ecosystem. Research methodology. The study uses, firstly, an ecosystem approach, which made it possible to qualify television as a networked audiovisual ecosystem with internal dynamics and external interactions, and secondly, media archaeology as a field that attempts to understand the early stage and electromechanical practices of television through the prism of technical history, and, thirdly, general scientific methods of analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, generalization and abstraction when working with theoretical material. Scientific novelty. For the first time, the article comprehensively and at the appropriate theoretical level considers the most significant milestones in the development of electromechanical (mechanical) television of the period and its audiovisual parameters. Conclusions. It is proved that during the 40 years since the patent for the “Nipkow disc” was granted in 1885 to the first public demonstration of television moving images by the Scottish inventor John Logie Baird in 1925, electromechanical TV has gone through a rapid and very significant path from broadcasting a static image (analogue of photography) to transmitting a moving image (analogue of cinema). It has been substantiated that despite numerous experiments aimed at “collaborating” the means of preserving and transmitting sound and image (telegraph, radio, telephone), early mechanical television broadcasts remained silent and black and white. It is emphasized that further technical development and improvement of audiovisual parameters of mechanical television led to the deepening of audiovisual synthesis in the industry and its transformation, which first resulted in the emergence of electromechanical and electronic systems with the ability to preserve colour images and later regular and cable television broadcasting systems.