Noctovision

Infrared Television in 1926

John Logie Baird, besides being the inventor behind the early television system used in the UK and, arguably, being the inventor of television itself, developed several advanced versions. He was able to demonstrate large-screen, colour and stereoscopic television in the 1920s and 1930s and also developed a system for recording the images on disc ... Phonovision. Over 75 years ago he also demonstrated the use of infrared light as illumination for television and came up with a device he called a Noctovisor. Alexander Russell, writing in the February 5 1927 edition of Nature, described how he and WR Crookes were shown Noctovision in action at Baird's laboratory in London on December 23rd 1926. One of us stayed in the sending room with a laboratory assistant in apparently complete darkness. In the receiving room, on another floor [of the building], the image of the assistant's head, and all the motions he made, could be readily followed. Russell goes on to describe the images as 'not so clearly defined as when visible rays were used, but we easily recognised the figures we saw, and made out their action'. Baird had tried ultraviolet light as a means of shooting in darkness, but he found that this was damaging to the subject's eyes. His first experiments with infrared used electric fires and on one occasion a dummy actually burst into flames! His successful infrared source was an ordinary light bulb coated with ebonite to block visible radiation.

Baird prepares to Noctovise Sir Oliver Lodge

The distinguished scientist Sir Oliver Lodge (the first man to send a signal using radio) was successfully Noctovised at a meeting of the British Association held in Leeds in 1927. Baird wrote ... He came with his daughter and said it was 'amazing, but very hot.' I thought this was a pity, as he was the best subject for television I have ever seen, his white beard and impressive head coming through marvellously well.

It is said that the demonstration of this equipment in Leeds was so exciting that mounted police had to be called in to regulate the queues of people wanting to see it. [NB: The occasion of the Lodge demonstration was at Baird's Frith Street studio in London according to Moseley's biography of Baird. Since Moseley put it in Leeds in Television Today and Tomorrow this is a little confusing.] On another occasion, the then Prime Minister, Ramsey MacDonald, saw Noctovision and, according to Moseley, 'found it difficult to believe'. By 1929, Baird had refined the system sufficiently for a demonstration of a self-contained infrared viewer on Box Hill in Surrey on August 9th. The device (or one similar) is shown in the photograph below. A simulated fog made by viewing through a thin piece of ebonite (which is opaque to visible light) was used and the Noctovisor clearly showed lights which were invisible to the unaided eye.

Baird (standing) and assistant with the Noctovisor The authors of the description of Baird's demonstration on Box Hill, written up in a 1931 book called Television: Today and Tomorrow, were clearly excited by the naval and military possibilities. They wanted this infrared technology to provide a capability for night and fog-bound vision that was, in reality, only achieved by RADAR during World War II. Whether the Noctovisor was what we would now call a Night Vision Scope using near infrared or a Thermal Imager using far infrared is unclear in the book. However, I believe it is likely that the device was a night scope. If this was the case then the Noctovisor would not have seen through fog as Baird intended. Infrared will penetrate haze but as the size of the particles in the air gets larger and it becomes fog, infrared can no longer penetrate. According to Michael Ritchie in his book on early TV ('Please Stand By' - see below) there was an incident at the BBC during tests with the Baird system ... In 1933 the BBC broadcast an infrared-ray technique that 'stripped' cotton dresses off a line of dancing girls. The press teased the broadcasters about this unintended nudity. 'Scientific progress took an unforseen turn today' wrote the London News Chronicle.

The high light levels needed by the cameras and the high infrared output of those lights (they were incandescent) also may have caused a similar incident involving a gymnast in the Soviet Union in 1938. This will no doubt bring to mind the interest shown in this aspect of infrared when Sony introduced its 'Night Shot' camcorders. The company fixed the cameras so that infrared could only work in low light levels - much to the annoyance of the 'legitimate' infrared community. Baird's television system used a rotating mechanical disc with holes in it arranged to scan the light from a brightly-lit scene so that was 'seen' by a photo-electric cell. The 30 scan lines were vertical (this apparently looking better than a horizontal scan) and the picture was refreshed 12.5 times a second. The receiver (or monitor) had a lamp behind the scanning disc but otherwise the process just worked in reverse. An experimental broadcasting service using the London station of the BBC (call-sign 2LO) was inaugurated on September 30th 1929. Unlike his rivals in the USA, Baird successfully synchronised the transmitted and received scans to achieve a stable picture without the motors at both ends being powered by the same synchronised AC power source. Unfortunately he is often remembered as being wedded to mechanical scanning and a film-intermediate system and eventually his system was replaced by the electronic, cathoderay-based television we still make use of today. However the picture is more complex and Baird experimented with and even demonstrated video recording, large screen, colour and even stereoscopic television. Footnote: There is an ongoing friendly battle between the television and computer-led factions over the development of digital television, particularly over whether the future of television should be interlaced, as it is now, or progressive like computer screens. A representative of Microsoft described their approach to the assembled TV engineers at the 1997 IBC conference in Amsterdam. As part of the presentation, Microsoft showed their 240-line progressive scan suggestion for a possible future format. It was possible that neither the presenter, nor most of his audience, were aware that in 1936 John Logie Baird was advocating such a standard for broadcast TV in the UK.

References
The Noctovision patents have obfuscated names which was, one assumes, to confound his rivals, but the two key ones are available on line (at least in their American incarnations). Method of and means for transmitting signals (US 1930, UK 1926) Apparatus for transmitting views or images to a distance (US 1929, UK 1926) Ref: Television Today and Tomorrow: Sydney A Moseley and H J Barton Chapple with a forword by John L Baird. Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons, London Second Edition 1931 Sydney Moseley was Baird's business manager and a tireless enthusiast for his work. Ref: John Baird: Sydney Moseley. Odhams, London 1952 (approx) Detailed information on the early development of television, especially in England, can be found in the following book, which is still in print:

Ref: British Television - The Formative Years: R W Burns IEE History of Technology Series number 7 Peter Peregrinus Ltd in association with the Science Museum, London 1986 The book is expensive at 65 pounds and was in dire need of being proof-read as it is full of typos, but the information on the technical and political background to the development of television is matchless. There is coverage of the work done in the USA, Germany, France and elsewhere as well as the UK. ISBN is 0-86341-079-0 Ref: Please Stand By - A Pre-History of Television: Michael Ritchie The Overlook Press, Woodstock 1994 Michael Ritchie's book, refreshingly, gives an American slant on the whole business of early TV and is written in a style that is easy to read while still being authoritative. He includes the story of Philo Farnsworth, the first man to make electronic TV work (and featured, with his invention, as a character in the best-selling thriller novel 'Carter Beats the Devil' by Glen David Gold). Although taking a programming viewpoint the book places this clearly in the context of the competitive relationship between the various elements of media big business in the US as it affected TV. How unlike the homelife of our own dear BBC! ISBN is 0-87951-546-5

John Logie Baird, though little recognized in the US, was perhaps the most remarkable inventor in the early history of television. In a period of scarcely three years from 1924 to 1927, he invented the first successful mechanical-electric television system, infrared television (dubbed "Noctovision"), stereoscopic television, and the earliest means of recording a television signal, Phonovision. He also staged the first public demonstrations of television, and made the earliest transatlantic broadcast of a television signal. For several years in the early 1930's, 30-line television broadcasts via BBC facilities were produced by Baird's company, and the quality and variety of these programs was quite high, given the limited bandwidth the BBC and the GPO allowed for them. Baird's mechanoelectrical systems were eventually replaced by completely electronic television, but nevertheless constituted the first television broadcasts, and the first regularly scheduled programs, in the history of the medium.

"Mechanical" Television

To us here in the Twenty-first century, the idea of "mechanical" television sounds almost absurd -how could television ever have been anything but electronic? Nevertheless, the principle is amazingly simple, so much so that it would be fairly easy to tinker up a television in your garage today. The basic element of such systems is the Nipkow Disk, invented in the 1880's by Paul Nipkow. When we think of the classic television screen of the pre-HDTV era, we of course think of lines, each line containing some information about color and shade, each refreshed and compiled to create the illusion of a moving picture. Nipkow's disc did the same thing, only mechanically: on a disc of metal, tiny pinholes were drilled in a gradual spiral, such that each was just a bit further in from the edge, and a bit further (the size of one frame of the image) along the perimeter. As the disc spins, each pinhole passes by (or "scans") one vertical line; when assembled, the lines form a picture, which is refreshed each time the disc completes a rotation. For the effect of motion, the frame rate must be high -- at least 12 and preferably 20 or more frames per second; some discs used two sets of slightly offset pinholes to produce a better image with fewer rotations.

The Nipkow disc had been around for decades when Baird began his work on television in the early 1920's. Though the principle was sound, the problem lay in converting and amplifying the disc's scan signal, which required a light-sensitive material. Selenium, an ideal choice, posed problems because it was slow to respond to changes, and its signal output was very low. The invention of electronic amplification using valves (or "tubes" as they were commonly known in the US) solved half of the problem, and so Baird worked on the second. The use of very bright lights, and replacing the disc's pinholes with lenses, helped, but only enough to produce so-called "shadowgrams" of brightly back-illuminated cutouts. To get a signal from reflected light -- the kind of light that a human face emits -- took considerable work. The exact nature of Baird's solution is still something of a mystery, but apparently involved the application of a carefully-calibrated boosting signal at the same frequency as that of the signal from the photocell. In March of 1925, he made a series of public demonstrations at Selfridge's department store on Oxford Street; By the fall of that year, he was close enough that he considered making a more formal demonstration in front of recognized experts.

First Demonstrations Baird conducted his final experiments in a tiny top-floor apartment on Frith Street in London's Soho district. On October 2, 1925, he succeeded in transmitting in his laboratory the first television picture with shades of grey derived from reflected light: the head of a ventriloquist's dummy known affectionately as "Stookie Bill", in a 30-line vertically scanned image. Baird later transmitted the image of a young man working in the office downstairs, William Taynton, whom he paid two shillings and sixpence to endure the hot lights then necessary for an effective image.

Baird repeated the transmission for members of the Royal Institution and a reporter from The Times on January 26, 1926 in his laboratory at 22 Frith Street in the Soho district of London. It was the world's first demonstration of a true television system, one that could broadcast moving images with tone graduation. In 1928 he demonstrated the first colour television and true stereoscopic television, ad that same year he developed Phonovision, a method of recording his television signal on a phonograph record. A few of his test recordings have survived and, restored by engineer Don McLean, give us a remarkable window into television as it worked in the late 1920's. The successful demonstrations enabled Baird to raise money from investors, hire a staff of engineers, and move to a much larger facility at Long Acre. There, he was able to secure the grudging agreement of the BBC to allow him to transmit regular broadcasts, though only on a lessthan-ideal bandwidth, and only very late at night. Sir John Reith, head of the BBC, believed that television was a "waste of time," and conceived of the limited service provided as purely experimental. Nevertheless, with the support of the government, Baird's company eventually obtained a license for regular broadcasts, and began the sale of receivers, known as "televisors." These came assembled or as a less-expensive kit, and included an application form for a license (British broadcasting at this point was strictly noncommercial, and subsidized by license fees charged to receive its signal).

30-Line Broadcasts

Throughout the early 1930's hundreds of "lookers-in" used their sets to receive these early broadcasts, which used a 30-line system. Although limited in scope, continual technical improvements gave these broadcasts a remarkably clear picture for its size. In 1930, the BBC broadcast the first ever television drama, an adaptation of Luigi Pirandello's "The Man with the Flower in his Mouth." Despite these successes, the Baird company -- which depended on televisor sales for its only revenue, and had to pay the BBC for its transmissions -- was losing money quite rapidly. An attempt by Baird to obtain licenses in the United States from the Federal Radio Commission was quashed by Westinghouse and other radio broadcasters, who were developing their own mechano-electrical systems The 30-line broadcasts were discontinued in 1934, and a new "Television Committee," headed by Lord Selsdon, was established to determine the next steps. The company was re-organized, and was eventually purchased by Isidore Ostrer, who was also the owner of the Gaumont-British film and cinema chain. Baird was removed from day-to-day management, although the company continued to provide staff and materials for his private laboratory.

New BBC Television Service 1936 In the wake of the Selsdon Committee's recommendation that mechanical and electronic systems be tried, the Baird company was forced to compete with the newly-created firm of Marconi-EMI, who had developed an all-electronic camera, the Emitron. At the time, the Emitron still suffered from dropouts and distortions, and the outcome was by no means definite. By that time, Baird's had switched to an "intermediate-film" system where scenes were shot on cinema film which was immediately developed and scanned electronically. When the BBC's new higher-definition system was inaugurated in the fall of 1936, the two systems were run on alternate days. EMI's technicians made significant improvements in their system, while Baird's reached a plateau without being able to reduce problems such as the limited motion of their cameras and leaks of developing fluid. The fire at the Crystal Palace in November of 1936 was a further blow, as it destroyed their laboratories and much of their equipment. Early in 1937, the BBC chose EMI as the standard, and the Baird system was discontinued.

Baird's Final Years Baird ended up losing most of the money he'd made through television, and when the firm bearing his name went into receivership, he lost the services of its technicians. Nevertheless, he continued his researches at his own expense; having long ago realized that electronic systems were the way of the future, he managed to develop a high-resolution color electronic system that had better resolution than any commercial system of its day. Unfortunately, the years during and just after the war proved to be difficult economic times, and there was no interest from investors in something which consumers would be unable to afford. Baird died on June 14th, 1946, having brought into the world what would be one of the most important and widespread technologies of the twentieth century.

Other Television Systems There were two other inventors who have a claim on the "first," or at least on very early television: Philo T. Farnsworth and Charles Francis Jenkins. If one defines television as the transmission of any sort of moving image -- even a silhouette -- by wire or wireless, Jenkins is only a few months behind Baird, and Farnsworth's out of the running. If you define it as the transmission of an image made from reflected light, Baird stands alone. If, on the other hand, you define it as the invention of a fully electronic system for the transmission of images -- which, after all, was to be the ultimate mode of transmission for the rest of the twentieth century, then Farnsworth stands alone.

Farnsworth's system was electronic from the beginning, and he developed several key patents which even the giant RCA could not get around. Getting a recognizable image of the human face proved a challenge; Baird was already transmitting television across the Atlantic at the time when Farnsworth's system was only capable of sending simple images such as a vertical line or a dollar sign. Farnsworth eventually developed a complete system, with both a camera tube -- which he dubbed the "Image Dissector" -- and a picture tube. The Dissector proved the harder to perfect; Farnsworth actually licensed the technology to Baird's in 1935, but it was still not sensitive enough for a direct camera. Baird's instead used it as part of their intermediate film system. In the end, the war defeated Farnsworth as it had Baird; RCA simply waited for his patents to expire, and then used their far greater financial resources to steamroller over his system.

On June 13, 1925 -- scarcely three months after Baird's demonstration at Selfridge's -- Charles Francis Jenkins was able to demonstrate the transmission of the silhouette image of a toy windmill in motion from a naval radio station to his laboratory in Washington, using a lensed disk scanner with 48 lines per picture, 16 pictures per second. At this early date, low definition silhouettes were the best Jenkins could do, since his bandwidth was limited to 10kHz, but he later obtained permission from the Federal Radio Commission to move to a carrier frequency of 4.95 MHz with a bandwidth of 100 kHz. Jenkins employed a rotating mirror drum rather than a Nipkow disc, in his receivers (drum receivers were later used by Baird as well). The sets were only able to pick up Jenkins's own experimental signal, transmitted from his station W3XK in Wheaton, Maryland; the demand for receivers -- which Jenkins called "radiovisors" -- never reached a profitable level.

NOTE: All images on this page are either self-made, public domain, and/or derived from images on my own Baird webpage, which you can visithere. Some text from my pages there, and from the articles on Baird and the history of Television technology articles I wrote for Citizendium, are re-used here under their Creative Commons license.

Here........ http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/S%C3%A9ance