Early Television Manuscript

Early Television Manuscript, Edgar Lloyd Brockow, New York, 10 August 1928, unrecorded two-page document with diagrams detailing a prismatic-mechanical television design, witnessed, signed and blind-stamped by public notary Philip Turk, ink-stamped March 30 1930, 8 x 13 in. Text: Literature: Stephen Herbert, (2004), ed. A History of Early Television . This document dates from August 1928, a period when "mechanical" television, based on spinning discs or drums at both transmitting and receiving ends, was still the method being used by most experimenters, including John Logie Baird in Britain and Charles Francis Jenkins in the USA. Jenkins used a system of prismatic discs to maniplate scanning beams. The author of this document, an inventor who does not feature in the history books, proposes a similar method using rotating prisms which could be manipulated (rotated in the same or opposing directions and at different speeds) to alter the beam from a straight line to a circle. The position of the lens - in front of or behind the prisms - could also be varied to give a curved field. The full text is available upon request. At about this time experimental television stations were set up in many parts of the USA using a variety of technical systems, but it would be more than ten years before the "official" start of television in this country, at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Original documents from the earliest days of practical television (before1930) are scarce.