In it's simplicity it is genius. I had no clue this was a thing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirephoto
I really like these old "explaining" films. The pedagogical level is far higher than what seems common today. And the they take their time to convey the message.
Tangential, but was there ever some form of fibre or telephony connection for news crews in 1990s? Microwave trucks excluded.
I ask this because I swear, as a kid, I’ve seen a cameramen open up a telecom/telephone box and connect something to it. I assumed it was for an uplink back to the station to transmit video.
Absolutely. From the advent of radio broadcasting telephone lines were used for everything, audio and even DC signalling to control relays. All remote radio broadcasts used at least two lines. One for sending sound back to the station and a 2nd pair (telephone lines are a balanced pair of wires) for "cue" that came from the master control room to the remote site.
Since most transmitters were located outside of city limits, equalized telephone lines were used to send the sound from master control to the transmitter.
This was the most common and cheapest way to make the connection to the transmitter until the advent of inexpensive microwave equipment. And microwave links have a nasty habit of fading out during tropospheric inversions so they were actually not as reliable, over long distances, as a phone line with a backup phone line that took an alternate path. (first hand experience here. Ya I'm that old) :-)
Most people today have no idea how you transmit analogue audio faithfully and reliably over long distances, via wires. Telephone engineers figured it out over 100 years ago.
You mention two telephony lines were used for comms between station and site. Was the quality of audio for remote broadcasts better than a typical phone call?
Yes. The audio quality of land line phones was dictated primarily by transducers. This was by design. The TIA published specs for USA, Canada had their own as well as most other countries.
The response of a twisted pair was pretty good over 2 to 4 miles as I recall but for a audio grade (50Hz to 5000Hz) various techniques were used that at the simplest involved coils but there were also active equalizers available for long haul circuits and/or "hi-fi" requirements. Remember DSL lines were/are shipping 1..2Mhz carriers over those same old telco lines. :-)
Of course some old trunk lines used paper insulation. Really. Which meant noise went up ... when it rained.
Specially-conditioned circuits for broadcast audio were available at a price. These were point-to-point links, not on the PSTN. Network TV was sent over Bell System transcontinental coaxial cables before it went via satellite or fiber.
they would have had the operator reverse the charges I assume?
by the way the old bell system technical journals are a fun read and are generally available at places like archive.org
These were called "leased" lines. You ordered them and the Telco set them up for you and billed you like any other service.
The internet began on leased lines.
I know ISDN was used for this kind of thing for a good while.
Yes, ISDN was the higher priced product offered by the telcos but ISDN was not available until the 1980s. Radio broadcasting started over 60 years earlier and analogue lines were the only option.
This is also how live radio broadcasts were made. I'm old enough to have been a part of shows performed at the West End, mixed across the street in the studio, and broadcast from the World Trade Center downtown.
I love this. It's so immensely simple. Truly human technology.
We need to burn all computers and limit technology to this level.
Long live the Butlerian Jihad!
The spice must flow!
I think you may have gotten a bit carried away.
You may start with yours ;)
How did they get the incandescent bulb on the receiving end to switch on and off fast enough to avoid blurring the picture?
The video explains that they used a neon bulb, which is far more reactive to current changes than standard incandescent.
Incandescent lights produce visible light largely through heat of the filament, whereas neon lights emit by passing current through the gas, meaning that rapidly changing the current is more effective- the had e doesn't need to cool down like a filament to stop producing light.
A neon tube was used on the receiving end because it reacts more quickly to current. This is mentioned at about 6:45 into the video.
I think the video said it was a neon bulb, which reacted "fast enough".
That scene (around 3:45) with the two, coupled spools of rope that transmit the picture from one spool to the other is simply amazing.
That also shows up several decades later in Hunkin's The Secret Life of the Fax Machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuUyt9RG7pk
Agreed - really conveys what is happening in a simple and effective manner. It's a great addition to the video.
Low-res video! Basically the width of the rope!
1930s? These machines were widely in use even in the very end of the Soviet era like in 1989 or so, in the USSR. I personally seen them in operation in post offices being a kid. I think the very last of them fell out of use when modern faxes appeared but just like telegrams existed for a while when email was already a thing, i think these stayed formally available even if not in demand, well into 1990s.
Not sure if it's the same tech or just similar, but all newspapers used to transmit photos from correspondents by telephone, all the way up to the eighties at least. I remember seeing it in practice - I was taking part in a multi-day bicycling competition, and a newspaper sent a two-person team to follow the tour. They developed their photos in their hotel room every evening, and sent them by phone to the newspaper back home, and the newspaper had a new story with photos every day.
Same tech. That stuff was mainly used by press indeed (and law enforcement, like sending suspect photos and fingerprints).
Note that in the original 1965 Ian Fleming novel The Man with the Golden Gun (which has little in common with the movie save character names), James Bond describes being picked up by waterfront police in Vladivostok, and his prints being "belinographed" to Moscow, after his mission to Japan. The term is obvious enough to convey its meaning, at least.
For a slightly later version of this: My most popular YouTube upload is the telecopier scene from Bullitt, where you can see the police use the latest and greatest "fax" technology of 1968. I uploaded the video without almost no information, but in an surprising twist, a lot of the youtube comments are actually pretty informative.
I like how it's nearly two minutes of men standing absolutely motionless, with a completely stationary camera, with no score, no building tension, no close-ups showing emotion or what we are supposed to be feeling, as they listen to a whirring sound. Riveting television
Are you perhaps being sarcastic? Because it's a great scene. The whole movie's great on the same basis. It's classic film that has the authentic feel of the period, for those who weren't alive then, and lets people simply experience what's happening on the screen.
The devices you mention are what makes most movies unwatchable. The over the top and increasingly forced devices used to essentially manipulate the viewer, lest there's any ambiguity as to what they "should" be feeling. No room for subtlety, just shove it down the viewer's throat.
They're a great alternative to fine acting, directing and cinematography that's able to speak for itself.
A neat variation from the era is Hellschreiber teleprinter, graphically prints the characters using a spinning head that impacts the tape strip, which results in readable messages even with heavy interference
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellschreiber
Edit: some ham radio operators still use it for fun, and I'd heard that one of the SDR decoders can read it
With SDR, you can paint an image into the receiver waterfall with OFDM.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saac0ZtTeX4 (be sure to switch to 1080p)
This is remarkable. Lasers were invented in 1960 as a point of reference.
The painted rope on two spools was also remarkable because of its simplicity - and it holds up today on explaining what a "download" is. ;-)
And even cooler - if we wanted to, I would wager a high school student could implement something along these lines using lego today. There's optical sensors, and you could rig up something to hold a pen like this [1] to render the image.
Imagine the effort, creativity and commitment they’ve put with the rope on two spools, just to let the watcher better understand how they were transmitting the images.
Why even this simple thing seems unthinkable nowadays?
Fax machines go way back to the 1800s, before phones, surprisingly old! Another classic is Tim Hunkin’s secret life of the fax machine https://youtu.be/yuUyt9RG7pk which features a clip from the video in TFA.
Older even than the Pony Express.
"This is called [pause for effect] scanning."
Amazing. Stuff like this is why I come to HN.
Crazy what we had to do before fully digital circuits.
Also, that GO/STOP traffic “light”!!!
Breaking an image up into lines is similar to how television cameras/displays and raster scan CRTs operated (IIRC TV dated back to the 1920s?), though wrapping the image on a drum was clever and not found in television technology. I wonder how they synchronize lines between the transmitter and receiver though (all video standards have hsync pulses, while I didn't see any such here). I'm not sure how fax machines worked/work either.
That is some electric age magic and is really neat.
This was featured on an episode of Connections 3 way back in the long ago. Moral equivalent of thermal paper but with electricity.
I have some old wire photos in a particular set of movie memorabilia I've been constructing from press kits, pamphlets, film cells, foreign posters, slides, lobby cards, et al.
Even older is Jacquards self portrait on 24000 punched cards - a 2Mpixel image in 1839
Also very impressive was the making of this video itself. Transitions between scenes, overlayed graphics (arrows) pointing and moving in the diagrams.
Original source link: https://youtube.com/watch?v=cLUD_NGE370
I wonder what happened? I have been blown away by some of the older explainer videos from the 40s and 50s, esp. some of the military training videos for vehicle repair, electrical engineering, etc. Very concise and very clear explanations, always with visual examples. Today, we have things like 3brown1blue that are kind of like that, but in general you don't see information transfer like this either online or in school (at least not in my experience).
Youtube is full of videos like that. A few sample excellent channels:
https://www.youtube.com/@animagraffs
https://www.youtube.com/@engineerguyvideo
https://www.youtube.com/@Lesics/videos
The problem is more that they are drowned under the volume of content available.
If YouTube had a Dewey decimal style clickable directory it would be a lot easier to find content.
A librarian friend had the same complaint.
The problem is that libraries Dewey decimals are managed by librarians who want to sort things correctly. YouTube would be managed by uploaders who wants their stuff to be managed _incorrectly_.
YouTube recommendations and search is a super interesting problem not just because of the scale but also because uploaders are an adverse opponent, trying to keyword stuff their spam.
The obvious solution is to actually have librarians correctly classify the videos. DDS focuses on the nature of the work itself, not on the keywords or spam in the content. Librarians understand how to class all kinds of works, and it should be relatively simple to build a DDS/MDS index (Melville Decimal System since it's open, see https://librarything.com/mds) for YouTube videos. Just like with books, disagreement on classification is inevitable and perfectly natural; there's no perfect classification scheme, though DDS/MDS does a generally good job.
Which videos? The 500 hours of video uploaded every minute?
All videos of accounts with more than X subscribers.
Dewey Decimal is probably not actually appropriate but it would be nice to have a good and appropriate classification scheme be used.
Yahoo, more or less. You’re not wrong.
rip yahoo directory and dmoz.
I'll recommend a couple of other channels:
- Old Royal Navy instruction manuals and documentaries: https://www.youtube.com/@davidbober7035
My favorite is Hands To Flying Stations (1975): https://youtu.be/cALccuPShQc
- Historic films and clips, mostly focused on workplace safety: https://www.youtube.com/@markdcatlin
My favorite is NASA's Toxic Propellant Hazards: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ND2TeNfcmKA
I'd like to throw in a recommendation for Huygens Optics: https://www.youtube.com/@HuygensOptics
Everything you ever wanted to know (and more) about light and lenses, explained in a way that's totally comprehensible if you learned electricity and magnetism physics in college.
That toxic propellant one is fantastic.
Also Jared Owen which does an impressive work of 3D modeling to explain how things and places work. I’m amazed by the level of documentation you have to ingest to model things in such details.
I like the game boy graphics explanations by Jesse „system of levers“: https://youtu.be/SK7XT0DWqtE
Wow, thanks for sharing!
My guess is that back then producing films was expensive cutting edge technology, and the few films that got made hired the brightest and best, and gave them time to get it right.
Today any unemployed bozo can make explainer YouTube videos. That great as a "democratization", but the average quality is obviously lower.
Some quick googling shows cinematic film cameras in 1930/40 used to cost $100k-$300k adjusted for inflation.
Today, the cheapest Netflix-approved camera is $2k [0]
Lower barrier to entry is a blessing and a curse. Signal v noise, etc.
[0] https://noamkroll.com/the-3-most-affordable-netflix-approved...
It's even lower. The FS7 on that list is more like $1,000 these days.
(Not that I would consider all those cameras on the Netflix list cinematic. Some are geared more towards documentary.)
And not that it's contrary to the $1K price point but, I think, Apple's last event was filmed with iPhones albeit with a lot of expensive lighting and other gear/people.
Film reels were also a significant cost that's pretty much gone to zero these days.
This is the right answer
I pretty much use YouTube as a MTV replacement to watch music videos only, so won't speak to the quality of instructional material you find there, but I was still in the military as recently as 12 years ago and the training material in the military was still terrific. This includes unclassified material, though I don't know how you'd find it as a civilian if, for whatever reason, you were interested in learning how to perform maintenance on a modern humvee or what not.
The technical manuals are all available through Army epubs, but even though they're not classified, you still need a common access card to login and use the site. A lot of them get mirrored somewhere the public can find them, but I would definitely not call the sprawl of where you might find them very searchable.
can a civilian obtain a common access card?
Keyword: ECA
I'm not in the US, so that sprawl sounds like my only option if I wanted to see what was available.
Where should I start looking? If there's enough high quality content, it might be worth it to download entire websites and index everything to classify and surface things.
Have you seen Technology Connections on YouTube?
A criticism I have with not just Technology Connections but plenty of similar channels is that each video seems to just be whatever they thought of doing next.
I would love something of the same caliber of quality but with a blueprint for an entire series that would cover the compete gamut of a subject.
A popular YouTuber mentioned on HN, and deservedly so, is Ben Eater. His series on building a 6502 computer on a breadboard is exactly the kind of blueprint-driven content I would like to see more of. He had a goal of beginning from a clock circuit and ending up with an 8-bit breadboard computer displaying ASCII to an LCD display and he delivered it in a series of chapters.
That series Ben Eater did was really fantastic. Between following along in Logisim and trying a more ambitious design afterwards, it was the most fun I've had in a long time.
Yeah, a bit dry and it doesn't always hit the spot with the tone.
I wanted to like it but couldn't.
Those videos were the equivalent of 3brown1blue for their day. With YouTube, there are far more videos of this sort today than there were then.
Yes, however, nobody has (imho) done it better than The Secret Life of Machines did it back in the late 80s/early 90s:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuUyt9RG7pk
What happened is that the average attention span fell bellow 2 seconds. There is a book. “Amusing ourselves to death”. YOU can watch those videos. The average person today will be bored and tune out.
Check out Jared Owen's explainer 3D videos on Youtube. some of the best I've ever seen, and relatively recent. Example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iod6uwUGM2E
It's simple, yet hard to execute well. Each sentence contains one piece of information to be imparted. The speed of speaking is slower - with emphasis on diction and pronunciation. There is a slight pause between sentences to allow the recipient time to comprehend what was just said.
Try it yourself - read some of the comments here in that manner and observe the difference.
They were produced to convey information, not to generate clicks and ad views.
Survivor bias?
Maybe they made plenty of trash explainer videos, and those didn't survive.
Though for economic reasons, that's clearly less true than today.
The one about how a differential works is fantastic. It just goes step by step through showing the problem to incremental improvements until the final gearing system is “simple”.
This is a growing pet peeve of mine. I used to think that advancing media formats and productions tools would generally make conveying knowledge faster, better and deeper. Instead, we see most media intentionally engaging in overall 'dumbification'. It's not just more content being shorter or more summarized, as I'm trying to compare 'apples to apples' here in terms of content targeting, length etc.
What’s interesting is you also see the is was sponsored by Chevrolet (on the title screen), so it seems monetization-wise, it’s no different than today when YouTubers have a sponsor read at the start of a video. I just wonder if then it’s simply a matter of more creators competing for less ad-money-per-person, which leads to the kind of “optimized” content we see today.
It’s the algorithm. You’re playing a different game when your content has to compete with and grab attention on its own vs when a gatekeeper decides to broadcast you at 3pm to every TV.
Does survivor bias account for this? Only the best/most worthwhile videos from the "old times" are archived.
Right now, we see every piece of crap uploaded to YouTube. No doubt there's awesome video content being created today - Smarter Every Day by Destin Sandlin seems to fit - but it's surrounded by junk.
No, almost every piece of non-live media that was produced from the 1940s onwards went into huge broadcast archives. Some of the media it was stored on was destroyed, or otherwise reused for newer broadcasts, but much of what survived wasn't due to the inherent quality of the content and we have vast amounts of it remaining. Take this compilation of 1960s commercials from the Prelinger archives [0]. These obviously weren't produced to the same quality as the Chevrolet videos, but it's also not drastically different from contemporaneous syndicated content. The pacing is slower than modern ads, most include practical demonstrations of why the product is better/necessary, and there's just less optimization towards the visual frenzy we see today.
[0] https://youtu.be/EGUuyewrNNo
The hard part was synchronization. We're used to synchronization being easy today, but it was really hard to synchronize anything until the 1980s, when phase-locked loops became easy and cheap.
Does the belinograph need syncing though? I imagine you would just have a waste ribbon around the photo and start it after the call with say a delay you both agreed too. Or maybe you could send light in some known pattern with a starter strip and the receiver could look at the lamp.
Attenuation most have been a problem though? I guess you could send some sort of calibration photo to adjust gain? I don't think practical FM signal modulation was a thing yet in the 30s?
You need to synchronize the spin rate of the drums on either end. If there's a difference of half a rotation over however many hundreds (thousands?) of rotations to transmit the photo, you'd end up with a completely distorted picture.
I had a pair of these transceivers when I was in my teens, from a somewhat later period, thanks to my grandfather who refurbished them from his time as a telegrapher at Western Union. Synchronization at startup took ten seconds or so while each unit adjusted its timing and apparently sent a correction signal to the other, drums whirling all the time and gradually matching initial positions. It looked like the most primitive process possible, but worked every time.
Yes, I was looking for the bit where they addressed skew. You can even see it in the demo with the string, horizontal lines come out wavy after transfer to the other spool due to small differences in synchronization.
I think that is true for some content, but there's certainly a contingent of content creators out there now putting out a lot of good technical explainer videos. They're doing it far better than your typical mass media content producers.
I agree completely. I have found so many great videos for woodworking, coffee (both roasting and espresso brewing), robotics, home construction, car repairs, computer/portable device repairs, etc. Youtube has made almost any hands-on activity so much easier for me to learn.
I prefer reading for theoretical concepts most of the time, but something more complex that I don't have the time to properly study is sometimes better served by a good video or series as well.
Practically, most everything I dig into it's using both, although I just now started using phind.com (thanks for the tip HN) to fill in some of the things all my sources seemed to be skipping over or presupposing, and that has helped me get answers to latent questions I had for quite some time. I really need those links out because I can't rely on AI generated information otherwise, of course.
A couple other good ones:
How Differential Steering Works (1937) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYAw79386WI
Flak (1943) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8zPNMqVi2E
The diff one is so good.
Note how they made a model in the wirephoto video too to show the concept but with painted rope.
Models seems to me to be a very good pedagogical tool.
That's Jam Handy. They were really good at that.
Some Youtubers should try that style. Neckbeards with headphones are so over.
Not sure what you mean by that but Steve Mould (physics/chemistry/engineering), Matt Parker (math), Primer (economics), AlphaPhoenix (electricity, lately), 3Blue1Brown (math), Fraser Builds (history of chemistry, alchemy), Ben Eater (computers), Gneiss Name (geology) and The Thought Emporium (genetics/miscellaneous) are some youtube channels I really enjoy that teach concepts by either making elaborate models, making elaborate animations, or just actually making the thing they're talking about from scratch.
Possibly the high water mark of such things was the "Secret Life Of Machines" series. Here is their episode on fax machines:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuUyt9RG7pk
The pedagogical level and the production values both have the same source - this is an advertisement. The Jam Handy Organization made what we would now call sponsored content. It is unfair to compare the production values of this to modern educational content or modern amateur content - they're operating at different scales and with different resources.
In the past - as in now - media production is driven by the demands of capital.
We can wax nostalgic for commercials all we want but comparing it to a different modern product does a disservice to the past and media workers in the present.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt45kdjb.16
As someone else also pointed out, this video about the differential is fantastic!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYAw79386WI
OT but one of my favorite songs is made from an old video like that https://youtu.be/Azsk21MpbUk?feature=shared
AT&T's "Similarities of Wave Behavior" is incredible.
A style guide/analysis for these pedagogical films should be written, so it can be applied to new things