With this telegraph, a device invented way
back in the mid-1800s, I can communicate with
you, even if you’re hundreds of miles away.
I can update you on stock prices or the movements
of enemy troops.
Or who's going to the next week on Ru Paul's Drag Race!
What’s harder to do is make you laugh, tell
you a long story, sing you this metal song
I wrote, or show you this hilarious cat who’s
terrified of this little toy rabbit—it’s
adorable, trust me!
For that more emotional, audiovisual mode
of communication, let’s ditch the telegraph
and leverage some basic scientific discoveries
about sound, light, and electricity made during
the nineteenth century.
*Hank sings the Crash Course theme*
[Intro Music Plays]
The telephone, invented in the 1860s and ‘70s,
took personal communication to the next level.
Both Scottish–Canadian inventor Alexander
Graham Bell and American engineer Elisha Gray
created working telephone systems in 1876,
and the priority dispute between them is fascinating.
But the telephone didn’t lend itself to
popular entertainment. It was a one-on-one
technology, not a way of communicating to
the masses.
So it wasn’t until the invention of commercial
sound recorders and motion picture cameras,
in the late 1800s, that you could consume
the same media as other people around the
globe.
And for those devices, we need to head back
to the Menlo Park laboratory of Thomas Edison.
Who was, by the way, also working on the telephone!
Edison developed the phonograph, which literally
means “sound writing,” in 1877, shortly
before the lightbulb and electrical power
system that made him famous.
Maybe Edison was interested in recording,
amplifying, and playing back sounds because
he was hard of hearing. He might have imagined
alternative strategies for recording that
hearing people wouldn’t have thought of.
Edison’s team invented a recording cylinder,
which offered good sound quality. It worked
by vibrating a thin membrane wrapped around
the cylinder, and then amplifying those vibrations,
or making them louder.
But other inventors created the commercially
popular record—a big, flag disc that stores
audio information easily by using the ridges
of records to encode sound waves.
Either way, phonographs are pretty simple
and durable—and still in use! All of you
“long play”-collecting vinyl heads are
enjoying a fancier version of the phonograph
every time you start your turntables.
Edison’s cylinders were originally used
mostly for office dictation by big companies
and had little impact on the consumer market.
In fact, Edison invented a lot of stuff that
consumers would either ignore or outright
despise.
Probably the funniest example of an Edison-fail
was the talking doll, created in 1890. The
doll had a recorder in its chest that could
play back “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and
other kid-friendly hits.
But the sounds grew faint quickly, making
an already creepy object that much creepier.
Even Edison called the dolls his “little
monsters!”
And Edison’s magnetic ore separator—which
was basically a big electromagnet that could
pick up tiny bits of ore left behind by conventional
mining—straight-up bankrupted him!
That said, this was actually a brilliant application
of the new science of electromagnetics.
Just too far ahead of its time to work efficiently
in practice.
Edison had better luck—post-doll, post-ore
separator—with moving pictures.
As with his other inventions, he wasn’t
the first inventor, just the one who made
a practical commercial system.
Today, historians credit French artist Louis
Le Prince with the first workable movie camera.
In 1888, he created the first known movie,
a very short one showing off Roundhay Garden
in Leeds... it's apparently a good garden... haven't seen it myself.
Then, Le Prince disappeared from a train and was never seen again, so… ThoughtBubble, show us how Edison
made movie magic:
As with the lightbulb, Edison didn’t do
the inventing himself, but relied on hiring
creative experts. Still, he was the self-proclaimed
Napoleon of technology.
So in the 1890s, Edison and Scottish inventor
William Dickson rolled out the Kinetograph,
the first motion picture camera, which Dickson
invented at Menlo Park.
Film movie cameras work by taking lots and
lots of photographs called frames. When they’re
played back quickly, they give the illusion
of motion, because the human brain can only
process so many images per second before it
just gives up.
Edison also created the prototype for the
Kinetoscope, the first device for individual
movie viewing, in 1891. He debuted this device
in Brooklyn in 1893. And in 1895, Edison created
the Kinetophone, adding sound to his movies
via a cylinder phonograph.
Edison’s early movies were not exactly Oscar-worthy,
although perhaps YouTube-worthy. They were
only one minute long, and they often lacked
elements we associate with cinema today, such
as plot.
One of his early movies, for example, simply
depicted three of his blacksmiths, doing some
smithing. Other memorable Edison productions
included “The Kiss,” “Fred Ott’s Sneeze,”
Annie Oakley shooting glass balls, “Frankenstein,”
and everyone’s favorite, “Professor Welton’s
Boxing Cats!”
Most of these were shot in the first movie
studio, the Black Maria, which was created
at Edison’s bigger, newer lab in West Orange,
New Jersey.
One notable exception was “Electrocuting
an Elephant” which was filmed at Cony Island in which the
aging elephant Topsy was killed using alternating current. It was sad and
weird, and also popular.
Thanks Thoughtbubble!
Kinetoscope and Kinetophone movies took off
in saloons. And to Edison, this was enough.
Movies didn’t need to be long or complex:
they’d never make any money that way! And
besides, people have short attention spans.
Other cinematic entrepreneurs had different
ideas. Unfortunately for them, Edison was
an enormous patent troll! He had the patent
on the camera, so he kept suing other movie
makers on the east coast.
Which is one reason why they kept moving to
Los Angeles, the eventual epicenter of the
movie industry. The other reasons were the
better natural lighting and weather, and the
larger number of very good yoga studios-slash-juiceries.
Dickson left Edison Studios to found Biograph
Pictures, and the French kept innovating.
Brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière invented
the cinematograph in the 1890s with the idea
of holding mass screenings.
And, finally, in 1902, the U.S. Court of Appeals
ruled against Edison, finding that his company
couldn’t hold the patent on all movie cameras,
just the specific model Dickson invented.
But by then, cinema had moved to the west
coast, and the world would finally be able
to bask in the glory of Point Break.
Radio came decades after cinema. Which may
sound odd—it’s just sound, after all.
But radio waves have to travel long distances
without losing fidelity, or accuracy. Whereas
movies were carted around using physical reels
of film.
Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell predicted
the existence of radio waves back in the 1860s.
But German physicist Heinrich Hertz discovered
in 1885 that a wire carrying an electric current
will radiate, or give off, electromagnetic
waves when it’s swung back and forth.
That is, he made an antenna.
Hertz researched the waves that antennae give
off, becoming the first person to show in
an experiment how to make and detect electromagnetic
waves.
His work led directly to radio.
Today we measure the frequencies of electromagnetic
waves in units called hertz. Radio waves—the
longest type of electromagnetic wave—are
measured in kilohertz, megahertz, or gigahertz.
Inspired by Hertz’s research, a young Italian
inventor engineer named Guglielmo Marconi
worked in the 1890s on how to send telegrams
wirelessly.
Many people were interested in wireless communication,
but it was Marconi who first developed a working
system. At home in Bologna, he sent and received
the first radio signals.
Soon after, Marconi traveled to Britain to
commercialize his system. By 1899, he sent
the first wireless telegraph signal across
the English Channel.
And by 1901, he was able to send a single
letter, “S,” across the Atlantic Ocean,
from England to Newfoundland, Canada.
In this humble, sibilant way, radio was born!
And so Marconi won the Nobel in 1909.
In fact, Nikola Tesla developed a working
radio system even before Marconi, but it was
Marconi’s that took off commercially.
That process took a long while. Regular radio
broadcasts began in 1920, in Pittsburgh, at
the 100-watt station KDKA.
And the British Broadcasting Corporation created
the first radio network in 1922. Radio broadcasts
soared in popularity and became profitable
thanks to advertising.
By 1936, three quarters of American households
owned a radio. Unlike a telephone, a radio
worked without laying expensive copper wires.
So this invention, and the automobile, connected
cities to rural areas and changed how people
consumed music and sports.
Radio also became a tool of political propaganda
and an indispensible way of communicating
important news.
The greatest example of this occurred on October
30, 1938, when Orson Welles directed an adaptation
of H. G. Wells’s novel, “War of the Worlds,”
in which terrifying Martians invade earth
and subdue humanity.
Some people didn’t understand that this
was a drama - maybe they like, flipped on midway through, and mistook the realistic radio
announcements for actual news, causing a panic.
As radio was taking off, television was invented
and built on the infrastructure that supported it.
And, like radio, TV would take a long time
to move from prototypes to commercial networks.
Numerous people contributed to its development,
but one name stands out. Scottish engineer
John Baird invented a mechanical TV in the
early 1920s.
He used transparent rods to transmit images
of only thirty lines at at time, or pretty
low resolution.
Baird demonstrated the first televised images
in 1924, and moving ones in 1926. In 1928,
he transmitted an image of a human face across
the the Atlantic Ocean.
A year later, the BBC began broadcasting Baird’s
TV system. He even worked on color
TV before 1930—a tech that wouldn’t become
standard until the 1950s.
But in the end, the BBC switched to electronic,
rather than mechanical TV, adopting a system
by Marconi’s company in 1936.
Still, TV was expensive to produce, and receivers
were expensive. World War Two caused an intervening
distraction, so television didn’t take off
as an industry until the 1940s.
Telstar, the first satellite for global broadcast,
was launched in 1962.
And then, on July 20, 1969, people all over
the world watched as a human set foot on the
moon. We’ll get to space soon!
Think of all of the communications technologies
required to enable almost everyone alive to
watch the same Super Bowl, World Cup, or EuroVision
final!
These technologies emerged from intensive,
competitive corporate research programs. Corporate
invention at Menlo Park set the stage for
later R&D hubs at Standard Oil, General Electric,
DuPont, Bell Labs, IBM Labs, and Google X.
These places sought to, and seek to, turn
basic scientific discoveries about electromagnetism
into patents and profits.
Next time—we’re probing our own gray matter:
it’s the birth of psychology and psychiatry!
Crash Course History of Science is filmed
in the Dr. Cheryl C. Kinney studio in Missoula,
Montana and it’s made with the help of all
this nice people and our animation team is
Thought Cafe.
Crash Course is a Complexly production. If
you wanna keep imagining the world complexly
with us, you can check out some of our other
channels like Healthcare Traige, The Art Assignment,
and The Financial Diet.
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