Life and Work on the Other Side of Your TV ScreenEngineering TVW7 in the 1960s and 1970s  The Australian Museum of Motion Picture and Television (AMMPT) not only conduct the Sunday morning Classic Movies at the Cygnet Cinema once a month, but also have regular In Focus Presentations, where historians or veterans of […]
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Part 1 – The long and winding path that led to television
This article will try to remain non-technical, though it is important to know what forms of knowledge were required for television to happen. The sources of these discoveries are often buried in ancient history and the many efforts of numerous people that were made over the centuries. Part 1 deals with the sources of our […]
Part 2 – The long and winding path that led to television
PART 2 This part shows how imagination played an important role in not only arriving at new concepts but predicting where the future may lead. The science fiction of yesteryear soon became the reality of today as the properties of light were explored and substances that reacted to it led to photography and the electric […]
Part 3 – The long and winding path that led to television
PART 3 This part tells how all the ingredients gradually came together for television to become a reality. The discovery of cathode rays, wireless propagation, the gadgetry and people who made it all happen. The Cathode Ray Tube In 1838, the English scientist Michael Faraday (1791–1867) discovered cathode rays. His main discoveries include those of […]
Part 4 – The long and winding path that led to television
PART 4 This part tells how some of the early devices were primitive, being made from bicycle parts, until overtaken by advances in the electronics field. There were many people who contributed to the development of television and it was not alway fair in who benefited most from the discoveries. As isolated as Australia was […]
Part 5 – The long and winding path that led to television
PART 5 This part explains how the competition between the mechanical method of sending images soon gave way to the superior electronic system, with practical applications gradually becoming mainstream as broadcasting organisations embraced this new field. Cathode Ray Tube technology gains prominence Manfred von Ardenne (1907–1997) a German research and applied physicist and inventor gave […]
Part 6 – The long and winding path that led to television
PART 6 This part tracks how television has evolved since the end of World War II with its spread through Britain, the United States and Europe until politicians in Australia started to take notice and contemplate how it should be introduced here. When it arrived in the capitol cities between 1956 and 1959, all licences […]
Part 7 – The long and winding path that led to television
PART 7 – The long and winding path that led to television This part explores how television came to Western Australia and the battle to get enough viewers to make the industry viable. It really was the pioneering days, as the exchange of programs between other countries, with different television systems, was fraught with technical […]
Nickel Queen (1971) with John Hudson as TV interviewer
Nickel Queen was an Australian comedy film released in 1971 starring Googie Withers and directed by her husband John McCallum. The story was loosely based on the Poseidon bubble, a nickel boom in Western Australia in the late 1960s, and tells of an outback pub owner who stakes a claim and finds herself an […]
The Encyclopedia of Western Australian Wirelesses and Gramophones
We wish to advise that Perth science-teacher-turned-history-author and founder of the Light and Sound Discovery Centre, Richard Rennie, has produced an exciting new reference to everything old in relation to Western Australia wirelesses and gramophones. NEW PUBLICATION The Encyclopedia of Western Australian Wirelesses and Gramophones by Richard Rennie. In the first half of the twentieth […]