Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

Floppy top o’ the mornin to ya...




Today's Chuckle comes to us from the March 22, 1965 edition of the York, Pennsylvania Dispatch.

Dragoons were originally a class of mounted infantry, who used horses for mobility, but dismounted to fight on foot. From the early 17th century onward, dragoons were increasingly also employed as conventional cavalry and trained for combat with swords and firearms from horseback. While their use goes back to the late 16th century, dragoon regiments were established in most European armies during the 17th and early 18th centuries; they provided greater mobility than regular infantry but were far less expensive than cavalry.

The name reputedly derives from a type of firearm, called a dragon, which was a handgun version of a blunderbuss, carried by dragoons of the French Army.

The title has been retained in modern times by a number of armoured or ceremonial mounted regiments.

The Dragonnades were a French government policy instituted by King Louis XIV in 1681 to intimidate Huguenot (Protestant) families into converting to Catholicism.

March 22, 1965: Bob Dylan's LP "Bringing It All Back Home" was released. The album cover photo by Daniel Kramer includes one of the most famous Fallout Shelter Sign cameos in history. Daniel Kramer describes the creative process behind the cover photograph.




Der schwarze Kanal (The Black Channel)



Translation from German:

The digitized broadcast manuscripts - The black channel

In 1998, the German Broadcasting Archive decided to digitize the broadcast manuscripts of the GDR political magazine The Black Channel (1960-1989), whose preservation was at risk, and to make them accessible to a broad audience via the Internet as part of the Distributed Digital Research Library. This project was financially supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG). The presentation of the broadcast manuscripts is supplemented by references to sources and literature as well as the integration of audio and video material from the DRA's holdings.

Fade to Black

When WW2 ended in 1945, it left communist and capitalist systems eyeball-to-eyeball in the centre of Europe and no more so than in what remained of Hitler’s fortunately short-lived ‘thousand-year’ Reich.

With Germany divided geographically, politically and militarily, both governments in the country were left with a problem -broad swathes of western Germany and almost the entire eastern zone could receive each other’s radio and VHF television output.

For most west Germans and the Federal Republic’s government, this was not a real problem. While ARD and later ZDF picked up a reputation for quality television (by mainland European standards), the Democratic Republic’s television service was, to try to be fair, awful at all times. Western viewers would rarely tune in for anything other than a laugh and were certainly never propagandised by it.

However, the situation was rather different in the east. While the west, as an open society, made few moves against communist broadcasting, the rulers in the east were not so forgiving.

Geography prevented the number one choice – jamming the signal. The need for the largely isolated GDR to live up to its laughable middle initial also made it diplomatically impossible to jam ARD’s transmissions.

So the Orwellian Ministry of Information in East Berlin chose a different tack.

West German television didn’t openly aim propaganda at the east. But its existence itself was a challenge – providing easterners with unbiased and accurate news, ‘capitalist’ entertainment and a forward-looking world view that the Politburo did not share.

Unable to prevent the population from watching, they created Der schwartz Kanal, ‘The Black Channel’, a peak-time ‘news’ programme where government (or Stasi) approved journalists provided a commentary over re-broadcast ARD and ZDF programmes.

In these bizarre, not to say downright creepy, programmes, West German broadcasts were pulled to pieces, with the presenter explaining to the audience the ‘real’ meaning behind the broadcasts they knew the population had been secretly watching.

News was freely re-interpreted. Drama was shown as nothing but arch propaganda against East German ‘democracy’. The lives of westerners were shown to be empty, lacking fulfilment and above all cold to the concerns of each other except where money was involved.

The Stasi – the secret police – kept files on more than a third of the population. Building its profiles from informers, the Stasi requested that East German schoolteachers ask children to draw what clock they saw on television the night before.

Almost invariably it was that of ARD. And that, in the strange world that was communism, was reason enough to keep the Black Channel open.

Television in Germany began in Berlin on 22 March 1935, broadcasting for 90 minutes three times a week. It was home to the first regular television service in the world, named Fernsehsender Paul Nipkow (TV station Paul Nipkow). The station was named after Paul Gottlieb Nipkow (22 August 1860 – 24 August 1940), the "father of television" and the inventor of the Nipkow disk. Nipkow's glory was used by Hitler and the Nazi government as a tool of National Socialist scientific propaganda.

While still a student, he invented a device he entitled the "electric telescope". The key component of this invention later became known as the "Nipkow disc". Accounts of its invention state that on Christmas Eve, 1883 when he sat alone at home with an oil lamp, he conceived the idea to use a spiral-perforated disk to divide a picture into a mosaic of points and lines. Another important component of his invention was a selenium photocell.

Nipkow applied for a patent in the imperial patent office in Berlin for his electric telescope. This was for the electric reproduction of illuminating objects, in the category "electric apparatuses". German patent No. 30105 was granted on 15th January 1885, retroactive to 6th January 1884, the 30 marks fee being lent by his future wife. It was allowed to lapse after 15 years. Nipkow had taken a position as a designer in the Berlin-Buchloh Institute and did not continue further development of the electric telescope.

The first practical television systems used an electro-mechanical picture scanning method, the method that Nipkow had helped create with his disc; he could claim some credit for the invention. Nipkow recounted his first sight of television at a Berlin radio show in 1928: "the televisions stood in dark cells. Hundreds stood and waited patiently for the moment at which they would see television for the first time. I waited among them, growing ever more nervous. Now for the first time I would see what I had devised 45 years ago. Finally, I reached the front row; a dark cloth was pushed to the side, and I saw before me a flickering image, not easy to discern."

A few years later, the leadership of the Third Reich saw the propaganda value in claiming television was a German invention, and in 1935 named the first public television station after Nipkow. Paul Nipkow appearing on German TV in the late 1930sHe became honorary president of the "television council" of the Reich Broadcasting Chamber. Nipkow died on the 24th of August, 1940 in Berlin. By government order, he was given a state funeral.

BAIRD TELEVISION

And lest not forget...



In 2006, Baird was named as one of the 10 greatest Scottish scientists in history, having been listed in the National Library of Scotland's Scottish Science Hall of Fame. In 2015 he was inducted into the Scottish Engineering Hall of Fame. In 2017, IEEE unveiled a bronze street plaque at 22 Frith Street (Bar Italia), London, dedicated to Baird and the invention of television. In 2021, the Royal Mint unveiled a John Logie Baird 50p coin commemorating the 75th anniversary of his death.

This is a photograph of a live image of Paddy Naismith, the first color television image displayed for the public in the UK, a demonstration made by famed Scottish television pioneer, John Logie Baird in 1941. The image was produced by a two-color system using dual projection CRTs combining their image onto a screen. The image shows famed adventurer Paddy Naismith, known as a race driver, air hostess and model of the 1930s and 40s.

BAIRD TELEVISION

This site is primarily about John Logie Baird (1888–1946), the Scotsman who was the first person in the world to demonstrate a working television system. On January 26th, 1926, a viable television system was demonstrated using mechanical picture scanning with electronic amplification at the transmitter and at the receiver. It could be sent by radio or over ordinary telephone lines, leading to the historic trans-Atlantic transmissions of television from London to New York in February, 1928.

You will discover herein not only information on Baird and his life's work, but also snippets and stories about other pioneers of television and the development of the television industry to the present day. Updates are made to the site every few months by its creators Malcolm H.I. Baird and Iain L. Baird who are respectively the son and grandson of J.L. Baird.

This is the oldest surviving color television in the world. It uses a color system invented in 1937 by Scottish engineer John Logie Baird.



National Museums Scotland