A few days ago Om and I were talking about some technologies. I mentioned I sort of predicted one with reasonable confidence about twenty years out. It seemed a bit too scifi on the surface, but other people in research agreed it could happen if a lot of money was spent. It seemed desirable, so why not? There was only one major roadblock and that turned out not to be roadblock at all. It needed a much better battery than anything we knew about. A lithium-ion battery was in the ball park at the time, but we had no idea Sony was playing with the technology at the time. We were equally unaware of the fundamental work in university labs two decades before.
It's interesting to think about areas of technology under rapid development and the importance of missing technologies. Television is a great example.
Television has been around for a long time. Philo Farnsworth's all electronic television in the 20s was probably the most important breakthrough. The lens of a camera focued an image on a photosensitive plate while an electron beam was scanned row by row across the imaged area. A signal of strength that varied with the brightness of the region the beam was on would be transmitted as a radio signal to a television receiver. The receiver had a cathode ray tube that, in lock-step with the beam in the camera, scanned a piece of glass coated with a phosphor that would glow when the beam hit it with a brightness that changed as with the signal the camera was sending. All of this was done at about thirty frames a second - good enough that your mind perceives motion.
Television was such a great name - viewing a moving scene at a distance as it happened. Shortly after WWII a few television networks sent their television signals between cities and then across the country. Even though the receivers were expensive it quickly caught on and the networks were spending serious money on production. But there was this problem with time zone. You put a program on at 6 PM in New York City and the television receivers in Los Angeles would display the image at 3 PM. Not exactly good for creating the largest potential audiences.
Electronic recording would fix the problem, but wire and tape recorders were just getting good enough for audio and television signals had about a thousand times as much information. It just wasn't possible. The solution seems a bit crazy now - point a film camera at a television monitor and immediately develop the film. Eastern and Central time zones were live, Mountain and Pacific were delayed by two hours.
At first these kinescopes used 16mm film. Once used most of the film was thrown away it degrades and is a fire hazard.. By 1954 television kinescope delayed broadcast became the largest consumer of movie film eclipsing Hollywood and the home movie markets combined. A bit before I Love Lucy became a huge hit show. Lucile Ball demanded higher quality so a switch was made to 35mm. The larger format was so expensive and had to be stored in newly constructed fireproof facilities. An archive began to emerge.
A few years passed and Ampex came out with a video recorder able to handle the flood of information. - a monster that used two inch wide tape. An expensive and initially temperamental monster that used two inch tape, but dirt cheap compared to the kinescope process. It quickly became the standard for time zone delay. The curious thing is that the television people didn't see tape as an archive medium. For a few years none of the tape delayed shows remain as the expensive tapes were reused until they wore out. No one thought long term storage was important.
The last part is interesting. We don't think of television as remote viewing - rather it's a video stream that might be live, time delayed, manipulated, archived, or all of these.
Oh .. the prediction from 1993? You will take a flat piece of glass out of your pocket and have a video conversation with a relative in India and the "call" won't cost anything. We knew how to code video, mobile radio would easily have the bandwidth in 15 or 20 years, multi-touch screens were in the labs, lcd color screens and lcd cameras were only going to get better, the price of bandwidth was going to crater (our corporate management didn't like that message) ... Moore's law on everything but the battery. Note: I've made a few good predictions, but looking back at my old lab books can be an embarrassment - you tend to forget the dead ends.
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