Customer Reviews

Television: The Life Story of a Technology (Greenwood Technographies)

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The very extensive research that is the foundation of this book has revealed a wealth of new findings to this reader, who otherwise is a regular reader of technical history writings. The very fine organization of the material and clear writing, make the book an easy read with easy assimilation of details as well as the larger picture context. While this may, or may not be the definitive text on television history, it makes a very solid contribution that others may build upon. The extensive reference system will save a lot of work to future contributors in the field. Even though the geographic scope of the book is clearly world-wide, perhaps other books will have more extensive coverage of TV developments outside the USA.
This reader is a mature engineer with several patents under his belt, and that comes from an interest in invention and admiration for inventors that goes back to childhood. I expect that this book will attract many other technically oriented readers with a an interest in inventors. This interest may cause some disappointment for admirers of Farnsworth. Even though contributions from Farnsworth are generally well documented by Magoun, their technical consequence was not always fully appreciated in the judgement of this Engineer reader. The two Farnsworth-related historic items that I would have liked to see included in the book are the use of Farnsworth image Dissectors in the 1936 German olympics, and pointing out that the English Emitron image pickup tube combined electron image storage plate inspired in Zworikin's iconoscope and the separate photo-cathode to convert photons to electrons, first used in Farnsworth's image dissector. The Emittron tube was the workhorse of English TV in the post-war period.
Finally, the concept of technography provided a very effective time structure to organize the material, and it imparted a fresh perspective that helps encapsulate the TV era in it's various phases.
Well done, Alex Magoun.

Written by Alexander B. Magoun (executive director, David Sarnoff Library), Television: The Life Story of a Technology lives up to its title with an in-depth examination of the history of a media that continues to transform the world. Though television has been prevalent only for approximately fifty years, the earliest conception of the technology that would become television had its roots over one hundred years in the past. Chapters cover the innovation that brought television into existence, and then to the masses; how its commercialization affected human culture; and how modern digital media is chipping away at television's dominance - indeed, could the Internet bring about television's final end? A handful of black-and-white photographs, a bibliography, and an index enhance this highly readable account, sure to fascinate lay readers and scholars alike.

This book is a great contributor to the technical books that, like Abramson's work before it, goes a long way toward placing a great deal of information in a single place. Unfortunately, it continues the tradition of history being written by the winners. In this case, the author being the curator of the Sarnoff library, he (intentionally or not) downplays the role of Philo Farnsworth in discovering the key to making television work, and then the many contributions Farnsworth made in refining the technology (see Joseph L. Sousa's review). However, if the reader is aware of this (and keeps in mind that the bias over at the Sarnoff Library against Farnsworth is so bad that over at their website's review of "The Farnsworth Invention" they spend a great deal of time denigrating the idea of patent law and accusing Farnsworth of being a worthless drunk) they will find a wealth of library information here.