BBC Television received in New York (1938)
1938 · Television · 3 min
Synopsis
Andrew Emmerson, the British enthusiast, spent five years tracking down the recording and believes it is the only surviving example of pre-war live high-definition British television. The flickering black-and-white footage includes Jasmine Bligh, one of the original BBC announcers, and a brief shot of Elizabeth Cowell, who also shared announcing duties with Jasmine, an excerpt from an unknown period costume drama and the BBC's station identity transmitted at the beginning and end of the day's output. It was made at a time when no technology existed to record live broadcasts directly. Video tape was not perfected until the late 1950s and "telerecording", the quality copying with a cine camera mounted in front of a television screen was not developed until after the Second World War. There are other recordings from the pre-war era, but they are all cine film shot from a camera alongside the television lens, or as in the case of the Demonstration Films, recreated scenes in a shot in a film studio. The American recording was shown on 26 June 1999 at the refurbished National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford. Mr Emmerson, 50, a freelance researcher and writer on the television industry, said: "Rumours of a recording existing in America have circulated for years, but no one had ever got to the bottom of them. It was known that about this time there had been tremendous sun spot activity, which had a dramatic effect on the ionosphere. Broadcasts from the BBC…
Uploader's description on archive.org
Details
- Running time
- 3 minutes
- Collection
- 1950s Classic TV, Classic TV
Subjects on the Internet Archive
- apts
- simon
- vaughan
- new
- york
- telerecording
- alexandra
- palace
- jasmine
- bligh
Reviews on the Internet Archive
★★★★★ · Ghostly Images from a truely lost era in TV · The_Emperor_Of_Television · 2010-07-30
Very little 1930s TV footage still exists today. I think in one country, a few shows produced on film still exist. But with British TV, it's almost all gone, largely because British TV of this era was live with no way to record it until the mid-1940s. This footage, though ghostly and somewhat scary, is almost all that is left. For that reason, it's a must-see for those interesting in early TV. EDIT: To RoboReview, the other surviving footage from this period include a few minutes of an NBC drama (missing the sound), and several dozen episodes of German television programming that was produced…
★★★★★ · This broadcast, a lovely thing from the ether... · Eklectic1again · 2012-07-12
seems miraculous to me each time I watch it. I am old enough to remember the whacky world of analog television, dragged down to earth to our old TV sets by a roof-top aerial (i.e., antenna). Back in the early 60s, I recall receiving New Jersey, Philadelphia, and even Baltimore once, because of some kind of atmospheric condition on those particular nights. This at a time when it was hard to get New York City and Hartford, CT in New Haven, CT where I lived---the "snow" and "ghosting" due to other frequencies interfering (such as the strength of the local New Haven station coming in to compete)…
★★★★★ · Mostly likely recorded on February 18th 1938 by D R Goddard · T Smith275 · 2026-10-23
There is a detailed description of how these TV broadcasts were recorded in 1938 in the January 1939 issue of the Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE). In a paper by D R Goddard. The paper starts on page 12. There is what looks like a screen-shot from this video on page 15 of the paper. This research project was started in September 1937 at the RCA research facility in Riverhead, Long Island, NY and this paper was first presented at a conference in Washington DC in April 1938 before being published in January 1939. The most likely date for the images in this video based on…
★★★★★ · Amazing footage from london · aratbag · 2010-03-14
How this survived is amazing, particularly so that it was recorded on film in the USA and survived so many years. Quality may be sparse, but history is strong, no idea who is on, but I remember tuning in to SW closing my eyes and pulling in the best signal I could.
★★★★ · The flicker of history · RoboReview · 2010-07-30
It's remarkable that this signal reached the US, doubly remarkable that anyone was poised to film it, and trebly remarkable that it not only still exists, it will last thru the ages on IA. I hope the national broadcasting museum in NYC has a copy of this. Does anyone know whether there are other '30s kinescopes or filmed TV shows available to view? (I already saw the German one in this section.) If anyone wonders why a site like IA is so vital even in the age of YouTube, this is one of a million reasons why.