with this Telegraph a device invented
way back in the mid-1800s I can
communicate with you even if you're
hundreds of miles away I can update you
on stock prices where the movements of
enemy troops or who's going to the next
week on RuPaul's Drag Race what's harder
to do is make you laugh tell you a long
story sing you this metal song I wrote
or show you this hilarious cat who's
terrified of this toy rabbit it's
adorable
trust me for that more emotional
audio-visual mode of communication let's
ditch the Telegraph and leverage some
basic scientific discoveries about sound
light and electricity made during the
19th century
[Music]
the telephone invented in the 1860s and
70s to personal communication to the
next level
both Scottish Canadian inventor
Alexander Graham Bell and American
engineer Elisha gray created working
telephone systems in 1876 and the
priority dispute between them is
fascinating but the telephone didn't
lend itself to popular entertainment it
was a one on one technology not a way of
communicating to the masses so it wasn't
until the invention of commercial sound
recorders and motion picture cameras in
the late 18-hundreds that you could
consume the same media as other people
around the globe and for those devices
we need to head back to the Menlo Park
Laboratory of Thomas Edison who was by
the way also working on the telephone
Edison developed the phonograph which
literally means sound writing in 1877
shortly before the light bulb and
electrical power system that made him
famous
maybe Edison was interested in recording
amplifying and playing back sounds
because he was hard of hearing
he might have imagined alternative
strategies for recording that hearing
people wouldn't have thought of Edison's
team invented a recording cylinder which
offered good sound quality it worked by
vibrating a thin membrane wrapped around
the cylinder and then amplifying those
vibrations or making them louder but
other inventors created the commercially
popular record a big flat disc that
stores audio information easily by using
the ridges to encode sound waves
either way photographs are pretty simple
and durable and still in use all of you
long play collecting vinyl heads are
enjoying a fancier version of the
phonograph every time you start your
turntable Edison cylinders were
originally used mostly for office
dictation by big companies and had
little impact on the consumer market in
fact Edison invented a lot of stuff that
consumers would either ignore or
outright despise probably the funniest
example of an Edison failed was the
talking doll created in 1890 the doll
had a recorder in its chest that could
play back mary had a little lamb and
other kid-friendly hits but the sounds
grew faint quickly making an already
creepy object much creepier even edison
called the dolls his little monsters and
at a
magnetic or separator which was
basically a big electromagnet that could
pick up tiny bits of or left behind by
conventional mining straight up
bankrupted him that said this was
actually a brilliant application of the
new science of electro magnetics just
too far ahead of its time to work
efficiently in practice medicine had
better lock post Dahle post or separator
with moving pictures as with his other
inventions he wasn't the first inventor
just the one who made a practical
commercial system today historians
credit French artist Lu EULA prints with
the first workable movie camera in 1888
he created the first known movie a very
short one showing off Roundhay garden in
Leeds apparently a very good garden
haven't seen it myself then the prints
disappeared from a train and was never
seen again
so thought bubble show us how Edison
made movie magic has with the light bulb
Edison didn't do the inventing himself
but relied on hiring creative experts
still he was the self-proclaimed
Napoleon of Technology so in the 1890s
Edison and Scottish inventor William
Dixon rolled out the kinetograph the
first motion picture camera which Dixon
invented at Menlo Park film movie
cameras work by taking lots and lots of
photographs called frames when they're
played back quickly they give the
illusion of motion because the human
brain can only process so many images
per second before it just gives up
Edison also created the prototype for
the Kinetoscope the first device for
individual movie viewing in 1891 he
debuted his device in Brooklyn in 1893
and in 1895 Edison created the kinetic
own adding sound to his movies via a
cylinder phonograph Edison's early
movies were not exactly oscar-worthy
although perhaps YouTube's worthy they
were only one minute long and they often
lacked elements we associate with cinema
like plot one of his early movies for
example simply depicted three of his
blacksmiths doing some smithing other
memorable Edison productions included
the kiss Fred Ott's sneeze Annie Oakley
shooting glass balls Frankenstein and
everyone's favorite professor Welton's
boxing cats
most of these were shot in the first
movie studio the black Mariah which was
created in Edison's bigger newer
in West Orange New Jersey one notable
exception was electrocuting an elephant
which was filmed at Coney Island in
which the aging elephant Topsy was
killed using alternating current it was
sad and weird and also popular thanks
tappable
Kinetoscope and caneta phone movies took
off in saloons and to Edison this was
enough movies didn't need to be long or
complex that never make any money that
way and besides people have short
attention spans other cinematic
entrepreneurs had different ideas
unfortunately for them Edison was an
enormous patent troll
he had the patent on the camera so he
kept suing other movie makers on the
East Coast which is one reason why they
kept moving to Los Angeles the eventual
epicenter of the movie industry the
other reasons were the better natural
lighting and weather and the larger
number of very good yoga studio /
Juicery 6 and left Edison Studios -
found Biograph pictures and the French
kept innovating brothers August and
Louie Lumiere invented these
cinematograph in the 1890s with the idea
of holding mass screenings and finally
in 1902 the US Court of Appeals ruled
against Edison finding that his company
couldn't hold the patent on all movie
cameras just the specific model Dixon
invented but by then cinema had moved to
the west coast and the world would
finally be able to bask in the glory of
Point Break radio came decades after
cinema which may sound odd because it's
just sound after all but radio waves
have to travel long distances without
losing fidelity or accuracy whereas
movies were just carted around using
physical reels of film Scottish
physicist James Clerk Maxwell predicted
the existence of radio waves back in the
1860s but German physicist Heinrich
Hertz discovered in 1885 that a wire
carrying an electric current will
radiate or give off electromagnetic
waves when it's swung back and forth
that is he made an antenna Hertz
researched the ways that antenna gave
off becoming the first person to show in
an experiment how to make and detect
electromagnetic waves his work led
directly to the radio today we measured
the frequencies of electromagnetic waves
in units called Hertz
radio waves the law
this type of electromagnetic wave are
measured in kilohertz megahertz or
gigahertz inspired by Hertz's research a
young Italian inventor engineer named
GUI Elmo Marconi worked in the 1890s on
how to send telegrams wirelessly many
people were interested in wireless
communication but it was Marconi who
first developed a working system at home
in bologna he sent and received the
first radio signals
soon after Marconi traveled to Britain
to commercialize his system by 1899 he
sent the first wireless Telegraph signal
across the English Channel and by 1901
he was able to send a single letter s
across the Atlantic Ocean from England
to Newfoundland Canada in this humble
sibilant way radio was born and so
Marconi won the Nobel Prize in 1909 in
fact Nikola Tesla developed a working
radio system even before Marconi but it
was Marconi's that took off commercially
that process did take a while regular
radio broadcasts began in 1920 in
Pittsburgh at the 100 watt station KDKA
and the British Broadcasting Corporation
created the first radio network in 1922
radio broadcasts soared in popularity
and became profitable thanks to
advertising by 1936 three-quarters of
American households owned a radio unlike
a telephone a radio worked without
laying expensive copper wires so this
invention and the automobile connected
cities to rural areas and changed how
people consumed music and sports radio
also became a tool of political
propaganda and an indispensable way of
communicating important news the
greatest example of this occurred on
October 30th 1938 when Orson Welles
directed an adaptation of HG Wells's
novel the War of the Worlds in which
terrifying Martians invade earth and
subdue humanity some people didn't
understand that this was a drama maybe
they like flipped on midway through and
mistook the realistic radio
announcements for actual news causing a
panic as radio is taking off television
was invented and built on the
infrastructure that was supporting it
and like radio TV would take a long time
to move from prototypes to commercial
networks numerous people contributed to
its development but one name stands out
Scottish engineer
Baird invented a mechanical TV in the
early 1920s he used transparent rods to
transmit images of only 30 lines at a
time or pretty low resolution Baird
demonstrated these first televised
images in 1924 and moving ones in 1926
in 1928 he transmitted an image of a
human face across the Atlantic Ocean a
year later the BBC began broadcasting
Barrett's TV system he even worked on
color TV before 1930 a tech that
wouldn't become standard until the 1950s
but in the end the BBC switched to
electronic rather than mechanical TV
adopting a system by Marconi's company
in 1936 still TV was expensive to
produce and receivers were expensive
world war ii caused an intervening
distraction so television didn't take
off as an industry until the 1940s
Telstar the first satellite for global
broadcast was launched in 1962 and then
on July 20th 1969 people all over the
world watched as a human set foot on the
moon will get to space soon think of all
of the communications technologies
required to enable almost everyone alive
to watch the same Super Bowl World Cup
or Eurovision final these technologies
emerged from intensive competitive
corporate research programmes corporate
invention at Menlo Park set the stage
for later R&D hubs at Standard Oil
General Electric DuPont Bell Labs IBM
labs and Google X these places sought to
and seek to turn basic scientific
discoveries about electromagnetism into
patents and profits next time we're
probing our own gray matter it's the
birth of psychology and psychiatry crash
course history of science is filmed in
the doctor Cheryl C Kinney studio in
Missoula Montana and it's made with the
help of all these nice people and our
animation team is thought cafe
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