No More Learning

With this new principle of synchronization, which had been con- ceived by a woman, the multimedia system was perfect. By rights, it would have had to wipe ont the cinema equipment that had already been established, but the three amateurs were not able to also finance this mnlti-billion dollar replacement. It was clear that the conver- sion of silent film to sound film was only the first in an entire series of conversions that would turn the existing media system operating worldwide completely inside out without interrupting its efficiency or its finances. The same holds true for television systems or technical wars in general, both in the recent past and in the future.
In the case of sound film, it is easy to predict the outcome of this immense need for capital: as in the USA, the German film industry also fell into the hands of electrical concerns like Siemens and AEG, which got involved in lawsuits with the American patent holders for years until the worldwide marlcets were divided up, as usual, and UFA was taken over by Deutsche Bank and Hugenberg. And one
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fine day, after the inconsequential Tri-Ergon patents had long been sold in Switzerland, an American film giant conceived of the idea of commercially surpassing Warner Brothers and their vitaphone system. William Fox, who had first made money, as I said, with Edison's automatic kinetoscopes, bought the Tri-Ergon patents and converted them into a completely auto-referential form of film publicity: Fox's Movietone talking newsreels, the first sound documentary film.
However, all of the international networks between companies and banks, or between Zurich and Hollywood, could not alter the fact that sound film - in contrast to silent film - does not constitute an international medium. The Gisela patent is and remains a com- promise. As long as people continue to speak American or German, and have thus not yet defected to a worldwide standardized computer language like Algol, C or Ada, sound film will continue to serve as national propaganda in so-called national languages. This is rather inconsequential today, in the age of the computer, as the greatness of film is now a thing of the past and only computer languages still count. But because the English themselves refused at that time to recognize the dialect of Hollywood and California as English (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 612), sound film virtually appeared to form nations, just like the radio of that time. It thus restricted the com- panies of the interwar period to national language borders, which also committed them to the possibility of a second world war. Our film history must therefore turn to this war.
It should be emphasized beforehand that the difficulties of sound film synchronization also have an internal technical-aesthetic aspect. The numerous conversions between sound, image, and electricity that are necessary for this process already indicate that acoustic and optical signals are naturally less compatible. For precisely this reason, sound film was the first model case of a multimedia system long before television - if this term is understood as a system that manufactures not natural or physiological but rather technical con- nections. Sound film thus had to bridge two fundamental differences between optics and acoustics, which can briefly be explained.
First, acoustic signals only depend on a single independent vari- able: time (provided that stereophonic sound effects are disregarded, of course). Every musical signal is the momentary amplitude of a complex yet solitary vibration in time. As moving images, film, and television also depend on time. However, they also depend on two spatial coordinates: the height and width of each individual pixel (apart from 3-D experiments, the third spatial coordinate of depth
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can be ignored in the same way that stereophonic sound can be dis- regarded when making sound recordings). A one-dimensional vibra- tion or line is thus adequate for sound recording, whereas optical media principally require two-dimensional signal processing. When calculated by the technical-economic standards of engineers, this means that the amount of information to be processed is raised to tbe second power. For this reason, the image fills almost the entire celluloid of a sound film, whereas a band at the edge of the image is sufficient for the optical soundtrack, which in principle could even
be implemented as a simple line.
Second, the acoustics compensate for this simplicity by functioning,
since Edison's days, as an analog medium. In every given moment, the stored technical signal corresponds to the precise amplitude of the recorded sound signal. Until the introduction of audiotape, as I said before, this continuous image of continuous vibrations made it unimaginable and unfeasible to cut the soundtrack into pieces and then rearrange these clips arbitrarily, as is customary with film montage. According to the Breslau radio play pioneer Friedrich Bischoff, when the first radio play directors received the strange assignment to invent a new art form they in desperation chose the feature film as their specific model. Their quasi-cinematic radio play tricks even included slow dissolves and fades, which the new radio art borrowed from films. On the other hand, abrupt cuts and montages, which Andre Malraux called the operating principle of film, did not find their way into the emerging radio play.
By the same token, film and television are discrete processes that deal with nothing but individual frames or pixels, because optical storage is impossible even today. Even electronic switches work far too slowly to store or process light as the mixture of frequencies that it physically is. As is well known, audible sound ranges from approximately 25 Hz to 16 kHz, and that is why it was so easily conquered by low-frequency technology. Visible light is ten billion times faster and ranges from 700 to 380 terahertz. These are numbers with 14 zeroes, which is roughly 8 zeroes beyond the switching time of today's standard electronics, and therefore no medium could even come close. For this reason, film and television do not store light itself but rather only its photochemical effects (as we have already thoroughly discussed), which can then be stored and played back every twenty-fifth of a second, that is, in the low-frequency range. A compact disc that would sample sound events not at the usual 40,000 times per second but rather as slow as film or television would be a unique disaster for the ears.
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The problems of television and sound film can only be understood on the basis of these physical principles of media technology. The Tri-Ergon process had to be capable of transporting the film images jerkily as a discrete signal, while simultaneously reading the optical soundtrack continuously as an analog signal.
To soften this collision between digital and analog, the Tri-Ergon people developed a new film transport system. Before and after a frame was projected, the celluloid went into a waiting loop, which compensated for the static images during the projection time. Behind the second waiting loop, the film roll continued running the entire time without any interruption, which also made it possible to read the soundtrack as an undisturbed continuum.
The mechanical solution to this problem also had a systematic side. Through millisecond-precise coupling between image and sound, sound film had carried out Messter's standardization proposals for the first time, which means that it had also required an absolutely fixed recording and playback speed for film images. Otherwise, a film star with a soprano voice would have been able to sound like a bass and a film star with a bass voice like a eunuch. You all know
such sound manipulations from tape recorders that run too quickly or too slowly.
In the days of silent film, on the other hand, time loops and time lapses were not technical-experimental exceptions but rather daily practices in order to sell as many meters of celluloid as possible to a paying audience. For the first time, therefore, sound film opened up an absolute difference between experimental films and feature films. Real-time processing of tbe visuals first became genuinely verifiable through the ear and the acoustics. For this reason, sound film was a revolution in film aesthetics.
To begin with, many performing artists became unemployed in the middle of the global economic crisis. In 1929, a flyer with the following headlines in bold print was circulated in German moving picture theaters, as they were still so beautifully called (I have left out the fine print):
To the public!
Attention! Sound film is dangerous!
Sound film is kitsch!
Sound film is economic and spiritual murder!
Sound film is bad conservative theater at higher prices! Therefore:
Demand good silent films!
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Demand orchestral accompaniment with musicians! Demand stage exhibitions with artists!
Reject sound film! (quoted in Greve et aI. , 1976, p. 287)
This social-revolutionary pamphlet, written in the style of the Com- munist Party or the Nazi Party, was of course signed by the Inter- nationale Artisten-Loge, the performers union, and the Deutscher Musiker-Verhand, the musicians union. These unions were some- what Justified, as the epoch of easy and therefore pointless theater or literary adaptations had indeed begun, bnt they were unable to comprehend a technology that entirely dispenses with acceptance or rejection, needs or fears. Circus artists and musicians were therefore just about as intelligent as many theorists, from Miinsterberg to Bela Balazs, who praised silent film as a self-contained art form and harshly called the possibility of adding a soundtrack absurd. Only theorists, at least at that time, were less frequently unemployed.
The second point is reminiscent of a real historical joke that sound film played on a famous silent film star. John Gilbert had enchanted America's screens and women for 11 long years without having to betray the secret of his voice. However, in 1929 Gilbert's first sound film made what I have presented to you as a technical possibility literally or physiologically true: even without time-axis manipulation or sound time lapse, Gilbert's voice sounded like Mickey Mouse or a eunuch. Immediately after the premiere of this film, the star was a dead man in his own lifetime. Only Garbo threw a pair of roses into his grave (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 607).
The total securing of evidence through which people are registered by multimedia systems can also have a rebound effect on people themselves. Sound film changed the standard of voices and even more noticeably that of movements. As you all know, all of the expressionistic gestures employed by silent film actors for 30 years, which had barely made up for the lack of words and simulated the superimposed intertitles, disappeared; in facial expressions and ges- tures, sound film asserted a verifiable ordinariness. The crude time of small people - in other words, Hollywood cinema - could begin. For reasons that were less democratic than technical, it became practi- cally impossible to cut or interrupt people in the middle of speaking, unlike the old days of silent film when the actors were inaudible. Even today, we must patiently watch and listen in front of the screen until no one in the studio has anything more to say. Expressionistic gestures, which had been developed as the last defense against cuts, film doubles, and trick film shocks, thus gave way to a new movement
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style, as the inability to cut acoustic events also dictated the optical
events.
Funnily enough, one of the last German silent films, which had actually been made in the era of sound film, illustrated the difference between the two media within the plot as the difference between two generations. Using expressionistic silent film gestures, Fritz Lang's 1929 film Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon) depicted an old, poverty-stricken professor who dreams only theoretically of moon rockets. In contrast, the young engineers, who turned this theory into blitzkrieg technology at practically the same time as the real Wernher von Braun, are depicted with the economical gestures of sound film, the new objectivity, and the Wehrmacht.
We can leave the content of sound films to themselves, because according to McLuhan's law the content of any medium is always only another medium. And thus, to adapt de Sade freely, we can bring the history of film with one final exertion to an end. With key words like rocket technology and Wehrmacht, a third subchapter has opened whose title, in a modification of a Foucault book, should be called: From the Birth of Media Technologies to the Color of the World War.
3. 2. 5 Color Film
In short, World War II was colorful. The reason was actually because the chief sponsor of the German film industry was Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, who had declared war on black-and-white film. In the name of total war or total simulation, World War II eliminated the last remaining differences between fiction and reality, and thus all the ways in which so-called artworks and so-called empiricism have been differentiated from time immemorial. After 1944, for example, German tank crews could no longer operate during the day due to allied air superiority, and they were equipped with night-vision devices that not only put Herschel's discovery of infrared light into practice, but also realized various dreams from a thousand and one nights. Conversely, Sir Watson-Watt provided the English air force with the first operational radar system in the world, which improved on Ritter's discovery of invisible ultraviolet light by extending it towards even higher light frequencies. If it was possible to see colors beyond even the visible color spectrum, such as infrared or radar waves, then visible colors were not permitted to remain hidden. The end of silent film as a consequence of World War I was thus followed by the development
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of color film as preparation for World War II. The Redness of Red in Technicolor, which was the lovely title of a 1960s book, was also the red over London, Dresden, and Hiroshima.
The first attempt to use homemade Agfacolor colors was the film Women Are Better Diplomats, which was banned by Goebbels at the beginning of the war simply because in his eyes the colors were "shameful. " The Wehrmacht, or more precisely the navy, had discov- ered feature films in American Technicolor on captured allied ships and sent them as spoils of war to the propaganda ministry. Among these films, naturally, was Gone with the Wind, the self-promotional color film about the American Civil War and the wonderfully color- ful fires that develop when one burns the wooden palaces of old- fashioned southern slave owners.
The German Agfacolor film followed this brilliant example and was gone with the wind. As usual, the leadership of the Reich con- tacted IG Farben, whose chemicals and poisonous substances were crucial to the war effort, and an optimized Agfacolor finally caught up with the criteria for realistic color set by Technicolor. This war over realistic color was supposed to define the entire history of optical media from 1939 to color television in 1965. But in 1942, Veit Harlan was already able to delight all of fortified Europe, from Cherbourg to Kiev, with his Golden City, a color film that was still primarily a form of publicity for itself. The propaganda minis- ter's strategy, whereby only perfectly made entertainment could raise morale, had once again been put into action.
So much for Virilio's discussion of color film as the spoils of war (Virilio, 1989, p. 8). Incidentally, this was not only true for Veit Harlan, but also for Eisenstein, whose Ivan the Terrible had to make do with captured German Agfacolor film. The transfer of technologi- cal advances in two phases (from America to Europe and then from Europe to West Asia), which has since become typical, thus took shape long before Gorbachev.
In addition to these historical notes, however, some technical- systematic remarks must also be devoted to color film, and I will once again attempt to formulate this so generally that it will also be true for color television. This is easy from a technical perspective, because the black-and-white television from World War II already had the technical elements of color television.
I cannot compete with Goethe and deliver a historical theory of colors. Still, the most important steps leading from color photo- graphy to color film to color television must be mentioned. It has already been said that painters always had to deal with colors, and
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signs of color deterioration over time became photography through positivization. But there was no economy of colors ill painting, as this did not become necessary until the development of color ink and color photography. In other words, the number of colors that a painter used to produce a mixed color on his palette was entirely up to his discretion. However, in 1611, an entire century before Newton's analysis of the light spectrum, the Venetian Antonius de Dominis established the key principle that all colors can be mixed from red, green, and violet - the three primary colors. This additive synthesis made it possible to print copperplate engravings no longer only next to one another - as was already the custom with Gutenberg and his colleague Schoffler - but also over one another. Bold colors (on broadsheets) were replaced by infinitely graduated and perfectly overlapping color values, which were standardized in the late nine- teenth century (after the discovery of chemical-artificial aniline dyes, the basis of IG Farben). With Senefelder's lithography, at the latest, three-color printing could commit all desired color nuances to paper. Four-color printing, which has since become the technical standard, also only uses three colors; the fourth printing plate is not colored, but is rather only black or grey, and its task is to differentiate bright- ness values (such as between pastel red and dark red of the same tint).
This economy of materials had important consequences for physi- ological optics, as it defined not arts but rather the first technical media. In the same years that Goethe spent dreaming of a poetic- aesthetic theory of colors, the Englishman Thomas Young developed first, his theory of the interference of light and second, his hypothesis that the eye also functions like a three-color print. Simply because it is completely improbable that the eye would have enough room to contain receptors for an infinite number of different colors, it was necessary to postulate the existence of sensors first for red, second for green, and third for violet. As far as I know, this has never been demonstrated on a living human eye, but in 1967 the Nobel Prize in Physiology went to three doctors who had proved that the cones of human-like vertebrates were limited to RGB (as the technicians say), while the rods can only distinguish between light and dark. Physiologically, therefore, every color signal is a mixture of different amounts of three tints plus a brightness or saturation value. Techno- logically, television - as electrified four-color printing - will derive from this its separation between chrominance (or color value) and luminance (or brightness value).
The first person to convert the new color physiology into technol- ogy again was none other than James Clark Maxwell, to whom we
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owe the general field theory of magnetism and electricity - the prin- ciple of all wireless radio communication - and the clarification that visible light does not consist of elastic vibrations, but rather it is only a special case of that electromagnetic spectrum. In 1861, Maxwell took black-and-white photographs of the same object, colored them in the three primary colors, and successfully projected the images over one another. This would later become the basic circuit of both color film and color television, and it had consequences for painters and technicians.
To begin correctly with the technicians: in 1868, the "ingenious [photographer] Ducos du Hauron" connected the physiology of Young (and Helmholtz) with the media technology of Maxwell (Bruch, 1967, p. 35). He literally suggested: "Small points and lines in the three primary colors red, green, and blue are placed next to each other on a plate so closely that they all merge into the same blended white at the same time. When the elements of all three colors are equally bright, they cover the same parts of the surface; when one color is less bright, more elements are taken from this color and they become larger" (Bruch, 1967, p. 35).
Ingenious blueprints rarely creep up so softly. First, Ducos du Hauron reversed the entire working principle of painting by replac- ing the subtractive color synthesis of a painter's palette, where the mixing of all colors together results in black, with Newton's and Maxwell's additive synthesis, where the sum of all colors results in white. Because there are no white phosphorescent materials in nature, incidentally, the white that has appeared on black-and-white screens since 1930 is also in technological reality a meticulously bal- anced mixture of complementary colors, whose addition results in this white. Second and possibly even more importantly, Ducos du Hauron hegan the digitization of color images. Just like the recently invented telegraph, he built colored areas out of "dots and dashes," which in the eye became the illusion of an apparently uniform colored area. Young's model, which broke the eyes down into nothing but discrete rods and cones for primary colors, was thus transferred to a picture or medium that could simulate human eyes and show them how to perform.
Painters only needed to transfer this technical model of vision to their canvases, through the mediation of a certain Chevreuil, and Europe's last object-oriented art movement was born. The so-called pointillists - Seurat, Signac, Pissaro, and so forth actually built their landscape pictures out of nothing but points in the primary colors, which then within the eye, and indeed sensationally through
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additive synthesis, blurred into blended pamts. This last competition between fine arts and optical media was followed only by abstract painting.
There was only one artist at the tIme who drew techmcal rather than aesthetic conclusions from these digitized colors: Charles Cros, who was a lyricist, painter, bohemian, and tinkerer all at the same time. He had already accurately described the phonograph shortly before Edison, and he also described the first method of making color photographs. After Young and Ducos du Hauron, all that remamed necessary for color storage was the development of emulsions, which contain static, dispersed receptors for all three primary colors just like the eye. This is precisely what Cros proposed, although Edison said that he "was inconsistent, sought immortality at one time as poet and at other times strove for the painter's laurels, and thus he lacked that peculiar ability of concentration and inner composure, without which nothing great and permanent can be created" (Eder, 1978, p. 651). To put it more simply: the money from color photography was made by others.
In order to get to television, I will not bother tracing the lengthy history leading up to the mass production of Agfacolor in 1941. To put it briefly, it consisted simply in the commercialization of the theories and experiments we have already discussed. In the first phase, the rule already given concerning silent film still applied: silent black-and-white film was neither silent nor black-and-white. First, the technique of film tinting was developed on the basis of Maxwell's experiment: black-and-white films were simply dyed in uniform, monochromatic colors such that love scenes were depicted in pink, a yearning for nature was expressed through the color blue, etc. Second, there were attempts to color the thousands of frames in an entire film by hand, which was lavish, expensive, and rare - like
impressionists painting the Cathedral of Chartres in all the changing shades of color of an entire day. Third, in 1897 the Berliner Hermann Issensee applied for a patent for color cinematography, which in the spirit of pointillism showed three differently colored frames one after the other in rapid succession, and these colors blended together at the extremely high frame rate of 120 hertz (Bruch, 1987, p. 19). Fourth, it is important to keep in mind that black-and-white films were never perfect before the developmeut of panchromatic films, because the emulsion responded to the individual primary colors with varying degrees of intensity and these imbalances could only be adjusted through the use of expensive carbon arc lamps or sunlight (Monaco, 1977, p. 96).
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In any case, you can see that it still took a long time after the introduction of sound film to erase the last difference between simu- lation and reality. As I said before, World War II was the first war in color. At the end of the war, the first color film material was provided to the propaganda companies that had been systematically established in all of the armies (see Barkhausen, 1982). In contrast to World War I, these propaganda companies were ordered to take part in the combat with weapons, and in contrast to Griffith or Messter they were consequently forbidden simply to reconstruct battle scenes. Unlike war correspondents on the radio, who were only equipped with transmitters, and unlike journalists, who were only equipped with typewriters (see Wedel, 1962), film could supply a multimedia show of color and sound, word and noise.
For this reason, the introduction of stereo sound and widescreen after the war was only a small step that enabled color film to be able to deceive the three-dimensionality of ears and eyes. In World War I, varions professors, physicists, and musicologists had attempted to use perspective to detect invisible enemy artillery by artificially extending the range of vision or hearing. One of them, the French physicist Henri Chretien, transferred his military detection technique to the civilian trick of horizontally compressing film images during recording to squeeze more optical information into Edison's stan- dard format. During playback, however, this deformation would once again be equalized (Virilio, 1989, p. 69; Monaco, 1977, p. 87).
Widescreen film was thus born, and it would be cinema's last life saver before the competition of television became overpowering. Up to now, the horizontal viewing angle of slipper cinema has been beneath contempt, but widescreen, cinemascope, and stereo sound can no longer change the fact that for us the highest purpose of film is already in the past. Strictly according to McLuhan's law, film has devolved into an evening program content filler for another medium: television.
3. 3 Television
Unlike film, which simply inherited all the complexities of the image as accoutrements, television is a high-tech object. Therefore, we can and must link together many of the technical explanations that have already been given. It will be impossible, however, to draw any connections between television and literature or fantasies. Unlike film, there were no dreams of television prior to its development. In
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1880, when the British humor magazine Punch published a carica- ture showing people watching television in the future, the principle underlying the technology had already been fixed. And when Liesegang edited his Contributions to the Problem ofElectrical Tele- vision in 1899, thus naming the medium, the principle had already been converted into a basic circuit. Television was and is not a desire of so-called humans, but rather it is largely a civilian byproduct of military electronics. That much should be clear.
It should also be clear that the history of the development of televi- sion was the first realization through electronics of all of the functions named in Shannon's information theory. First, it was a fully elec- tronic converter of images into currents, and thus a television signal source. Second, it was a fully electronic transmission circuit, and thus a television channel. Third, it was a fully electronic converter of current into images, and thus a television receiver. Its fourth function, which only developed much later, was also to serve as an electronic image storage device. The technical specifications were so complex because the digital processing of optical signals is two-dimensional; it must be able to cope with the square of the amount of information processed by records or radio transmitters.
Since 1840, however, the single electrical news channel was teleg- raphy, which had been standardized by Morse. It was a channel, therefore, that was just as linear as alphabet and letterpress - the media it had displaced. Just as letters are read one after the other, so too were the dots and dashes of Morse code transmitted one after the other through isolated copper-cored cables. On the other hand, Siimmerring's attempt to transmit the 26 letters and ten numbers over 36 parallel wires during the war of 1809 proved to be much too expensive and prone to interference. "A Gennan idea/) Napoleon reportedly said about Siimmerring's telegraphs. In contrast to film, therefore, the problem of television from the very beginning was how to make a single channel dimension from two image dimen- sions, and how to make a single time variable from convertible surfaces.
It was no coincidence that the principle answer was found by
Alexander Bain, a Scottish philosopher and printer. Because the print-
ing of writing processed data streams in a linear fashion, while the
printing of images broke these surfaces down into dots, Bain was able Col to suggest that images should be principally conceived as rectangular
grids, and that the individual raster elements should be transmitted point by point. In principle, therefore, images became discrete quan- tities of data, like telegrams. In strict opposition to photography,
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which prided Itself on its analogy to nature, and m partlal contrast to film, which consisted of a discontinuous or discrete sequence of many analog photographs, television began as radical cutting: it not only cut up movements in time, but it also disintegrated connections or shapes into individual points in space. The symbolic thus now triumphed where once the imaginary had ruled over perception and consequently also painting. And the fact that these individual points are today called pixels or "last elements" already shows how close television was to Young and Ducos du Hauron's theories concerning colored dots. This proximity had only to be realized.
It happened in 1883, even before the development of the feature film, when a 23-year-old physics student made a useable and patented television circuit based on Bain's principle. Paul Nipkow studied here in Berlin with Helmholtz, whose important experiments with sounds, voices, and colors laid the groundwork for the invention of the telephone and the gramophoue. But while Helmholtz received an imperial physical-technical institute as a gift from Werner von Siemens, the telegraph industrialist, his student Nipkow remained in classic Mecklenburg poverty. In 1883, therefore, he spent Christmas Eve in his dormitory room in front of a small Christmas tree with the candles burning, a cheap petroleum lamp, and a German National Post Service telephone that one of his few friends had misappropri- ated as a private gift for himself. From this misuse of an imperial device emerged - on the last Christmas in the history of the world, if you will - not an entertainment medium, as our current misunder- standing might assume, but rather a channel in Claude Shannon's literal sense of the word. As it says in Nipkow's patent specifications,
"the purpose of the apparatus described here is to make an object at 'location A visible at any location B" (Rings, 1962, p. 37).
The idea of this image transmission occurred to Nipkow either at the sight of the Christmas tree candles, which flicker, or at the sight of the telephone, which Alexander Graham Bell had first invented: if human voices were transmissible, why should it not also be possible to transmit the corresponding face? According to Bain, the image would then have to be cut up into individual points, which would be transmitted to a receiver using a telephone cable and would then be reassembled once again as a flickering image; as a good student of Helmholtz, however, Nipkow also knew about the inertia of the eye and its unconscious ability to filter out the image flicker either physiologically through the after-image effect already employed by film, or more generally or mathematically through the integration of individual pixels.
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The sender of such a system stood (ill his own words) "automati- cally" in Nipkow's mind's eye (if the literary quotation "mind's eye" had not become obsolete under the conditions of television). The so- called Nipkow disk - a metal disk that rotates around its axis - stood between the image source and the transmitting channel, and its sale function was to carry nothing but holes. When the disk turned, the holes arranged in spirals generated a visual axis of changing points on the image, which activated a fixed selenium cell that reacts to fluctuations of light with oscillating current, as already emphasized with sound film. The number of holes in the Nipkow disk corre- sponds to the desired number of lines in the television image, as Klaus Simmering points out:
As the disk turns, one pixel after the other wanders in an approxi- mately straight line over the screen, thus delineating an image line. H one point disappears on the left edge, the next point in the spiral, which shifts roughly one line space towards the center [of the disk], reaches the right edge and subsequently begins delineating the follow- ing line. The distance between the holes thus corresponds to the width of the screen, and the difference between the distance of the first and last holes from the center of the disk defines the height of the screen, which necessarily assumes a more or less trapezoidal form. (Simmering, 1989, p. 13)
To put it more simply: Nipkow imposed the discrete line form of a book or telegram onto images with sweeping success.
The inventor was less successful on the receiver side. What was missing was a method of converting the weak current produced by the photocell back into visible light, which in turn would have then been cut up by a Nipkow disk and projected as a two-dimensional image. Above all, Nipkow did not waste much thought on how to ensure that the continuous stream of electrical pixels on the receiver side would construct precisely the same lines as on the transmitter side. For example, if a 20-line television were reproduced with line 1 as line 19, line 2 as line 20, but line 3 as line 1, the imaginary of pattern recognition, on which Nipkow's video phone entirely depended, would have greatly suffered. In other words, the patent awarded by the imperial patent office in Berlin on January 6, 1884 did not provide a solution for a synchronization problem, and because this problem occurred between the transmitter and the receiver it was even more dramatic than the synchronization problem of image and sound with sound film.
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Nlpkow's third handIcap was the mechanics of Image scanning and image reconstruction. The electrical channel had the advantage of moving at the same absolute speed as the optical data itself; the selenium cell also kept pace, although it was admittedly slower than later Kerr cells (Simmering, 1989, p. 15); however, the rotating disks at both ends of the system were hopelessly slow and obsolete.
For this reason, Nipkow never thought about his Christmas idea agam nntil his old age, when imperial German broadcasting dragged him once more mto the spotlight of Berlin radio shows as a pioneer of German technology. One year after his patent, he joined the Berlm Railway Signal Company as a constructor, and for the next 30 years he constructed nothing but security equipment and signalling devices. He thus exchanged electrical high-frequency television signals, which were not yet technically feasible, for mechanical railway signals, and during the years of this regression he even forgot that he had applied for a television patent at all (Rings, 1962, p. 37).
Others fared no better than the patent holder. The processing of moving images in real time practically never succeeded with Nipkow disks; it only sncceeded in later practice when real time played no role. In 1928, long before the Federal Criminal Police Office's computer sur- veillance, the Imperial Criminal Police were already able to slowly scan wanted posters and fingerprints, broadcast them with electrical speed, and then convert them slowly back into images again at distant police stations. Television in Germany thus did not begin with entertainment
broadcasts; the states first learned how to secure evidence from across the country, which has led to remarkable arrests even quite recently.
But back to Nipkow's patent. I am sure you already anticipated that his three weak points were not corrected until the development of the tube. First, the tube enabled the virtually unlimited amplifica- tion of low-frequency currents, like those supplied by selenium cells after images are scanned. Second, the tube, at least in principle, made it possible to turn Nipkow's wire-bound video telephony into televi- sion, which like radio also transmits high-frequency wireless signals. By modulating the low-frequency pixel fluctuations, which cannot be radiated as such from any antenna, with a high carrier frequency, the television transmitter is complete. Third, the tube originated as the Braun tube even before it served the functions of amplification and feedback. Braun's oscilloscope could not only convert current immediately into light, thus avoiding all of the light bulbs that were still necessary for Nipkow, but it could also direct the luminous electron beam to arbitrary points on a screen using electromagnets, thus forming truly digital images out of nothing but points of light.
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In 1897, Braun had made alternating current visible with his oscIl- loscope, but he was not interested in transmitting images, as I have said. In 1908, on the other hand, Campbell-Swinton proposed the installation of a revolutionary television system with a Braun tube on the transmitter side as well as the receiver side. The image to be recorded was supposed to be projected on the screen of a Brann tube, which was covered with a mosaic of inertia-free photocells. The elec- tron beam of the tube was supposed to read out the electrical charge generated by the light falling on the photocells, thus converting it into oscillating current. On the receiver side, anotlier Braun tube would then perform the reverse process by converting this current back into visible images (Simmering, 1989, p. 25). That IS preCIsely how it happened.
Bnt it took a long time to eliminate all of the mechanical weak points of Nipkow's transmission chain. Because every information system is only as good as its weakest component, the development of television was slowed down above all by the bandwidth of medium wave radio, which arose from World War 1. These medium wave transmitters, in contrast to today's VHF, actually offered enough frequency bandwidth to transmit aconstic or one-dimensional signals, but a Braun television tube raised the amount of information by a power of two. To adapt Morgenstern freely, medium wave trans- mitters were not built for this at all, and it exploded the capacity of the channel. For this reason, mechanical Nipkow disks contin- ued to be used through the twenties even though the frame rate was a pathetic 12. 5 hertz, which was still below that of film, and the 4 X 4 cm large image only had 30 lines. The German National Post Service experimented with this standard, and the engineers in charge were professors Mihaly and Karolus, who also worked on optical sonnd. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) also experimented with this standard, with the passionate Scottish dilet- tante John Logie Baird in charge. For people, on the other hand, the
blurredness of a scanned newspaper photograph magnified 20 times seemed meaningless; only a few amateurs, who had to synchronize their private Nipkow disks with the transmitter's Nipkow disk nsing fingerprints (Simmering, 1989, p. 17), played along with the new technicians) toy.
The thirties were thus influenced by a double optimization. First, propaganda experts had to invent images that wonld tune the popula- tion into television, which was best accomplished by the spectacular Berlin Olympics iu 1936 and the Nuremberg rally crowd scenes. Second, even after broadcasting had electrified the televisiou channel,
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technicians still had to replace the Nipkow disks wIth tubes. Manfred von Ardenne, who played a leading role in the history of the National Socialists and the German Democratic Republic, succeeded at playing back television images, and Vladimir Zworykin, an officer of the Tsar who emigrated to the USA, succeeded in recording them.
Strangely, it was once again at Christmas in 1931 that von Ardenne astonished journalists with his flying spot scanner, which had a reso- lution of 10,000 pixels and a frame rate of 16 hertz. Von Ardenne thus achieved an Image quality that was far superior to that using mechanical Nipkow disks and even the frequencies of radio at that time. The channel capacity of Ardenne's television images increased even more after an ultra short wave radio was developed under pres- sure from the Wehrmacht, which was the only army in the world with ultra short wave radio-controlled tank divisions engaged in a blitzkrieg in 1939. As a BBC correspondent wrote, "Herr Eugen Hadamovsky, Director-General of the German broadcast service, [established] the world's first regular high-definition television service on Friday, 22 March 1935" (Simmering, 1989, p. 12).
But the German National Post Service's first regular high-definition television cannot be compared to Sony's high-definition TV today. It did not even have adequate transmitter tnbes. The result was that only one other medium could be considered for the content of televi- sion: sound film, which had just recently been developed, was divided into image and sound. Radio transmitted the sound quite easily, while a Nipkow disk laboriously scanned the image - not even in real time at first. McLuhan's law was thus absolutely valid. Television could only be decoupled from feature films and turned into a live broad- cast medium by developing an endless film: immediately after its development, it would be scanned by television, given a new emul- sion and then it would be exposed and scanned again, etc. , etc. This technique enabled the transmission of television in real time, just as radio broadcasters produced their own expensive canned recordings prior to the development of audiotape.
Third, the so-called "sweatbox" emerged as a genuine television recording studio, which functioned without the interposition of film technology. However, because the (even improved) Nipkow disks could only scan objects that were lit externally rather than self- illuminating objects like candles or light bulbs, the first television actors - like the telephone exchange after 1900, there were natu- rally no spokesmen but only spokeswomen - had to perform in an absolutely black box that was illuminated by the strongest available lamps, which was therefore also extremely hot. It was the last time in
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history and the first time since Edison's Black Mary that the camera obscura was implemented.
All of these deficiencies on the transmitter side disappeared with the 1936 Olympics, a spectacle of world war sport staged by the National Socialists. A young engineer named Walter Bruch focused his electronic camera on the athletes from a specially constructed, invisible trench or television bnnker in the Berlin Olympic Stadinm. The iconoscope developed by Zworykin was actually supposed to be mounted in the heads of rockets to enable remote military recon- naissance (Virilio, 1989, p. 75); however, Zworykin's company, the Radio Corporation of America, turned it into a twin of von Ardenne's playback tube: the massless and inertia-free recording tube, Just as Campbell-Swinton had imagined. Because Nipkow's individual sele- nium cells were replaced with an entire screen composed only of
light-sensitive elements, the iconoscope supplied a light yield that was 40,000 times better, and it thus released early television stars from their sweatboxes.
With ultra short wave radio as the transmission channel, the icono- scope as the recording tube, and the flying spot scanner as the play- back tube, the high-tech information system known as television was finally complete, because its combined functions (in Shannon's sense) shifted from mechanics to electronics. Like sound film, however, only countries and global companies on the technical warpath could still finance the fully electronic television system. The German National Post Service, for example, gave its patents on phosphorescent chemi- cals to the USA, as they were necessary for the apparent black and white of receiver tubes; in return, they received the iconoscope patented by RCA.
The political effects of this new image and sound medium were also similar to the effects of sound film. Television became a medium of national and domestic politics because it was transmitted in national languages and its extremely high transmission frequencies (prior to the development of satellite and cable television) only had a quasi- optical range of 60 to 70 kilometers. It was therefore no wonder that the Paul Nipkow television station, which had been named in honor of the inventor who was still living at that time, immediately had political functions. Hitler and Goebbels explicitly stated that novel- ists would be permitted to retain the completely ineffective medium of print provided that the state alone maintained a monopoly on all sounds and images. Despite its own claims or those made by its enemies, however, the National Socialist state was not monolithic and totalitarian but rather a conglomeration of power subsystems, so
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televisiOn got mvolved in a war even before the beginning of World War II. After a long struggle between these power subsystems, from which the Third Reich emerged like a polyp, in December 1935 there was a decree: the National Post Service retained the rights to civil- iau technical developments, the Ministry of Information retained the rights to "representative forms for the purpose of popular enlight- enment and propaganda," while the Air Ministry "in consideration of the special meaning of television for air traffic control and civil air defense" retained the rights to mannfacture and distribute all television technologies (Bruch, 1967, p. 53). This tripartite division between civilian technology, program content, and military arma- ment already proves that prior to World War II television was not a mass medium that would have derived its mass impact paradoxically from the intimacy of the picture size, program, and reception.
In fact, television worked much more like radio broadcasting, as dictators from Berlin to Moscow did not just rely on the intimacy of a recording microphone and a room speaker, but rather they rehearsed the mass impact of loudspeakers at party rallies or in Red Square. Following the model of the Volkswagen or the Volksrund- funkempfiinger (people's radio), the electrical industry developed the Volksfernseh-Einheitsempfiinger El (people's television) at a price of 500 reichsmarks. It was the first rectangular tube in the world (Bruch, 1967, p. 71), and it stood in post offices and other public agencies in Berlin, where its screen was enlarged so that it could be seen by many spectators at the same time. The people who attended these "large picture stations" did not actually pay an entry fee, but they had to show tickets, as in the cinema, to regulate the amount of traffic. These broadcasts ran continuously with only brief interruptions from the ontbreak of the war in 1939 until the bombing of nearly all the German transmitters: the few television receivers that were actually manufactured (50 instead of the planned 10,000) stood in mili- tary hospitals in Berlin and occupied Paris, where France's national television service could be connected directly to the Wehrmacht in 1944.
Now that we are discussing World War II, it is time to pause for a moment. It was clear since the Renaissance that perspective was closely related to firearms and ballistics. Photography was also applied to criminology and cryptography. World War I reconnais- sance planes even connected film cameras to machine guns, and sound film was also developed on the basis of war technologies. But the high-tech medium of television is the only one among all of these optical media that functions according to its own principle as
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a weapon. For this reason, it would not have risen to world power without World War II.
We begin the overview of World War II television technologies in France, where a color television system named SECAM, based on Wehrmacht television, was promoted after the war. The developer of the SECAM system was Henri de France (1911-86), who worked in the field of radar and whose company received their commissions after 1930 "primarily from the War Ministry, the Department of the Navy and the Air Ministry. In 1934 Henri de France applIed for his first patent for a direction finding system. Under contract with the French navy he developed a television system for the armoured cruis- ers of the second Atlantic fleet using a cathode ray tube and with an image resolution of 240 lines. In 1936 he succeeded in establishing a wireless television connection between warships on the high seas
and the port of Brest" (Bruch, 1987, p. 63).
French postwar television was a product of radar - an electroni-
cally perfected variant of World War I detection methods - which had begun with analog or natural sensory media like the eye and the ear. Great Britain proceeded similarly, but much more systematically; unlike the Wehrmacht's aggressive ultra short wave tank campaign, they had to prepare for a defensive war. The German physicist Christian Hiilsmeyer had already successfully received the first elec- tronic echo on May 18, 1904. He transmitted a radio impulse that traveled through space at lIght speed, was reflected by surfaces in its path, and was then once again received at the same location as the transmitter. When the signal delay was divided in half and multiplied by the speed of light, the result of course was the distance between the transmitter and the object that had reflected the signal. According to Virilio's brilliant formulation, therefore, radar is an invisible weapon that makes things visible (Virilio, 1989, p. 75) because it converts objects or enemies that do not want to be seen or measured at all into
involuntary and compulsive transmitters (with the exception of the US Air Force's brand new stealth bomber). For the strategic benefit of Great Britain before the war, Sir Watson-Watt developed Hiilsmey- er's basic circuit into a functional radar network. Radar stations were connected by radio throughout all of southern England, and they could report attacking Messerschmitts or Heinkels of the German Luftwaffe even while the approaching planes were still invisible. It was for precisely this reason that on the day the war began, the BBC discontinued the civilian television service it had introduced in 1936; from then on, the same high-frequency tubes that worked in televi- sion transmitters were sent to radar stations, and the same screens
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that worked I I I teleVIsion receivers also made the Illvisible enemy visible on radar screens. Without any friction loss, an entertainment medium had been converted into a war technology. And because Watson-Watt understood that the quality of radar images was stra- tegically crucial and inversely proportional to the wavelengths of the sent signals, Great Britain developed increasingly higher frequency tubes. At the same time, these tubes also had the advantage of becom- mg smaller and smaller, until finally entire radar installations could also be constructed on board airplanes. USIllg such UHF and VHF frequeucies, which had been researched and made usable strictly for military purposes, civilian postwar teleVISIOn later became a world power. First, however, they endowed Royal Air Force fighter planes with electronic vision: airborne radar first made their blind enemies on the Luftwaffe'S side visible, but after 1943 it also made the rivers, streets, and cities of the empire visible, which were destroyed by the carpet bombing of fighter-supported long-range bombers.
At first, the Luftwaffe could only counter this terror bombing by linking radar and anti-aircraft searchlights to form the Kammhu- berlinie, which was named after a Luftwaffe general who was also a Bundeswehr hero. This is the final manifestation of the actively armed eye - the spotlights used on the Russian-Japanese front. In World War I, these spotlights already gave rise to those anti-aircraft searchlights that later shone in the company logo of Fox's Movietone talking newsreels and were misused by Albert Speer during the 1935 Nuremberg Nazi Party convention to create the first truly immaterial architectnre. As Berlin burned in 1943, tbe same Speer wrote that he was "fascinated" by the "grandiose spectacle" of British bombers, German anti-aircraft searchlights, and crashing enemy planes, yet he neglected to add that his "dome of light" had already evoked this spectacle. In tbe Wehrmacht's defense system, anti-aircraft search- lights (a visible weapon that made things visible) and radar (an invisible weapon that also made things visible) were thus parts of a feedback loop, and anti-aircraft searchlights as well as Luftwaffe planes were both directed towards their targets. In our terminology, therefore, radar would indeed have to be called an actively armed but electronic eye.
More effective feedback weapons remained in the developmental stages. Walter Brucb, who had operated the iconoscope at the Berlin Olympics and later developed the German color television system known as PAL, spent the war partly in Peenemiinde and partly at Miiggelsee. In Peenemiinde, his two television cameras filmed the start of the first self-guided rockets and immediately transmitted
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these images by cable to a concrete bunker, where the engineers could remotely activate the V2 without being blown up by an even- tual false start. Television thus assumed one of the basic functions of mathematical simulations: namely, using feedback loops to shield from something real.
At Miiggelsee, the General Electricity Company (AEG) engineer succeeded in creating an even more promising feedback system: he left a pleasure steamer (in Bruch's words) "without any passengers of course" bobbing up and down on the lake for an approaching bomber to take aim at. This ballistic function was not assumed by the bomber pilot, however, but rather Bruch had constructed a tele- vision camera inside the bomb itself, which was supposed to be able to track down the enemy entirely on its own, follow it despite any evasive manoeuvres, and blow it up. World War II thus produced the first self-guided weapons systems, which have since made people, the subject of all modern philosophies, simply superfluous.
With the end of the subject, a television audience became possible in the postwar period, and with the triumph of radar, color television became possible as well. As the only country in the war that did not need to fear air attacks, the USA did not discontinue its development of television for the sake of radar. At the same time, the radar theory that emerged during the war was a key inspiration for the theory of digital signal processing in general. American physicists and math- ematicians like Shannon were the first to come to the conclusion that telecommunications overall should not be based on continuous oscillations or waves, but rather on simple discrete radar impulses. There was a clear correlation between the precision of radar echoes and the wavelengths of transmitted signals: the shorter and steeper the signal, the more precise the echo. The rectangular pulse discov- ered through radar thus became fundamental for modern telephone networks, computer circuits, and even television standards. It was no wonder, therefore, that the USA emerged from World War II as the leading power in television technology. It was also no wonder that the war was continued by technical and economic means: it became a war over the standards of the worldwide mass medium television, which has not yet been resolved. When asked whether television was art, for example, Klaus Simmering answered: "Television is an internationally standardized way of seeing defined in CCIR Report 407-1" (Simmering, 1989, p.