1950s

VIDEO TAPE RECORDER - 1951.  Bing Crosby Laboratories introduced the video tape recorder which recorded electrical impulses on magnetic tape. 

http://www.realtechnews.com/posts/1923
 
 

 
COLOR TELEVISION - 1951.   First U.S. color telecast.   On June 25, 1951, with 12 million TV sets in existence, of which only two dozen could receive CBS color, CBS made history by presenting an hour long color TV program hosted by Ed Sullivan and Arthur Godfrey with 16 stars that performed song, dance and comedy routines.  Click on left photo of Godfrey to see larger photos of Art and Ed. Image on the far right of Arthur Godrey is an original 7 x 9 inch Candid Camera TV program promotional photo. Godrey was the host of Candid Camera for a period of time.

 http://www.newberry.k12.sc.us/mchs/tvfifties.html

http://www.princetoninfo.com/200111/11114c01.html

http://www.factmonster.com/ipka/A0151956.html

ILOCA STEREO II - 1953.  One of various 3D cameras that have been popular over the years. There are hobby groups specifically dedicated to 3D cameras (Sydney Stereo Camera Club Inc., etc.). This particular model was also sold by Sears and Montgomery Ward.

www.oz3d.info/sscc/secure/Iloca1&2.PDF

  NTSC - 1953.  In 1953, the FCC dropped the CBS color broadcast standard in favor of a system developed by the Radio Corporation of America (RCA).  Named after the National Television System Committee, an FCC body that proposed the standard, NTSC is still used in North America and Japan.  Later in the year, NBC -- at that time an RCA subsidiary -- aired its first color broadcast, a program starring Kukla, Fran, and Ollie and the Boston Pops.  In 1954, CBS and NBC began regular color broadcasts even though only one percent of U.S. households owned a color television.  Click on the image to see large view of Fran and the puppets. The clock on the right commemorates the Kukla, Fran and Ollie program and can be purchased online.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,14770,00.html
http://www.princetoninfo.com/200111/11114c01.html
 
 

FiRST ALL-COLOR TELEVISION SERIES - 1955.  Howdy Doody TV program begins. 1951 Howdy Doody comic book shown on right.

http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/H/htmlH/howdydoodys/howdydoodys.htm

 

AGFA SOLINETTE II - 1955. The Solinette is an example of the limitless number of film cameras now available to the prospective collector at very reasonable prices. The Solinette II was of high quality construction, but somewhat unusual in that most 35mm cameras of the time were solid body rather than folding. Lens: 50mm, f3.5-22. Shutter: B plus eight speeds. The above camera in like-new condition with leather case was purchased on eBay for less than $40.

www.rolandandcaroline.co.uk/ solinetteii.html  

BELL LABS PICTURE PHONE - 1956. On August 23, 1956, Bell Labs announced their experiment with "picture phone" transmission that sends pictures along with sound over regular telephone line.

http://www.webbconsult.com/1950.html

FIRST COLOR SEPARATION SCANNING - 1955.   Printing Development, Inc.
 
 

FIRST VTR SALES - 1956.  Ampex prototype and the Ampex VR1000, the first VTR ever sold.  Ampex has a restored, operational machine in their museum in Redwood City, California.
http://www.tvhandbook.com/History/History_timeline.htm

BREMSON LUSTRE- PAK - 1950s. One very unique camera. The Lustre-Pak was made by Bremson Photo Industries, Kansas City, Missouri. If you have a few gray hairs on your head you may have had your photo taken with a Lustre-Pak, although you might not remember the experience. The Lustre-Pak line of cameras was made for one purpose only - taking photos for high school yearbooks and selling packs of prints to kids and parents. Kevin Whelan and his father were employees of Bremson Photo Industries during the 60's and 70's and Kevin has supplied much of the information you see here. Kevin says all the cameras he helped manufacture were of metal, so I'm guessing that this wooden model was made in the 50's. The camera used large rolls of 35mm film and the photographers sent the film back to Bremson for developing and printing. A portion of the original Bremson organization split off and eventually became a subsidiary of Kodak. The photography portion is apparently no longer in existence as an Internet search finds nothing of recent origin. In fact, there are only one or two places where Bremson Photo Industries is mentioned at all. Robert S. Bremson Jr., founder and former chairman of Bremson Photo Industries, was also an executive producer for fifteen major motion pictures including "Obsession" in 1976 and was past president of the Bob hope Classic. The photos shown below explain how the various features of the camera operate. What at first seems to be a simple wooden box camera is actually quite complex in operation. The camera is fixed-focus and entirely manual. The cord attached to the front of the camera was used to determine the correct distance for the subject being photographed. The mechanism attached to the lens allows the shutter to be snapped using a lever at the rear of the camera. The lens on the upper left front of the camera is for the viewfinder, the hole in the top of the camera.

The first photo above shows the left outer cover removed. Directly inside is a sheet metal cover for the rolls of film. The second photo shows the sheet metal cover removed. The third photo shows the wooden retainer bar removed. Film was fed from the upper spool to the lower. The top roller turns freely and acts as a film guide. The middle roller has a rough surface and is turned by the film as it advances. Its shaft extends through the right side of the camera and operates the photo-counter mechanism. The bottom roller is on a movable metal frame which is pushed upward against the middle roller by two springs.

The first photo shows a close-up of the right outer cover. In the upper right is the image counter (counter reads 20,778). Just below the counter is the end of the shaft which operates the counter. It can also be manually turned with the camera cover in place. The large knob toward the rear of the camera is for advancing the film. The shaft below that (with the latch holding it in the rear position) is used to lock or unlock the film advancing and photo-counter mechanisms. The viewfinder mirror is at the top center of the second photo. Directly ahead of the mirror is the ground glass imaging plate. The bar going across the middle of the camera allows the shutter to be operated from the rear of the camera. The silver wheel with the attached bar operates the photo-counting device (attached to the outer cover - see left photo). Its shaft extends through to the left side of the camera for the middle roller. As the film advances it turns the middle roller which in turn operates the photo counter.

The first photo shows the cog-shaped piece of wood (just left of center) and the shaft (on lower part of cog) which can manually unlock the film advance mechanism and the photo-counter mechanism. It extends through the right camera cover and allows the film advance lock and photo counter lock to be released with the outer cover of the camera still in place (the shaft being held by the latch in the previous photos). The shaft above that operates the film advance mechanism and has a knob attached when the outer cover is in place (see previous photos). The second photo shows a close-up of the locking bar. One end of the locking bar has a tip which fits into the notches on the silver photo-counter wheel. The other end of the bar has a similar tip which locks the film advance gear mechanism. The bar is spring-loaded to the closed position. After a photo is taken the lower shaft on the wooden cog is depressed momentarily by the operator as the film is advanced. The cross bar attached to the silver photo-counter wheel turns and trips the photo counter (attached to the camera's right cover - see previous photos). When the film advances the proper distance, the right tip of the lock bar enters the next slot on the silver photo-counter wheel and the left tip of the bar locks the film advance gears.

The first photo shows the left tip of the lock bar inserted into the film advance gear mechanism. The second photo (wooden cog is removed) shows a manual gear lock just to the left of upper tip of the spring and above the horizontal rod. The tip of this gear lock is similar in shape to the tips on the ends of the lock bar and was apparently intended to manually lock the gear mechanism for extended periods of time such as when the camera was being transported.

The first photo shows a portion of the mechanism which allows the wooden plate with the photo-counter shaft, film advance gears, mirror and ground glass, all to be moved a slight distance forward or rearward by a shaft extending through the back of the camera (What appears to be joints in the wood are actually separations between the movable center section and the upper and lower fixed sections). This was apparently intended for small adjustments to the focus of this otherwise fixed-focus camera. The second photo is a close-up of the viewfinder mirror and ground glass. The third photo shows an image as seen through the viewfinder porthole in the top of the camera.

Just a simple box camera? Not quite.

 
FIRST TV BROADCAST FROM TAPE - DOUGLAS EDWARDS AND THE NEWS - 1956.  Douglas Edwards checking tape broadcast equipment, 30 November 1956.  Click on image for enlarged view. http://www.terramedia.co.uk/Chronomedia/years/1956.htm

SILICON - 1956.  Possibly the first silicon crystal grown in Silicon Valley is shown on the left.  Using a new technique invented by William Shockley and Victor Jones, this silicon crystal was grown by Jones around the middle of 1956 at the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory of Beckman Instruments, Palo Alto, California.  The crystal was "pulled" through a surface heater that was used to produce a molten pool of silicon in a solid silicon body held at a temperature just below the silicon melting point.  The concept underlying the Shockley-Jones invention was that a silicon crystal would not be contaminated by crucible impurities if the effective "crucible" was formed in zone refined silicon.  The shaping was a result of changes (mostly intentional) in the power supplied to the surface heater.” http://people.deas.harvard.edu/~jones/shockley/first_crystal.html
 
 

FIRST SPACE SATELLITE - 1957.  Sputnik 1, the first satellite, is launched by the Soviet Union. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_1




SPUTNIK RECORD - 1957.  "The Earth Satellite" is a booklet and record commemorating the first earth satellite.  One side of the record has a dramatization of the Sputnik launch; the other has actual signals broadcast by Sputnik from space. The booklet containing the 45 rpm record was distributed by Mooney-Rowan Publications. The booklet provided information concerning the launch of Sputnik as well as the U.S. Project Vanguard program which was underway at that time. http://members.aol.com/djadamson9/sputnik.html


 
FIRST SCANNED PHOTO - 1957.  Russell A. Kirsch of the National Bureau of Standards scanned the first photograph into a computer, an image of his baby son.  Scientist Russell A. Kirsch and his colleagues, working at the National Bureau of Standards in the mid-1950's, constructed a simple mechanical drum scanner and used it to trace variations of intensity over the surfaces of photographs.  They converted the resulting photomultiplier signals into arrays of 176 by 176 binary digits, fed them to a SEAC (Standards Electronic Automatic Computer ) 1500 word binary computer, and programed that computer to extract line drawings, count objects, recognize characters of type, and produce oscilloscope displays, Digital Photography, Mikkel Aaland, 1992, p9.  http://www.olinda.com/ArtAndIdeas/lectures/Digital/history.htm
 http://nz.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/research/reports/HonsReps/2002/hons_0204.pdf
http://museum.nist.gov/panels/seac/EARLIEST.HTM

SSTV - SLOW SCAN TV - 1957.  Copthorne McDonald (last photo) formatted the concept of SSTV - a means of transmitting still televison images over an audio channel such as by HAM radio similar to the way still images are transmitted via video telephones (see 1985).   Originally, the SSTV monitor used a P7 phosphur surplus RADAR picture tube which could hold an image about 8 seconds before it completely decayed (1958 McDonald SSTV monitor shown on upper left, camera on upper right). Early SSTV images were of poor quality and in black and white, but later SSTV improved greatly in quality as well as adding color. Although such equipment was eventually made available comercially, early pioneers of SSTV had to build their own and as late as 1969 there were fewer than two dozen slow-scanners in the world. For additional information concerning the development of SSTV refer to the below sources.

http://taggart.glg.msu.edu/wb8dqt/modes.htm

http://www.ultimatecharger.com/html/Basics.html

http://www.ultimatecharger.com/html/sstvhistory.html

POLAROID PRINTER COPIERS - 1958. The Polaroid printer copiers were designed for use with various Polaroid cameras (Model 240, shown above, was for use with camera Models 95, 95A, 95B, 100, 150, 160, 700, 800, 850 and 900). The printer copiers were accessories for making copies of Polaroid prints. When unfolded, they somewhat resembled a slide projector. Prints were loaded into a holder in the back of the device. The camera was positioned on a rail at the front of the Copier-- the lens of the camera mated with a close-up lens built into the Copier. Two small 120-volt bayonet-base light bulbs in the Copier served as a fixed source of illumination for the print to be copied. The camera's exposure was set for this constant exposure source (via a chart supplied with the copier), and the picture was taken and developed in the usual way. The Copier was supplied with a cable release (for the camera) and had a built-in electric exposure/development timer (which was powered whenever the light bulbs are switched on), and (starting in 1959) came with a set of neutral-density filters for the light bulbs for use when 3000-speed film was used in the camera. http://www.rwhirled.com/landlist/landdcam.htm

FIRST INTEGRATED CIRCUIT 1959.   Bob Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor, printed an entire electronic circuit on a single crystal or microchip of silicon using a photographic process.  This breakthrough enabled the computer revolution to begin.  Noyce later co-founded Intel Corporation in 1968.  Andy Grove, Bob Noyce, and Gordon Moore of Intel Corporation are shown in the photograph on the left. http://www.pbs.org/transistor/album1/addlbios/noyce.html
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

XEROX 914 - 1959.  The Xerox 914 was the first automatic office copier to make copies on plain paper.  It was introduced by Haloid Xerox.  A floor-mounted device, it was designed by James G. Balmer of Armstrong-Balmer & Associates, in collaboration with Don Shepardson, John Rutkus and Hal Bogdenoff of Xerox, who had developed an engineering prototype.  Xerox named their first product the 914 because it could reproduce documents up to 9 inches by 14 inches in size.  It took about 15 seconds for the first copy to come out, and 7 seconds for each additional copy.  It was 42 in. high, 46 in. long, 45 in. wide and weighed 648 pounds.  The advertising campaign consisted on a TV commercial with a little girl making copies for her father who was dressed as a businessman.  A single 914 had a price tag of $29.500 while competitors wet copiers were sold for about $400, so Xerox copied IBM's leasing system, whereby a company could lease the copier for $95 per month (2000 copies free) and 5c per extra copy.  Xerox made four versions of the machine: 914, 420, 720 and 1000. The only difference being the motor speed. The 914 could make 7 copies a minute while the 1000 could make 17 copies a minute.  The Xerox 914 sold as many units in the first 6 months as what had been projected to be the entire lifetime demand for the product - and the number was that low only because they couldn't physically make enough 914's to meet the demand!
http://www.mises.org/econsense/ch54.asp

FIRST MARKETED VIDEOPHONE - 1959. The first Commercially Marketed Video Phone was the Bell Laboratories PicturePhone of 1959. The Bell version also sent still images. A lot of video telephones included picture printing and saving capability before still video cameras were introduced. They were often used by Doctors to take pictures of patient problems in remote areas and send them over standard telephone lines. Information provided by Mike Mozart of JeepersMedia.

http://www.youtube.com/user/JeepersMedia

1950s