A DVD In The 1920s?!

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[@kirbywaite1586]

I would imagine that transferring an existing movie film to this format must have been an equally complex task.

[@Christina_Paz]

Looked it up, I guess it came to be called the Jenkins Radiovisor. Thank you for sharing these snippets. Sometimes we just see the big names like Ford and Edison and don't hear of those who made contributions like this to the technology we know today. Thankful for all the names that went into what we have today, known or unknown.

[@Zarkovision]

The Jenkins Radiovisor was what we call today a TV set, and it worked really like a modern TV, just with a less good quality of the picture.

[@Muonium1]

I would REALLY love to see one of these working, but can't imagine that a) more than a few were ever built, and b) any of the mechanisms let alone paper "movie records" survived at all. Note that the movie being shown on the record in the image accompanying the story is "Annabelle Dances and Dances" or the "Annabelle Butterfly Dance" featuring Annabelle Moore, filmed by W.K.L. Dickson, William Heise, James White, and Jenkins himself in 1894 for the Edison Manufacturing Co. and American Mutoscope and Biograph Co. It's less than half a minute long and can be seen in full right here as it was very popular and survives in a number of film archives to the present day, several of which have digitized it.

[@BeesWaxMinder]

Wonderful!

[@hsimpson6581]

I have never heard of this in my entire life! Are there any still in existence? It would be wonderful to see one

[@michaelstocklin9080]

its amazing how many things were thought of ~100 years ago but are really only possible now.

[@Azurethewolf168]

Even 50 years ago being able to have a AI that can make huge paragraphs and understand your words by just typing a few sentences was science fiction, same thing for video calls or working at home

[@katjagolden893]

I remember in 1982 or 83 at a cousins wedding watching “Goldfinger” & another movie with my teenage twin cousins. It was a record, movie machine that I had never seen before. We didn’t even have a VHS OR Beta machine at home. Never saw this “record movie disc” player ever again.

[@menufrog]

Sounds like a LaserDisc

[@coldsamon]

That would be a "LaserDisc" I had a collection of them. Local video rental store had them for rent in the 1980s early 90s.

[@ajnasreddin]

The grandfather to BlueRay discs...

[@Muonium1]

Others are saying Laserdisc, but it could have just as easily been RCA's vinyl Videodisc that was read with a stylus. If it was shiny and reflected rainbow colors it was Laserdisc, if it was black and looked like a record it was Videodisc. Both were totally analog systems.

[@chitlitlah]

@@Muonium1 Are you talking about CED? If not, add it to the list. It was a format by RCA in the early 80s that competed with LaserDisc and used varying capacitance to encode the movie. You normally wouldn't see the medium as it stayed inside the cover. You'd put the whole thing in the player which would remove the medium and read it. The Angry Video Game Nerd / Cinemassacre did a video on it.

[@GeraBrown]

A longer video would have been great, giving an epilogue or post mortem to this invention.

[@weylguy]

The Talking Rings in the 1960 movie The Time Machine were similar, but with no video and maybe only 1 MB of storage.

[@mr50sagain55]

As a collector of early recorded sound, I’ve never run across this before!...wonder if there’s any other resources that detail its development and use further….very intriguing when you pull one of these gems out of the archive!!...thank you so much!!!

[@kurtb8474]

Scotsman John Logie Baird (my namesake) invented Phonovision, The First Videodisc around 1927-28. Quite an interesting development for that era.

[@whydidtheballooneatthefox282]

That is cool

[@zacharyrome3432]

Really really neat !

[@hilarioph]

This could be the birth of the Home video in the 1920s

[@hippiechick2112]

OMG, how amazing!!

[@jamesslick4790]

This concept is more like a 1970s Laserdisc (Originally Called "Disc-O-Vision", because..1978!) than a 1990s DVD. Since Laserdisc used... Well... a laser to read the disc, like a CD or DVD many people think Laserdiscs are digital. They are not. They are an analog recording of the video signal. This 1920s system is (of course) also analog. So yeah, this was Laserdisc (sans LASER) 50 years ahead of its time.

[@michaelmcgee8543]

I wonder if this worked?

[@thescoobymike]

Oh shit that’s cool

[@kathykirchner6271]

Wow! Very cool!

[@zero_bs_tolerance8646]

Thank you

[@Zarkovision]

Great invention, which would have worked. The projection method was used later for small Super 8 (and before that Normal 8 and 16 mm) watching devices and toy projectors. The idea just to print the film on paper would have been much cheaper than 8 mm film, yet of inferior quality.

[@tsuwaque]

the closest thing to a DVD in the 1920s was Baird's Phonovision

[@adrianadealmeida1472]

👏👏👏👏👏