Eidophor: 1950's Steampunk Video Projection Technology

[@AndreasSpiess]

I used to work for the Swiss company Gretag which was the producer of the Eidophor. BTW it was invented by the ETH university in Zurich because these guys could not imagine, that everybody will have its own TV at home. This was during WW2.

[@chadirby6216]

They used Eidophor projectors at the SIGGRAPH 98 convention in Orlando. If you attended and saw the big 3D/interactive graphics presentation in the large hall, you were looking at the output of a pair of Eidophor projectors. That was the last time I ever saw an Eidophor in person.

[@williamwright4716]

While employed by RCA Service Co. in the 1970's I ran both the B&W and Color Eidophor TV projectors for a company named TNT Communications out of NY City. The projector was an amazing piece of technology and unlike other live TV projectors like the DSI and Norelco produced a picture with the quality and brightness of a 35MM film print.

[@wvonstockhausen]

Hi Mike, the first Eidophor, a B/W I worked with was with the NOS in Hilversum, Netherlands. 10 years later in 1978 I worked for a Hollywood Company, Worldstage and did many shows for the Hollywood film and broadcasting companies and traveled all over the US which required special care transporting those expensive projectors. I flew so much that my frequent flyer miles gave my family an opportunity to fly free to many destinations. I know all about the special care and knowledge to operate those projectors. During open air venues we had to arrive a day before the show because the night before we could setup the projector and do the tedious "registration" line by line matching of the 3 colors, so at show time the next evening we were ready to go. At times we needed more brightness so we registered two Eidophors on top of each other. Memorable events I did was the first show in the Olympic stadium in Quebec City of the young Celine Dion, the Jackson Five Victory tours where we had a hard time projecting the high contrast of their dark skins on the screen, Prince tours where in Miami a stage worker fell to his death while installing the screen, The group Alabama in Memphis where the crane while installing the screen placed a big oil spot on the white screen. On the same event 1 crt fell out because we had a leak in the vacuum . So we switched to 1 crt, the green one for b/w projection. I also did the democratic convention in SF and was amazed by the security measures to protect the candidates. Next to the lectern was an small escape elevator to the basement. Also the screen behind the lectern as configured in such a way that object thrown at the stage will be caught and and guided to a bin in the basement where a fireman is standing by with an extinguisher. At one event in Washington DC at the Hall of the Daughters of the American Revolution, a sacred hall with expensive parket floor, I had the b/w Eidophor, still costing $1 million, falling on the floor from the forklift by an inexperienced forklift operator not realizing the sloping floor while turning the forklift and dropping the non secured projector. The projector was a total loss and the parket floor had a major dent, still visible today. I later saved the excellent vacuum pump and use to fix my car AC for many years. Also memorable was the Star Wars concert with the LA Philharmonic with Rubin Mehta in the Anaheim Stadium. Later working for another company Background Engineers when the Worldstage company closed, I operated the GE Talaria projector, which was way lighter and smaller and I could bring it with me in the private jet of the CEO of Amway Corporation on his sales tours. I even bought one for a heart hospital in Rancho Mirage by Palm Springs later where I was the AV director.

[@golaymusewerd7021]

Hey Walter, was the Eidophor generating a field with the projection pulsing at the resonant frequency of that field, yet? reference US Patent 6506148 B2

[@wvonstockhausen]

@@golaymusewerd7021 I believe so if I can remember the workings of an Eidophor. The pulsing field which is actually the TV writing beam caused a small pertuberation on the oil layer on a mirror and deflect the Xenon light thru the projection lens. Without pertuberation the Xenon light get reflected back to the source. Hence the bright picture of the Eidophor. The oil is a Swiss patent.

[@dougdulmage8579]

Hello! I worked at Lasermedia in LA in the same era, and did some shows with Worldstage at the Plitt in Century City, and other venues in the area. Was the owner named Rich? He borrowed me a GV Comp to RGB decoder to use with the full color laser video projector I was prototyping at LM, first in LA and then they moved me down to Houston where a partner company had some extra room and lasers. I can still remember the Teamsters hauling a pair of those Eidophor's up into the balcony at the Plitt for a CBS affiliate's show, Bob Newhart was the host and was fascinated watching those things being put into place as well!

[@ut4321]

Wow guys, very cool stories, thanks for sharing.

[@whitcwa]

We had a single valve GE Talaria projector at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland in 1978. It made decent images. At power-on the image was garbage, then you could see the image getting better as the disk rotated until the entire image was clear. It took about 30 minutes after power-on until the oil film had been cleanly deposited. As I recall, it used RF modulation of the beam at over 100 Mhz for creating the color. There was an excellent description of it (and the Eidophor) in one of Harold E. Ennes' books on broadcast TV engineering.

[@heinvisser4733]

I used to work with this machine in the Leacock Auditorium of mcGill university in Montreal in 1969 ; it took at least 1,5 hours to get this wonderfull machine ready and stable for operating... (Black/White version)

[@Zadster]

It may be worthwhile contacting the National Media Museum in Bradford, I know they have a pretty big technical archive. The TV section is curated by a certain Ian Logie-Baird (yes, really).

[@JensAndree]

Great presentation Mike!!! The funny thing about evolution and progress in the field of video is that today you can buy a DLP solution fairly cheaply but what are many of us doing at home? Yep, homebrew display panels with WS2812B and similar - with borderline useless resolution and massive costs... But we are having fun and you can't put a price on creativity ;)

[@ybunnygurl]

That color one from the 1970s... I know there used to be one at Kennedy Center in Dc in the Late 1980's, they used to show AFI pictures on it. I know its no longer in that theater because its now a live action theater and the old projector room is now the sound and light booth. I was told the American Film Institute (AFI) moved all the equipment to their new theater in Bethesda, Maryland. So they might have one in working order.

[@rocketman221projects]

I was really hoping that Mike was going to do a teardown.

[@Muonium1]

Mike is love Mike is life Let the electronics knowledge firehose flow *through* you

[@redshift78]

Sure it was the most complicated part of the Apollo program ... but if managed to make it, we sure were able to go to the moon.

[@JonWhitton]

The complexity of a modern photolithographic machine, but built on 1940s tech! Unreal

[@brainfornothing]

Mike talking = Very interesting info. Thanks for sharing !

[@privatechannel6708]

Video with lots of footage of the development and manufacturing process, plus some clips at the end of early images here: kzbin.info/www/bejne/eIPKloSjeb2roJY

[@Sixta16]

Hi Mike! Thanks for a great presentation!

[@stephenbaldassarre2289]

To think, I recently installed a 10,000 lumem 3-LCD LASER projector that I could easily vary myself and cost a mere $8,000 or so.

[@artifactingreality]

Hi and thanks from Thought Stream UK on Facebook

[@SarahKchannel]

one thing the Eidophor did not like, was vibration. Even minute vibrations of passing vehicles could send ripples across the entire image, or on the colored ones - separate the images from one to another, sort of like ghosting. They had to be mounted on a very sturdy concrete base preferably.

[@wktodd]

I can imagine some use of this type of technology to correct Atmospheric distortion for astronomical telescopes

[@chuckvanderbildt]

That's a really cool idea. I worry the efficiency / light-throughput of the system might be an issue though.

[@ChongMcBong]

very interesting, thanks Mike :)

[@electronash]

Only just seen this, thanks to a recommendation on Micah's stream. Awesome stuff, but completely insane. lol

[@johnc.donnelly4725]

You could get your hands on a service operators manual from many US projection presentation companies such as MB productions of NJ Michael Brooks and company.

[@FixitFrank]

this reminds me of an oil version of DLP.

[@Geerpower]

05:29 the tube at the top right corner seems a bit suspicious ^^

[@TheDripSpotter]

Scophony did this all pre 1940 better resolution, no high voltages I knew someone who saw it in U.K. cinemas.

[@johnc.donnelly4725]

The eidephore powered by the invention of the schlieren Lens was adopted for flight trading during WWII because of the loss of so many pilots and planes in training it seems it was safer to train pilots on the ground with a crude black and white version to simulate the experience of free flight .

[@blackrockcity]

Where did you learn about the early history? Even in the 1990s (and maybe even the early 2000's?) the GE Talaria was used in flight simulators.

[@paulstubbs7678]

For video of the actual Eidophor development kzbin.info/www/bejne/eIPKloSjeb2roJY Unfortunately it's in German, and great chunks of it are corrupted, what's left is still amazing

[@charlieangkor8649]

Fascinating presentation but I find the speaking style where speech is produced faster than can be pronounced, which leads to whole segments of sentences being left out, very frustrating.

[@aliceanderson5154]

Starts at 7:00

[@danbrit9848]

A true KZbinr shills other vids at the end even in person....I respect it

[@AndreasSpiess]

The "Museums für Kommunikation" in Bern, Switzerland, seem to have a few of them in its storage.

[@o0julek0o]

Tell him on his channel, I'm sure you've seen mikeselectricalstuff.

[@DrBovdin]

Cool, do they have any in working condition up and running on occasion? (I know this comment is maybe four years to late to get any response but it is worth a shot. ;)

[@matthiasmartin1975]

It's amazing how he got through his whole presentation without ever mentioning where the stuff was developed.

[@thaddaeustekell1721]

I worked in the 1990s as an audiovisual tech at the shedd aquarium in Chicago. We had a ge talaria videoprojector in the auditorium of the oceanarium which opened in 1991. The reason at the time for the purchase was the brightness for projection distance. The taleria did have a quite complicated personality setup ,which if done well could produce a very beautiful picture ( especially compared to the barco projector they replaced it with in 1995) . Very expensive to operate as the light valve and the bulb had to be replaced several times a year ( we ran programs in continuous operation and after hours for special events 7 days a week year round) Finally the barco projector was purchased as it made much more financial sense, even though it wasn't as good a quality of picture or input versatility, most special events were showing ntsc video from VHS tapes.

[@douro20]

The Talaria system was very reliable, and it didn't have the cathode contamination issues of the Eidophor, but it had very poor contrast compared to the Eidophor and colour separation in the single-tube version was extremely complex. The Talaria MP was the best single-tube version in terms of colour purity, which was nearly on par with 3-tube systems. Some people still use them!

[@privatechannel6708]

Only Talaria I ever saw was in the big auditorium at NIST in the USA in the mid-90s. We were quoting a Hughes to replace it.

[@gotham61]

The Ritz club in NYC had a Talaria in the 1980s, projecting music videos onto a pretty large screen, I'd guess about 30'x40'. I recall it was like looking through the water in a murky fish bowl.

[@midwestconcertvideo]

I saw both the _Eidophor_ and the _Talaria._ The first in _Arrowhead Stadium_ in Kansas City for a _Jethro Tull_ concert, billed as "Tullavision". It reportedly required three-phase power and a cold water supply for cooling. The Talaria I saw at David Bowie's _Glass Spider_ tour. It had been modified for Rock and Roll by a company called Nightmare Productions, and they added additional cooling. The best Taleria presentation I ever saw was three of them stacked up, one each red green and blue, out by the reflecting pool at the Richard Nixon presidential library for a party being thrown by Industrial Light and Magic.

[@MegaFPVFlyer]

mike just tore down a talaria "light valve" the other day, FYI

[@rkan2]

Mike just did a teardown of the GE Talaria tube! Check it out on his channel.

[@springford9511]

Thanks for the great presentation - I was riveted to it for every second. I believe that an Eidophor projector was used for the "Mother of All Demos" given at the Association for Computing Machinery / Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 1968. The inventor of the computer mouse Douglas Engelbart demonstrated the following technologies which were developed at Xerox Parc. Software applications running in their own window Mouse control Word processor Email Video Conferencing over a distance of tens of miles 1200 baud leased line from the graphics terminal to a remote computer Colaborative editing. It is rumoured that the Macintosh computer grew from Steve Jobs being shown similar systems at Xerox. I think I read about it here but I am not presently sure - Steven Levy's 1994 book Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

[@BGTech1]

Wow… how did they even come up with such a concept. I can’t even begin to imagine the dedication the inventor must have had to make something like this work

[@thrillcompany]

I've got one EP 23 in my collection, wich was retrieved from a German University planetarium, years ago.

[@dougdulmage8579]

There was an alternative to these starting in the late 70's. The Dwight Cavendish Co. in the UK built laser video projectors using an Argon and Krypton laser for the RGB source, and then a 25 sided polygon running at 40,000 rpm. I don't know how many were produced, some ended up in the US, 6 purchased by Coke Cola for a convention in Atlanta. They were sold to an AV Co. in Vegas, who did some modifications to them to make them more user friendly. There's also a brilliant laser Eng. in the UK, Tony Clennick(sp?) who built his own system including an HD version that I believe was used in London for an event for the Queen, and then possibly in Spain for a Worlds Fair. I worked on my own version of this but I used acousto-optic deflectors for the horizontal scan, and then a simple galvo for the vertical at 60hz. Some of my work was done with help from the folks at World Stage in LA. I did build one single color polygon system for the Gardaland theme park in Italy in about 1992 to project onto a water curtain using a 15watt Ar laser. I did do a demo of the full color system at the 4th of July on the Mississippi River at Jack's Brewery location in New Orleans. That was the extent of my development work, but I think that there were at least a dozen laser video projectors in circulation from about 1975 until mid 1990's. Also, TRW developed their own laser video projector strictly for Command and Control operations, I was offered a position on that team but there were security issues as I'm not a US citizen and I wouldn't have been able to access the various military and intel installations. I don't know how far TRW went with the project but I assume it was abandoned for possibly a deformable grating device.

[@WOFFY-qc9te]

What a great time in your life, I thought when low cot laser were available that they could be used for projection, early galvanometer movement to deflect the beams and rotating mirrors for scanning you system is rather refined and carries its own complexities. It is not as simple as a young mind in the 80's thinks. Best to you and thanks for the story.

[@unverifiedbiotic]

LCD projectors seem downright primitive compared to this thing in terms of complexity.

[@nu7q]

GE Tararia was the best thing going before LCD projectors

[@iramoser3528]

Had one back in the late 80s-early 90s that was surplused from DOE-Hanford. It was part of a multi-pallet lot, and I ended-up selling it to a local scrapyard to avoid hauling it back home. I remember the overall 'Dr. Frankenstein aura' of the thing-- Including a prominent mercury diffusion vacuum system for the high-vacuum required. Wish I'd kept it! It looked more like the early systems illustrated in your talk. Amazing cutting-edge technological magic of the time! Really enjoyed your talk! --Ira

[@radarmusen]

Seen this video before but it really a great history. The thing about velocity of the beam was change due to black white level, must have been some fiddle. Wonder about it was a special camera there was used in the other end.

[@ut4321]

Great Scott this is amazing!!! The science plus the engineering required to get an image out of these projectors is nothing short of miraculous. And to achieve a 50k hour reliability! That’s about the same as today’s LED lightbulbs. Remarkable.

[@nitramluap]

11:20 - Surely the beam current determines the number of electrons hitting the surface per unit time, not their speed (which as far as I recall, is constant)?

[@gmeesen]

That is correct, but what Mike is talking about is changing the speed of the scanbeam (and not the electrons speed) on a "pixel-by-pixel" basis. So if you want a large charge deposited on a certain "pixel", you slow down the speed at which the beam scans over this "pixel" and therefore deposit more electrons. If you want less charge, you scan quicker over that "pixel". Must have been quite complex electronics to manage that.

[@phaque179]

Steampunk = How would you build something using Edwardian technology (1800), while using steam as a power source, alchemy, and a little chronography,. Slapping gears on something doesn't make it steampunk

[@yandyyay]

wow that was really interesting, i didn't even know that these things existed until now, Thanks Mike.

[@psywiped]

Incredible engineering involved in the creation of this system.

[@bradscott3165]

1950's is dieselpunk.

[@ObiTrev]

1950's is Atom Punk. Dieselpunk is roughly WWI to WWII. The styling of the Atomic Age, Jet Age, Space Age, Googie, and Mid Century Modern exemplify Atomic Punk. Art Deco, Industrial Design, Military/War, Combustion Engines (Grease, Oil, Gas) exemplify Dieselpunk.

[@craigharrison1274]

It’s called Googie! I had no idea. Thank you!

[@mikeissweet]

Mike is my hero. Great presentation!

[@tolkienfan1972]

I'd probably have tried modulating the beam focus

[@tolkienfan1972]

"Grossbildprojektionssystem" gotta love German! ❤️

[@PlaywithJunk]

the first DLP projector

[@Veptis]

Had the teardown video in my watch later. But needed to go here. This kinda tech seems beyond insane to me. And I thought video was crazy with the electron beam and raytubes. If I look at the very high end tech nowadays - think EUV machines - it's the equal amount of crazy with mirrors and high energy rays.

[@gustavgnoettgen]

Imagine having such technology behind every screen because we don't know better

[@AgentOffice]

Like a laser printer

[@AgentOffice]

1 hack per day

[@martin09091989]

Wer hats erfunde? 😁

[@knust2329]

Na der Erfinder.

[@OrangeHarrisonRB3]

people'll slap the word steampunk on anything without microchips inside