The Secret Life Of Machines - The Television Set (1988)

[@Muonium1]

There is something enormously soothing about these programs that I've enjoyed since seeing them as a kid in the 90s. I never get tired of rewatching them.

[@coollary1]

25:02 He looks pretty badass! This series is where I learned that nothing in our modern world is complicated. Just a bit tedious, but with time and a little out of the box thinking you can really easily understand and do something with the knowledge

[@Blondeemer]

I love this series! Tim has a way of breaking down the complex so that anyone can understand.

[@Jeffrey314159]

Philo T Farnsworth invented the first all electronic camera television system in the early 20s with his Image Disector , a method that was used throughout the 40s & 50s. Selenium was used to make the first carmera tube for the age of solid state electronics and video tape recording: The Vidicon Tube

[@DanafoxyVixen]

Philo T Farnsworth came up with many valid ideas regarding video camera tubes, but in reality the Image Disector was not a practical device, its 'video image' was very crude and required too much light

[@trytobefairhistorybuff9063]

Very articulate, and well researched. A pleasure to watch!

[@NormSpupsEntertainment]

thankyou so much for uploading these at full length!

[@pifie]

that's a badass ending right there. the reflection of burning TVs on the shades

[@hindler]

Every time I go to the Science Museum in London, I first head for Tim & Rex's exhibition downstairs. Still going after all this time.

[@lookoutleo]

i love how much the world has changed, can you imagine them burning a pile of tvs while they are switched on in a new tv program , wow think health and safety would have a kitten :)

[@imnotamechanic3491]

My thoughts exactly! There is no sense of environmental concern like there would be these days, the internal combustion engine one they fire beer cans into wildlife areas and chuck oil all over the place. Burning a bunch of TVs full of toxic plastic, these days you would have to take them to the recycling centre. Health and safety has no place on this show!

[@isotac7789]

One of the best series on television. If only the millennial generation would watch and learn.

[@zotopzaz]

it was in the year ?

[@johneygd]

Blowing up those old tv sets was the best part of the entire programm,hahaha lol,but seriousely; i find tv's so amezing, it's like a window wich you can put on any place you want.

[@sphexes]

I love the didjeridu sound used for the plasma lamp. They weren't yet in popular use.

[@dummyspitter1106]

i remember this series on tv the first time it was shown i even wrote in to the show to get the information book that went with the programs

[@FelixTheHouseFreak]

I work as a television repair man and i can tell you that isnt really true, i can still get most of the components needed to be replaced. The costum coponents can be found at a parts recycler where old tvs are scrapped like a junk yard. Of course for that you need people and businesses that will do that and in most countries people just throw stuff out.

[@Mujangga]

Wow! I haven't seen this show is 20 years!

[@pon2oon]

Yeah I collect the "Elaborate old Tele's that don't work properly" but I love em. I'm a Yank by the way.

[@QuaaludeCharlie]

This should be show in every grade school :) QC

[@MathWebs]

Of mention is. Crooke (electron rays and tube), edison (practical electric light, recording and edison diode effect), deForest (practical tube diode and amp) , RCA. for the photo tube and photo multiplier which zwyorkin implemented. Farnsworth is as important as Zwyorkin.

[@joshuasundheimer4218]

That ending was so freaking awesome! But seriously that was just so cool that they had them turned on playing stuff as they slowly exploded... (Now i gotta find some old TV's and have my own lil bonfire) LOL

[@VideoDroidORG]

+Joshua Sundheimer They had to do it at night because the black death smoke would have shown that some of those old tv's still will be killing people, via lung cancers :P

[@ChickenBG7]

do it if you want to destroy history...

[@charlestuma2336]

Joshua Sundheimer y

[@saabninefive93]

I loved these shows!

[@stonesy87]

ive seen all of these now and find them great... i wonder if old tim hunkin is aware of the success these two series are having on you tube.... itd be great to make more of them and talk about the history of household appliances and how they work today.... i rekon i could do it...

[@kyleanderson1455]

He died last year unfortunately, with a long battle with alzheimer's, RIP rex

[@crumplezone1]

Shango066 will weep when he sees this EOL :)

[@Sys-Edit0r-1995]

Jeff Jones Ha! :3

[@ChickenBG7]

XD

[@workonesabs]

Good advice given re. fault-finding. Break the circuit down into sections and work on that, rather seeing the whole picture (sic) and a circuit board is less intimidating when taken from that perspective. I actually used that idea when I started into electronics at school and can fault-find any problem, even when no diagram is present.

[@Elfnetdesigns]

RIP CRT.. Hello LCD HD digital Selenium is the WORST! What made most of those OLD first gen sets so dangerous was the lack of implosion rings and safety glass

I so thank you for these so educative video!!!. The Planetary Society, Patagonia Argentina.

[@ufoengines]

Very cool old T.V. show! Still impressed with the idea of a television that watches you as you watched it using Manfred Von Ardenne flying spot technology. 1984 for real buck-o.

[@Elfnetdesigns]

In Soviet Russia (Or modern day USA) TV Watches You

[@connor9589]

Ha he thinks that phosphors are letting me watch this. well he is wrong as my TV is a led TV lol

[@7egb]

+connor coutts that was back then

[@JaredConnell]

Um this is obviously more than a few years old, and as it was originally a t.v. show when all tv sets were CRTs this statement was correct, Einstein.

[@connor9589]

i was joking. i know this was made ages ago

[@7egb]

ok lol

[@MarkTillotson]

Ironically phosphors _still_ produce most of the light in modern screens, because white LEDs use them - otherwise they would be blue LEDs only.

[@MildMisanthropeMaybeMassive]

I can always smell the endings.

[@hazelarevalo7403]

me he dado cuenta que muchas personas siguen hablando de Mofedest Milagro (hacer una búsqueda en google). Pero estoy seguro de si es bueno. ¿Alguna vez ha tratado de utilizar este programa que creó por motivador conocido?

[@richgg2]

THE ORIGINAL MYTH BUSTERS!!!!

[@artifactingreality]

10:37 woah... how did he scrape the phosphor off the inside of a vacuum tube?

[@HDXFH]

artifactingreality probably got in touch with a CRT Manufacturer

[@allmycircuits8850]

I would burn it with high intensity electron beam :)

[@pon2oon]

The truth really is that the older sets were more fixable do to easily interchangeable and more universal parts, where as newer sets feature custom components which are much more difficult to exchange and go obsolete very quickly thus making them nearly impossible to obtain. Something goes wrong with a modern set and 9 times out of 10 it costs more than the sets worth to fix or cant be fix because they cant get the parts making it instant landfill waste.

[@MarkTillotson]

On the other hand modern devices go wrong a lot less frequently and I suspect are far less likely to catch fire and burn houses down.

[@spacemissing]

Cutting anything made of many parts (refrigerator, TV, etc.) neatly in half is a trick I've wondered about for a long time. I imagine a diamond-coated fine wire might do it. Does anyone know "the secret life of precision division equipment" ?

[@spacemissing]

My interest in this case is not as much in things that are cut open but HOW they are cut open. Technique! Who shows the "HOW"?

[@user2C47]

They might have used a bandsaw.

[@GeoNeilUK]

13:46 but has that boffin in the lab coat got a Pye Tube Cube? 1988 technology for that standards converter and the old 405 line service wasn't turned off until 1985, will digital technology standards last that long? 18:00 LCD panels work in the same way when it comes to colour mixing, red green and blue pixels combining to create all the other colours. These are real engineers, experts in their field on screen because they know what they're talking about. Nowadays if they made a programme like this it would be narrated by Stephen Fry (or if you're American, Ryan Seaquest or whatever his name is) mispronouncing all the technical terms.

[@frankcabanski9409]

You're probably right about the narrator for a show of today. It's all very generic and plastic.

[@teltri]

That´s WRONG! You missed two other inventors of Television. Paul Gottlieb Nipkow in Germany and Philo Farnsworth in the USA.

[@stanwbaker]

Nipkow designed mechanical television. You will note the short shrift given to Mr. Baird which wouldn't be done in the UK today. EMI-Marconi licensed their system from Philco and their chief engineer Farnsworth. That's close enough.

[@FelixTheHouseFreak]

Yeah same here.

[@TeaGeeLee]

Even more interesting is the story of color television and how the general at RCA played CBS out of the game. The CBS system was, because some units were sold and some programming was prepared, at least $500 less than the all electronic RCA set. These suffered from convergence problems and de-gaussing became a money maker for the average tv repairman over many years. Worse, the CBS system which had been adopted had folks saying that the colors were very accurate and looked like technicolor movies.

[@DanafoxyVixen]

The CBS system was a mechanical field sequential system that while it gave a good color image for static images, if the camera moved you could see a 'rainbow' type effect, was physically bulky and as it was basically a motor spinning colored filters around, not quiet and limited how big the screen could be. If your familiar with modern DLP projectors they use more or less a similar system to get color

[@Oldgamingfart]

Hi, no problem :)

[@thekaiser4333]

What is the point of a television set that doesn't kill?

[@alexlelel]

And smash videos are born

[@HappySexyFlyingFish]

Philo farnsworth invented television. not a mention of him?

[@lumabi25]

Happy Sexy Flying Fish Actually there were many people working on television around the same time, all over the world. There was no single inventor of television despite what we were told at school.

[@russellpastuchj7521]

He invented the image dissector, a tube that needed so much light to operate it really was useful for monitoring in steel plants. Even the iconoscope was a light glutton.

[@Oldgamingfart]

Indeed, I guess that's planned obsolescence for you. What a wasteful world we live in.

[@cohenjp1048]

This series is fun. However, the episode on TV's is painfully dated. It is a reminder of how much things have changed in the past almost 30 years, and many of the other episodes are reminders of how little things have changed in that time.

[@MarkTillotson]

Kind of like realizing IBM actually made a 0.5GB spinning hard drive 1 inch across, when you can get orders of magnitude more storage in a microSD card now. In fact in 10 years the idea of storage devices with spindles will seem equally as quaint as the CRT I suspect.

[@patrickjohnson5658]

Of course the episode on TV's is dated from the point of view of today, but it wasn't when I first saw this episode back in the early 1990's. That is why I found it very interesting back then. Today it is just a history lesson on old school CRT televisions.

[@pon2oon]

Interesting show but I hate the ending

[@ChickenBG7]

me too they are destroing history

[@sikedipuuhja7376]

i know that these things where dime in a dozen mainstream units, but i always honor the engineering that went into them more that i would ever thing of destroying them.

[@Oerg866]

1:10 WRONG. I'm looking at it with an LCD monitor. Fool! :P

[@Oerg866]

I'm well aware. It was a joke. (Also, LCDs were a thing in 1988.)

[@allmycircuits8850]

If you're watching this on LED-backlight LCD there is big chance you're seeing light from phosphor which converts blue light into white, so still almost correct :)

[@TomPauls007]

holy pollution!! Fun ending, but the chemicals burned off is rather stunning. EPA in the States would be on you with stun guns in a flash! Love the shows...

[@bearcatben4762]

The English version of the EPA was probably very angry too

[@bearcatben4762]

Nevermind the EPA for the uk didn't exist till 1995

[@warefairsoda]

24:30 BonPYEr

[@swedishdissident3406]

Talk about hard corn. Did people actually look at that rubbish in the 1930s.

[@ChickenBG7]

well it was the best tech then they had 35mm film cameras and projectors too that produced better images

[@88bigten]

kind of boring