early TV

[Donna Halper <dlh@donnahalper.com>]

While giving credit to Vladimir Zworykin and Philo Farnsworth, we must also
give credit to Boston's local TV innovators.  In the mid 1920s, respected
inventor C. Francis Jenkins put a number of mechanical TV stations (48
scanning lines) on the air in various eastern cities.  Here in greater
Boston, we had one of the first such stations-- W1XAY, a collaboration
between Raytheon and WLEX in Lexington.  The station broadcast/telecast from
late September of 1928 till it ran out of money in March of 1930.  The chief
engineer who built it was Al Pote, brother of the legendary Bill (William
S.) whose WLOE lost its license and whose WMEX seldom if ever made any
money...  Some of Al's TV tubes were used by other mechanical stations.  The
mechanical method proved to be a failure, but that doesn't diminish the fact
that viewers were able to SEE the WLEX programmes as well as hear them in
the late 20s... And of course there was a John Shepard connexion too-- part
of the investment that put W1XAY on the air came from its license holder,
Jack Dodge, who in his free time was the transmitter engineer for Shepard's
WNAC... 

I realise that looking back on those long ago days is not as much fun as
arguing about when Daylight savings time is <gg>, but I still get a kick out
of pointing out to people just how far ahead of the curve Boston radio often
was.  KDKA may have made more noise, but our stations did some pretty
amazing stuff back then!     

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