The History of Television, 1880 to 1941

Rating:
Summary: An extraordinarily comprehensive history of TV technology.
Review: This is probably the most comprehensive extant book on the history of early television technology. Abramson's exhaustive research over many years (documented in the extensive and often chatty footnotes) covers worldwide developments and patents in the many technologies that made TV workable. Much of the writing about the early decades is rather turbid with patent language, but that of the rapid developments in the 1930s is actually exciting reading at times. Still, it is not easy stuff for the non-technical reader. TV engineers will find it just sufficiently technical to whet the appetite for more data (often available from the footnotes or the large bibliography). Curiously, for a book devoted to a visual medium, the photographs tend to be quite murky. And why so little information on Allen B. DuMont, a major force in the development of practical display tubes and TV receivers? Despite these lapses, this book is an indispensible part of the canon of technological histories