The wonderful world of television

I could’ve sworn that, some time ago, I posted an old 1920s magazine cover about television that I found quite interesting, but it appears I have done nothing of the sort and I can only assume I did this on my old Tumblr. Anyway, never mind that cos here’s another one I’ve found via Pulp Librarian:

I am, obviously, somewhat struck by the shape of the screen on this thing; apart from being a bit ovoid, it’s also notably somewhat widescreen. I find this quite remarkable, given this wasn’t even really a thing in cinema yet; there’d been experiments with wider images than the 1.33:1 standard going back to the Corbett & Fitzsimmons fight in 1897, and the year this was apparently published (1927) Abel Gance had just unleashed Polyvision, and in the couple of years following there would be a handful of other attempts. But it was hardly a common industry practice, so I’m not sure why our cover artist here was envisaging wider-screen TV… I mean, when Hollywood started going widescreen in the 50s it was in competition with the rising popularity of TV, whereas in 1927 it wasn’t trying to do anything of the sort. The sort of thing that only puzzles me, I’m sure, but there you go.

I wonder, too, if our artist was envisaging sound as part of the package, which would’ve been REALLY forward-looking. In 1927, of course, sound was yet to become the film industry revolution it soon would be—like widescreen, it had only really been limited and experimental—so I’m wondering if the artist envisaged that thing at the top of the screen as a speaker. As it happens, Experimenter Publishing, who published this thing, also had a radio station which, in 1928, started doing experimental TV broadcasts as well using their radio frequency, but they broadcast silent TV, so if that is supposed to be a speaker it was way ahead of the publisher’s own reality (TV with sound would be a thing not long after, apparently). Anyway, just found that kind of pleasing on a sort of retro-futurist level; I suppose just showing a TV of any sort was kind of futuristic in 1927…