And the actual 1928 version…

This, incidentally, is the magazine cover I said in the previous post that I thought I’d posted but apparently hadn’t:

Radio News, November 1928, Hugo Gernsback (the man behind Experimenter Publishing, father of “scientifiction” and cheap bastard—though I do suspect Lovecraft’s antipathy for him was not just down to the tightness of his fists) sits watching one of his TV’s station’s broadcasts. Quite interesting looking at this after the one we were just looking at; the previous picture is like a fantasy of what television might be like, whereas this is the reality of it by the end of 1928. What strikes me most obviously is the smallness of the screen on this thing compared to the size of the overall unit… I know that early TV screens were miniscule because the limitations of mechanical TV meant it could only produce very small pictures, and I actually have my own photo of a 1930 Baird Televisor from York Castle Museum, but I don’t have that scanned that I know of so I’ll make do with this photo of JLB with his own set:

You may observe just how small the screen on that thing is, which was the thing that struck me that time I got to see one in the flesh. What strikes me, though, about the illustrated one above is that the screen looks even smaller in proportion to the overall unit… also that the latter is noticeably undecorated otherwise, all it has is the screen and the bits I gather you plugged into the radio, and otherwise it’s just this… brown block. I’m assuming the box is as big as it is to accommodate the scanning disc, but it’s not the most aesthetically pleasing bit of tech, is it? The Baird model’s quite nice by comparison.