Something I only noticed tonight

And I suspect I’m not the first and therefore this is not an original insight (few if any of my “insights” are), but you know how vertical video has been a thing since Vine, and now lives on as Instagram reels, Tiktok, Youtube shorts and whatever else? For some reason it struck me tonight that it goes back a lot further than that…

…And I mean RIGHT BACK to the invention of television. That there is John Logie Baird with one of his televisors. You might notice the shape of the screen. Vertical.

And that’s from one of Baird’s Phonovision discs, so you can see the picture it recorded was indeed upright (aspect ratio of 7:3, apparently). I wonder why Baird went for this rather than a squarer format like cinema (and isn’t it interesting, too, that even when Baird was experimenting with TV, cinema had long been experimenting with going wide rather than tall). I don’t know why this only hit me tonight, I can’t remember what pages I might’ve been looking at on the Interwebs that made me have this sudden realisation, but there you go, vertical video has a heritage going back to the 1920s. So if, like me, you’re not actually a fan of vertical video, well, sorry…