Technical

Before the BBC, there was the Electrophone

A trip to Kingswood Warren to see how the BBC Research Department is keeping ahead of technological developments

Television: it’s all about timing and clocks

Make sure your television set is fully adjusted to improve your viewing

Will television have an effect on voters at election time? Leeds University plan to find out, using an ‘electronic brain’ in 1959

Will it ever be possible to exchange television across the Atlantic? Bell Laboratories have a plan to lay a cable in 1955

Anglia Television is about to come on air, meaning lots of technical developments

Inside ITV’s teletext service ORACLE in 1985

The future of black-and-white is here: subjective colour

It’s almost S-night! With ITV about to convert from 405 to 625, the technology correspondent of the Sunday Times looks into what’s involved

From doing the cinema live to doing the stage on video, television’s mise en scène keeps changing… whilst still staying the same

The first geostationary satellite linking Europe and North America goes into service in 1965

A radio reviewer looks on incredulously at the coming of television to the United States in 1935

Practical Television in 1962 gives advice on how to receive European television in the UK: grab your soldering iron

‘Professor’ A M Low explains to people who want the new ITV in 1955 just why they’ve got to change aerials and TV sets

A simplified guide to how the pictures get from the studio to the transmitter to your home from 1966

How Central’s new £15 million television centre in Birmingham uses state-of-the-art technology to put the ‘broad’ in broadcasting in 1996

The IBA introduces its experimental ‘Oracle’ service in the early 1970s

Showing filmed material on television is difficult, as these 1956 instructions prove

Instructions for transmitter staff in the event of screens going blank

The last few minutes of ORACLE teletext, 25 years ago

Television cameras around the home, recording their every move? 1962 celebrities say yes please!

Colour comes to ITV, courtesy of tests done by ITA chief engineer Howard Steele

The work of the mobile maintenance teams in 1974

The IBA announces that BSB is on its way

Your guide to the latest television designs on display at Earls Court in 1955

A 1963 guide to the options available for 625 lines, colour and ITV-2

A 1963 discussion of how to use the tuning signal to get perfect 405-line VHF black and white pictures

The BBC in 1986 details what went wrong with the planned BBC/IBA satellite service

The changes the make-up artists at Thames, Yorkshire and ATV had to make for the introduction of colour TV

Dan Farrimond takes a trip to Republica in Berlin to experience a teletext block party

1982: another report into cable television

A tour around the bits in between the testcards

Sydney Bernstein argues against going colour in 1969

Comparing VHF and UHF

From 1967, the BBC gives instructions on how to use the new colour testcard

Extracting colour information from black and white video images is now possible

Professionals worse off than viewers

Broadcasting gear changes too fast – and support suffers

An insight into Medical Photography & TV, 1966 to 1980

Do viewers and listeners care about technical quality? Yes and no.

The impact of podcasting on the future of TV and radio

We’ve arrived in the future we were always promised.

On being educated by television and radio

Multiplexing doesn’t work