Oh What A Time... - #114 Inventions: The Sequel (Part 2)

Episode Date: May 26, 2025

This is Part 2! For Part 1, check the feed!It’s time to return to one of our favourite subjects: inventions! This week we’ve got the history of portable music, the various attempts at portable television, plus the emergence of air conditioning starting with - and get this - Ancient Rome!Elsewhere, we’re still struggling to believe we live in the age of hair product innovation and no longer need to iron our hair. Is there anything else about modern hair styling that you can scarcely believe? Do let us know: [e-mail] If you fancy a bunch of OWAT content you’ve never heard before, why not treat yourself and become an Oh What A Time: FULL TIMER?Up for grabs is:- two bonus episodes every month!- ad-free listening- episodes a week ahead of everyone else- And much moreSubscriptions are available via AnotherSlice and Wondery +. For all the links head to: ohwhatatime.comYou can also follow us on: X (formerly Twitter) at @ohwhatatimepodAnd Instagram at @ohwhatatimepodAaannnd if you like it, why not drop us a review in your podcast app of choice?Thank you to Dan Evans for the artwork (idrawforfood.co.uk).Chris, Elis and Tom xSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to episodes of Oh What A Time early and ad free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. This is part two of Inventions. Let's get on with the show. OK, you're in the park. It's the 1960s. Sun is out. Someone says, oh, do you like music? Yes, I love music. Who's this person that's asked me if I like music? I'd like it. Now, obviously, nowadays, you could listen to music on your headphones. If you're deeply

annoying, you could listen to music on your phone in a public place. I think that is what will cause a revolution in the UK. It's people doing that on public transport. But still. The chutzpah of people who do that is just... Yeah, I can't believe people do that either. People just watching videos. It's remarkable that, isn't it?

That I understand to a greater extent. Do you? But music, pure audio, I just can't get up on that. But flicking through Instagram where those videos are changing every seven seconds and people are having to listen to something with none of the context. Although, yeah, if you're ever on the party train from West Wales to Swansea on a Saturday afternoon, it is full of like hen do doos from Hanford West, listening to tunes. I find that quite charming, just because it's just like, I'm having a bloody good time, it's 11am

and I've been drinking rose for an hour and a half. Right, okay, so in the 60s, the analogue era, what would you do? Well, have you ever heard, I certainly haven't, of the Mickey phone? No, it's not a children's toy. It was the world's first portable music player and it was invented in 1924, incredibly. Wow! By two Hungarian brothers, brothers Miklós and Etienne Vadaz,

and hailed by no less a figure than the artist Corbusier as embodying the essence of the Esprit Nouveau. Now, 1924, so that's over 100 years ago. Now it was pocket sized when you folded it up, it was about the size of a pocket watch, and it played a 10 inch shellac record. Now, a shellac record, shellac was a precursor to vinyl, and I've seen shellac records, they're very, very heavy,

okay, now that obviously is an issue. Because using the device was a bitor to vinyl and I've seen shellac records they're very very heavy okay now that obviously is an issue because using the device was was a bit more complicated you had to assemble it each time but once you'd put it together you would hand crank it and then it would produce an effective sound so you could take it on a picnic for instance. If I saw someone with one of those on public transport I wouldn't have a problem actually. Well the cranking was so difficult you know they've got at least one really big buff arm. Like Raphael Nadal. Yeah, you're a Popeye. So yeah it was a portable player but the records you had to schlep around with that's the issue obviously because the records were so heavy. Now the Mickey phone was manufactured by Maison Pilar in Switzerland, a company because the records were so heavy. Now, the Mickey phone was manufactured

by Maison Pilar in Switzerland, a company then well-known for making watches. They produced, this is amazing, because obviously there's no real cultural memory of the Mickey phone. About 180,000 Mickey phones over a period of three years till the novelty wore off and sales declined in 1927, the same year, ironically, that the device won first prize at the International Music Exhibition in Geneva.

And that's the thing, you know, the three of us are old enough to have seen these strange fads where everyone would be convinced that something's really great, they'll buy it, and then after a couple of years they'd be like, actually, I'm not sure about this anymore. Just thinking about the mini disc again. I'm, I, that was the one I was thinking of was the mini disc. I've backed that in a big way. Danny Baker really backed the laser disc. The laser disc.

Yeah. Yeah. Known in his family's Baker's Folly because he's got bloody loads of them. Huge backer of the laser disc. There was a second hand bookshop in Cardiff called, well, there is actually called Trap Mark Books, and they used to sell old music magazines upstairs. And I went through a phase of buying old Q magazines from the 1980s because I just found it quite interesting. And the advert for

the laser disc was amazing because they were like 12 inch records, but CDs for films. Right, yeah. So it was like a sort of an LP, but you would... Obviously the machine was massive. Wow. So when was... Was that before the DVD? Yeah, I think it was just before. Oh yeah, it was before the DVD.

Yeah. My grandad was a huge backer of Betamax. Like, my grandad had the only Betamax player I ever saw in the wild. Uh, Betamax, now then, I hope I'm not setting myself up for a corrections corner, oh what a shame here. From what I understand, Betamax was a better quality picture than VHS Video. It was the big rival, wasn't it? But it lost the war.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It lost the war from what I understand because the porn industry used VHS. Someone told me that in a pub once. VHS won the videotape war because of pornography. Yeah, that is what I was told that in a pub once. Hello at owhatatime.com. I think I can beat your Beat-A-Max backing with something even more sort of old-fashioned and archaic. I'm intrigued to hear how eccentric you think this is. So I grew up, as you know, in a house where we didn't have a TV until I was 14 or 15. And the only thing we would watch is on Christmas Eve, my brother would put up a bed sheet in the kitchen hung from the ceiling. And we had a silent movie projector, which had like, just film from like the 40s. I had like one eight minute

Disney's cartoon and one other thing. I can't remember what the other thing was, and we would arrange the kitchen chairs in a row like a cinema and we would watch 20 minutes of this silent film and then the bed sheet would be packed away again and that was what I watched. And then an old lady would come round and play the piano while you watched it. Yeah. That is... That's mad. That anecdote could be a century old.

Yeah, so that was my screen time apart from occasionally being, well, obviously being at friend's houses. I mean, at that time, Damon Albin was on a heroine writing love songs to Justin Fishman. That is incredible. But Beatamax was, it had a superior picture quality to VHS. That was the thing. It was actually better. I dreamed of Betamax. But by the late 80s, people were like, yeah, it's not working out. But I've never actually seen one. I've never actually seen a Betamax video. I'm amazed at that. I'm amazed at your granddad was so into it.

Okay. It wasn't, now the Mickey phone wasn't just a continental thing, continental European thing. It was a piece of up-to-date equipment that was bought and sold throughout Europe. So the London supplier was Keith Prowse and Co. of New Bond Streets. They used to put adverts in the press to tempt buyers. Now some of these even recommended placing the device on a champagne glass to amplify the sound, which tells you a lot about the intended audience. If you want a 2010s sort of bleaker version, when I'm listening to music in the kitchen, I used to put my mobile phone into a big Sports Direct mug. I do that with a pint glass. Why are they so massive? I do that with a pint glass. I've listened to a podcast I'm watching.

Why are they so massive? Yeah. Why? Why? I know it's not Mike Aschie's biggest crime, but why, why are they so massive? You can hardly put a full record player in a sports director's.

Yeah. Now there were other pocket gramophones on the market, including the Belgian made Calibri, which looked not dissimilar to the Mickey phone, but came ready made in a leather case, more typical of a sort of box camera or a vanity case and record player. And the Calibri, the word means hummingbird,

that branding will be applied to a gramophone later on. Then you had, in France, you had the Minion phone, which appeared in the mid-1920s, and there was a lookalike made by a Parisian company called Phonos. I like the Belgian design, they were set in a leather case, so they looked more like cameras than pocket watches. And it had a horn in place of a resonator.

So they're set up, it looks like the sound comes out with sort of an ice cream cone. Now, there was a British inventor as well, and they came up with the Peter Pan portable, which came in a wooden box and was invented by Frederick Ferris, manufactured by the London-based R. Crispin and Company Limited. I loved names in the 20s,

no one's called stuff like that anymore. Although it did have Swiss parts in the mechanism. It was first sold by Ferris' Peter Pan Gramophone Company Limited in August 1923. And Peter Pan was also in the business of making like novelty items. So they thought thought they were like, listen, we've got the portable mechanism sorted. So one was an alarm clock as well, which is actually very modern, isn't it? Yeah. Now, the technology developed, so designers got more adventurous. They came up with models that not just look like old box cameras or pocket watches, but the new sort of sleeker pocket cameras of the present.

So, especially the Kodak ones. So you had the camera gramophone, and more simply a camera phone. So there was a Swiss company called Torrens, and they made the parts for the Peter Pan portable, just mentioned. It sounds like a tongue twister. It sounds like I'm on Good Peter. I'm trying to prove a point. And they took on the additional challenge of fusing the record player with other everyday items. So they produced a thing called the Excelda and the Phonoposh models by the late twenties and then the Peter Pan company copied them. But the heyday of portable music was of course after the second world war because you had a number of manufacturers in North America and Europe and Japan and they all put innovative products into the field but

they all faced the same problem. A problem I remember the portability of the music itself, the player they could do. Yeah that's so interesting. But the issue was you had to take your records, your sets, so you know the records are massive and even cassettes it was a ball ache. Like I used to take cassettes around town in the back. Yeah yeah yeah. Because the the player itself wasn't the issue. It was it was just it was just, you know, what music would take and, you know, what do you what you choose? Now, the Pica design came in 1983 with the release of the Mr.

Disk, known as the Sound Burger by a Japanese firm called Audio Technica, and it was battery powered, it had stereo sound, it was marketed at the hipsters of the early 1980s. So, you know, it was quite a big deal in its time, but the early 70s you see portable record players were so ubiquitous, they were everywhere, that they became toys, leading to the introduction in 1972 of the Italian-made Penny Portable, which was a recco player and it looked like it swallowed the discs. Oh, right. Much like the CD player used to do years later.

Yeah. And apparently that was the inspiration for that process. Yeah. The Italian name for this device was called the Mangia di C. Which, or the Mange Disque in French, which translates as the disc eater. That's really, that's interesting because I remember when I first got a CD player that had that mechanism, it was something, there was something really pleasing about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

When it's, it would almost draw it in, like suck it in. Because with a cassette, it was very clunky. Yeah. You'd sort of snap it shut. The tape would get eaten up by the machine. Yeah. Yeah, very smooth. I loved CDs when I first had them. I loved CDs. You'd sort of snap it shut. The tape would get eaten up by the machine. Yeah. Yeah, very smooth. I loved CDs when I first had them.

I loved CDs. And the way that the CD player would sort of suck it in, it looked like it knew what it was doing. It gave you confidence, didn't it? As a consumer. You were confident. Whereas with a cassette, you're like,unk clunk clunk, slap clunk. And then it would play and it wouldn't sound as good.

So obviously it's the Americans, they always innovate in terms of portable music. So they introduced in the late 60s, the hip pocket record, which was a flexible vinyl, four inches in diameter. The word is the name implied, fit in the pocket of your jeans. So in all, there were 50 hip pocket titles released by Philco between 1967 and 1969.

They are tie-ins with Woolworths and Ford dealerships. And the way that I remember seeing a list in the back of a music magazine of all the great albums that had been put on mini disc. Because obviously they hadn't done them all yet. When mini disc ended. When MiniDisc ended. No, no, no. When MiniDisc still looked like it had a future, they were like, oh, and you can buy a couple of Bruce Springsteen albums. And yes, you can buy this Neil Young album. It's fine. MiniDisc will eventually get them all. Now, Philco produced hip pocket turntables, which were very portable, battery powered.

They were 24.95, as in dollars, with the discs themselves sold at 69 cents. So it was pocket money, really. Wow. And then Americom, who were a big rival to Philco, they came up with their version, pocket disc at the same time. And by various manufacturers in the communist half of Europe

with a flexi disc, transformed the possibilities of cheap, carryable music Europe, with a flexi disc, transformed the possibilities of cheap, carryable music. And with the flexi disc as well, I remember that in the 80s you would get flexi discs on the front cover of things like the NME. Because obviously it was much, much cheaper than vinyl and then it became cassette. How interesting. That passed me by completely.

But to be honest, it was... portable music, I don't think really worked until the iPod. Yes. Yeah. The Discman would... I wouldn't say the Discman was good. I would say actually that the cassette Walkman was better than the Discman. Yeah. Because if you walked for three paces, the fucker would skip. Yeah.

So it was like the least portable... You could... It was portable in the sense that you... I suppose you could move it from room to room. If you were a world-class ice skater, you could listen to a CD all the way through. Torville and Dean, they believe in the Discman. They still do. Anyone else? Yeah.

Yeah, even the Walkman, like, popping a tape in. You'd only carry around one cassette around with you, wouldn't you. Yeah. Even the Walkman popping a tape in, you'd only carry around one cassette around with you, wouldn't you? Yeah. So you'd only have like a maximum of 10 songs at any one time. And maybe the radio. My Walkman had a radio on it. Yeah, same actually.

Which was great. I still listen to Radio 1 on my Walkman. Last game of the season. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Love the terraces. Absolutely. Yeah, you're right. Do you remember there was a radio one played in April Fools, and this would have been in

the 80s, that there was a new invention, which basically was the iPod. They said like the size of a matchbox, they could contain all of your music. People were losing their mind. Then it was like, ha ha ha. Obviously that would never happen. That was just in April Fools. People got really excited. But then it happened.

Listen, we're over 20 years into the iPod era. They don't even make iPods anymore because everyone's moved on. I still don't quite believe that it exists. Still magic. All of that music on an iPod, that's insane to me. Yeah. It's like magic. It's like Sat Nav, I'm like this, and the iPod. I'm, it's, it's like magic. It's like Sutnav, I'm like this and the iPod. I will never believe that it's possible. Yeah, absolutely. A few years ago, I found my iPod mini and it was great to go through the playlist and see what I had.

I don't know when the last time I would have listened to it, but it was, I thought my music taste hasn't really changed in 20 years. And then the first playlist was like Garage and then like the second one, then there was one sort of hit and it was like, I was like yes I have moved on actually yeah I think maybe I have. Yeah yeah yeah. Well that's remarkable, El. It's just so much earlier than you would have thought. Absolutely and I can't believe that one in 1924 when it was was Pocket Size as well. That's what I find it most remarkable. Even if the stuff you played in it was the size of a house, it's still amazing that the actual player was tiny.

Fair play to them. All right, we're going to go back now to the dawn of the portable TV. Now today, television and entertainment more generally is on demand wherever you go. Phones, tablets, laptops, it's not even really TV anymore. It's video content streamed into your retinas whenever you want it, everywhere all of the time. I got a flight the other day, there was Wi-Fi on it. into your retinas whenever you want it, everywhere all of the time. I got a flight the other day, there was wifi on it.

Now, you know, I used to enjoy those little moments where you were bound by technology not to engage in the wider world and there's the, you know, all the on-demand content. There's no escape now, it is everywhere. Content is fully consumable, portable, everywhere you were, but that wasn't always the case. Wifi on a plane, I've never seen that.

Yeah, it's a new thing. You can still get it, yeah. You're right, content's everywhere, and if you want to become an author time full time, 4.99 a month, you can get yet more content from this show, even in the sky. I used to watch James Bond's films, and the invention that would always blow my mind wasn't like the pen that would also like blow up and kill you or blow out a dart and kill someone. It was sometimes James Bond would get in a car and Q or whoever would call him and the dash would flip and there he would be. Yes.

Yeah. And I was like a television in a car. The idea, even as a kid. Yeah. Yeah. I'm the same as you. In the early nineties, the idea of watching a television anywhere that wasn't the living room was absolutely mind-blowing to me. Equally would be sci-fi where someone's got like a screen on their wrist. Yes. That was a big one.

Yeah. Like Star Trek, which is essentially just an iPhone stuck to their wrist, is what it is now. But that blew my mind. Even the... Well, it's the Apple Watch, isn't it? Yeah, it is the Apple Watch, yeah, yeah. Do you remember in Back to the Future 2,

when he goes to the future and he's having like a conference call on the wall and flee from, Red Hot Chili Peppers is there as his boss, but do you remember, he's talking to multiple people on like, what is a projection on the wall. That at the time blew my mind the idea that that would be possible. Yeah, I think I thought the combined TV and video machine in your bedroom was the height of portable content consumption when I was about 80. You would have walked onto the factory floor

and said, lads, down the tools. We've done it. It's over. We've dropped the shutters. Technology is completed. It's over. We've finished it. Yeah. So, yeah, the idea of having it in a car, like a television in a car, it would just blow my mind. And so what I'm going to do now is take you back in time to the 1960s.

Televisions at this point, heavy, bulky boxes, majority in England at least, are black and white. Colour has really taken hold, let alone portable televisions. But the earliest attempt in Britain at least to create a portable television was the Ecovision TMB 272, released in 1956 by E.K. Cole. It could run on both electricity and batteries, which was an incredible novelty at the time. Wow. I thought you were going to say and gas. Yeah.

Cole. It's an oil powered television. Even in the 50s, get this, the Ecovision TMB 272, you could get it installed in Daimler's and Rolls Royce's early high end cars, could cover the portable television and get this in the 50s for a brief moment, it was legal to watch TV while driving. Woah! Yes. That's amazing. Can you imagine that?

Yeah. How could that go wrong? I don't know what's on TV in the 50s. What would be that good? But yeah, mind blowing. And so we move into the 60s and now Sony become a big player. And this is widely considered to be the first true portable television. And it is the TV8301. 8 inch screen,

black and white and it uses new transistor technology. It was a huge step forward but as with a lot of these things, not a commercial success. It was delicate, expensive and by 1962, two years after it had been released, it just vanished from the market. General Electric then entered the scene. In 1966, they released the PortaColor, the world's first portable colour television. 1966, you could watch England win the World Cup on a PortaColor. I don't think there was very much colour television in Britain at that point. Wasn't it BBC Two that brought in colour television about a year later? Yeah, amazing. But there was a portable colour television. When Swansea got to the first division in 81-82, our first game was against Leeds United. Yes, we won 5-1. And the beginning of the commentary is, and for those people at home watching,

in black and white, because there were some loads of black and white times in the 80s. We had a black and white telling in the 80s in the kitchen. My grandad, my dad's dad was so tight he refused to upgrade to a colour TV because the TV license was slightly cheaper. It was more expensive. Yeah, yeah. If you had a colour tally. Yeah. My dad's dad notoriously tight. And this is in the 90s, like the mid 90s, still had a black and white TV. I will remind you yet again that I had a bed sheet up in my kitchen on Christmas Eve. No TV license for you at the Crane Household. Exactly.

You've got a sheet licence. Let's just quickly remind you what I was going through. The idea of a black and white TV in my kitchen would have been the stuff of dreams. You were living the best life out there. You had to tune it like a radio. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because the first TV we had actually in the house was my brother's TV. He was 18 at the time and it was a TV come alarm clock that he had on his bedside table

and the screen was about five inches by five inches and you had to tune it to get the channels on. Wow. Yeah, that's the same thing. Weird old time. He'd let me watch quarter of an hour of telly a day which was not enough to watch a full program and he did that on purpose because he was cruel. So I'd watch like half of neighbors. I'm jumping around the timeline here but I remember the advent of the

remote control. We used to have a telly without remote control. I remember yeah we had a telly without remote control. Did you have that interstitial phase with the remote that was cabled in? Will Barron No, we went straight from having a crap telly to a remote control. I remember reading about the Beatles the first time they met Elvis. They were very impressed because he had a remote control telly on a cable and they were just like, oh my gosh, you just couldn't get them in the UK. Jason Vale But I think there's something quite satisfying about, well I'm just basically watching this channel now. My grandma had one with a heavy clunk button. Yes, that was the same as we had. So it would be a real active choice to go and change it. So you would stick with stuff, remember we'd watch the whole

of antique road shows because it was an effort to walk across the room and change it. Yeah, then the argument about who was going to do it. Whereas now at Netflix, you'll sat there for ages going flicking through a thousand screens. Actually, it's probably better times. On linear TV, it still blows my mind when the ratings come out. People still talk about the fact that, you know, you get ratings get bumped up at the start of a program because people haven't been bothered to get up and turn it off yet. Yeah. That must have been even more the case in the 60s, 70s, 80s,

when you had to get up off your seat. I bet your ratings probably the whole day might have been people who couldn't be bothered to get up and change the channel. The importance of a good breakfast show on your TV, because then it would be that to set you up for the day. No one's getting up. Yes, I think that's actually a very good point. Let's enter the 1970s portable TV boom. So throughout the 1960s, tech companies promised true pocket televisions were just around the corner.

They weren't quite here yet. RCA, Motorola, and Clive Sinclair was in the mix. But the first real proper pocket sized portable television came from Panasonic. In 1970, Panasonic released the TR-001. It's a handheld television that looks like a miniature camcorder. If you look at the pictures of it, the TR-001, it looks like a camcorder. It's got a one and a half inch screen. What is that?

That's bad isn't it? It weighed under a kilogram. It was a genuine pocket device by 1970 standards, but so pricey and quite niche for a one and a half inch screen TV. So it was quickly pulled back from the market. What is the viewing quality on a one and a half inch screen? Imagine what in the Champions League final that. What could you watch on a one and a half inch screen that would be? There's nothing, is there?

It's a radio with a light at the top essentially, isn't it? Yeah, it's like, have you seen Godfather, the greatest film ever made? Sort of. I've got the gist. So, the portable TV market needs a Maverick to enter it. A great inventor, possibly even a British great inventor of the 70s. Any suggestions for who that might be? It can't be Clive Sinclair.

Sir Clive Sinclair. Oh yes. Someone order a Maverick, here he comes. British electronics genius known for bold and most importantly, completely unprofitable ideas. 1977, he unveiled the MTV-1, which launched in the market in 1978, a micro television battery powered and it used AA batteries, it weighed just 780 grams and could also receive multi-region signals so PAL and NTSC. It was at the time a financial disaster. I bet Sir Clive did

not see this coming. Sir Clive lost an absolute fortune but it proved that a handheld TV idea was possible. And I hope that was some solace to him, as he sold his house. These sets weren't built in Silicon Valley, they came from Woolsey Electric, so based in Porth South Wales, part of a wider government-supported effort to regenerate coal communities through electronics manufacturing. I've got to ask, what were his successes? Well, 1984 rolls along, Sir Clive decides I'm not done with portable TVs. He releases the TV80. It was made in nearby Abakan.

And guess what? Was this idea a success? No. Absolutely not. This too lost a lot of money. In Abakan? Yeah. Oh God. If you see Zerkleif coming along, promising he's going to save your town with

electronics manufacturing, move out. He, do you know what? The Sinclair ZX81, that was him. Yeah. And that was big. But I mean, he put some money into some crap ideas, but he's a sirs. So it kind of gone that badly. Why, why did we knight the guy?

Cause he's a trier? That I think, isn't, isn't Eddie Eagle, Eddie the Eagle Edwards a sir? I'm not sure. It's a very British thing, isn't it? To knight this guy. Yeah. Mad inventors. What he's done.

On the New Year's Honours list. Failure after failure. But the real breakthrough wasn't about shrinking the box, it was changing the screen. So cathode ray tubes were bulky, power hungry, great fun when you go over the tip to smash. But Sinclair realised that for truly portable devices, a new kind of display was needed, but he couldn't quite make it work. It was Sony who cracked the problem.

In 1982, Sony released the Watchman, officially the FD210, and it used cutting edge LCD screens. Ah, that seems early for that LCD in 1982. Wow. My auntie had one. Oh really? The Watchmen? Yeah, yeah.

Because it had a little aerial. Yes. So you would tune it like a radio. And the reason she had one was because she absolutely loved soaps. And so when she was going for a haircut, if her haircut clashed with like crossroads or Emma Dale's, she couldn't bear to miss it. She couldn't bear to miss it. She invested in the Sony watch, man.

Good on Ash. Because I suppose at that point, when the soap goes out, that's your chance to watch it. Exactly. There's no watching it back. Yeah, there's no Sky Plus. So, you know, you've got to be available. Yeah. So the FD 210 used LCD screens and while it wasn't a smash hit it was clear that this was where things are heading and Sony doubled down. By 1988 the watchmen had colour and over time they released 65 different models before ending the line around the year 2000.

But in the early 90s, in the UK at least, portable pocket televisions finally made it to the mass market. You could walk into Argos and buy one. And the most popular choice was the one that I had, the Casio TV 470. It launched in 1991. It was a colour set with a 2.2 inch screen. It would retail for about £90, which is about £200 in today's money. I got mine in a boot sale in Dagnum for about 20 quid.

When was this? What year? Well, if it came out, I can't... I think I would have been about... I think this is about 94, I got one. Yeah. Oh, yes, I think this is about 94 I got one. Yeah. And if you have a look, the Casio TV 470, so it launched in 1991. And if you had a mate who had one, this was, you would be like, this blows my mind. I actually watched England versus the Netherlands Euro 96 on a Casio TV 470. The 4.1, the four goals, the Teddy Sheringham pass to Alan Sheeran.

I recognize that thing, yeah. I watched on a Casio TV 470. With this two inch screen. Four and a half inch, mate. Okay, sorry, sorry. Don't rub a couple of inches off that. I take it. I take it.

That vital. And the thing I remember about the Casio TV 470, I think it was like four, it might've even been eight AA batteries. It would consume these batteries Oh yeah, can you imagine? like an unreal extent. You were lucky to get an hour of TV out of four batteries.

It was churning through them. I bet it's a complete set of batteries per film. It was insane. Complete set of batteries for every drum beat in the East Enders. The batteries would go, you're like, I can't believe this is going again. I remember going on a scout trip with a Casio TV 470 and about 16 batteries. I think it was, it was, it was done in one day. It was ridiculous. Batteries are really expensive. A standard TV living room set in 1991 was about 150 pounds. The 2.2 inch portable was 90 pounds at the time. So you can see they were enormously expensive

and they were still niche, still novelties. It's the kind of thing Mr. Bean would have had. Yeah, and that really was the dawn of portable television, portable screens, and it's kicked on in the long run, fair play, and I think we owe it all to the Casio TV 470. These early devices, however, with their short battery lives, their flickering displays, they were cutting edge, but just two decades later, screens are now everywhere in our pockets, on our wrists. They were there in, but just two decades later, screens are now everywhere in our pockets, on our wrists. They are there in car dashboards.

Every one of us is James Bond, even in kitchen appliances and billboards. And even my toothbrush is now connected to Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Pathetic. And I love it because it means I never have to think ever again. Just consume other people's content. That's fascinating. It also says a lot about my childhood that I'm genuinely jealous that you had that. But even now, as you talk about it, I'm like, I would have loved that. And I would have thought you were so cool. I genuinely I would have been in awe of you. Whereas now,

very much the opposite. Well that's it for Inventions this week. Hope you enjoyed that. In fact, if you want even more Oh What A Time, you can have more Oh What A Time. You can become an Oh What A Time full-timer where you get two bonus episodes every month including lots of correspondence plus book reviews film reviews and all sorts of brand new episodes you've never heard before to sign up you can go to oh what a time calm and choose your options which include another slice and one re plus otherwise we'll see you next week bye Bye. Follow Oh What A Time on the Wondry app, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or

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