Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Cathode Ray Tubes

Episode Date: August 18, 2025

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why cathode ray tubes are secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

Cathode ray tubes, known for being televisions, famous for being CRT televisions. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why cathode ray tubes are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks, welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host, Katie Golden, Katie. Yes. What is your relationship to or opinion of cathode ray tubes? I mean, it sounds cool as hell. I like the sound of it. Cathode ray tubes, it sounds like a Duck Dodgers sort of weapon where I press a button

and it shoots a laser or alternatively shoots out sort of a little flag that says bang, but then outside of the little flagpole shoots a tinier gun that actually shoots a laser. I'm so glad we are both so versed in Duck Dodgers. and not what it was based on, which was a very famous but old-timey serial called Buck Rogers. But we're specifically versed in the Daffy Duck, Looney Tunes parody of Buck Rogers called Duck Dodgers. I mean, it's the ship of Theseus,

because now kids are probably only familiar with like the Roblox version of Duck Dodgers. So it'll keep getting sort of more and more modified until essentially all thought is blobs. But, you know, but yeah, speaking of the youth, cathode ray tubes, that sounds, I'm thinking like this feels like a mid-1900s kind of thing. Yeah, and it pretty much is. And also, like, we're both generationally in the group that had access to cathode ray tube-based televisions. And then also they got replaced by LED TVs and LCD TVs pretty quickly. Yeah, because the cathode ray tube-based television.

Ray 2 television is the one where you turn on and it kind of go, like this kind of, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, and then it would kind of like have to warm up a little bit. So the screen would slowly come on. If you got real close to it, because your mom told you not to and you are intrigued by the consequences, you can sort of smell it when it turns on and it has this sort of staticy smell. Sometimes you get a little static shock if you stuck your nose against it. I miss that.

You know, I feel like television used to be a lot more of a sensory experience. It was not just the physical dimensions. Like, if you're young, you may not know that TVs used to be shaped sort of like a refrigerator in terms of having a massive backends to the screen. And now they're kind of flat. You know how in Minecraft there are blocks? It was like a Minecraft block, but in real life. Yeah, pretty much.

Yeah, yeah. This technology is definitely from our time and from a lot of listeners' time and also feels like mid-1900s, Eisenhower stuff too somehow. It's interesting. Yeah. So it's a great pick. Thank you, listeners, especially Hrant, H-R-A-N-T on the Discord, with support from Jeff B, from Cortchester and many other folks.

This ran away in the polls. and realized in researching this, I truly, really never thought about them, even though we had a CRT TV when I was a kid, and my grandparents, I remember, had like a really big one because basically when they retired and moved to a new home, they treated themselves. So in order to get a large screen, that thing had such a massive back end on it. It was one of the heaviest objects I'd ever seen. Well, and let's get into all sorts of things about this technology. And on every episode we lead with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics.

This week that's in a segment called Because your stats and numbers, tasty stats and numbers will count up you, oh, we'll count up you, oh, we'll count up you, numerical stats numbers, SIFPOT stats and numbers, we'll count up you, oh, we will count up you. And that name was submitted by Tech Jack on the Discord. Thank you, Tech Jack. We have a new name for this segment every week. Please make them the silly and wacky and bad as possible. Submit through Discord or to siftpot at gmail.com.

That one is from a show called Veggie Tales that I grew up with. It was like computer animated Christian children's entertainment and also very good. So that's one of the silly songs. What vegetable was God represented as? I think he was not represented. Well, what about Jesus? It tended to be a lot of Bible stories, but I forget if God or Jesus was ever vegetableized. I'm looking at it.

Jesus veggies tales. But I. Okay. So it says that Jesus was not physically depicted as a talking vegetable. Yeah. What about Moses? Did they go for Moses? I think potentially, I think only the Trinity was off the table for vegetable.

I think he's, I think he's a cucumber or a pickle. No, I think a cucumber. If it's a pickle or a cucumber, it's potentially Larry, the cucumber, who's one of the main characters. So that's actually an honor. Right. Right. I mean, you know, also not an honor. But, you know what I mean?

I'm glad that the vegetables have something to believe in. And the first number this week is 1922. 1922 is the year when a Utah teenager who was a high school student named Philo Farnsworth. This high school student drew a sketch of what he called an image dissector so he could show it to his high school chemistry teacher. That's interesting because I know Futurama has Professor Farnsworth and Philip J. Frye as characters. They might, I mean, they're a bunch of nerds, so they must have taken it from this, this real guy, Philo Farnsworth. Yeah, and I would say Fylo Farnsworth is about as famous as he should be. Like, that's a name I had heard growing up as the quote unquote inventor of television.

And that's broadly true. There are other parallel inventors we'll talk about and other collaborators. But according to the Lemelson Center at MIT, Farnsworth's sketch that he drew as a teenager depicted most of the principles behind what became television and specifically a TV based on the general principles and tech of a cathode ray tube. Well, when I was a teenager, my drawings depicted what would be featured on television, usually on sort of the paid-for channels. Yeah, and we're starting with TV for two reasons.

One is that a lot of people are familiar with this topic as a TV thing. It's not just a TV thing in ways we'll talk about. But the other reason is it's one good way to just describe the extreme basics of what a cathode ray tube is. We're not electrical engineers, but we can give you the basics. You're not? What if like every episode I was loudly tinkering? It's so distracting in the audio. Receiving massive shock.

My hair is, like, out, like a Frankenstein, you know? Yeah. I mean, I am related to some engineers, and that's definitely how they are. This is the basics of a catheterate tube. Also, one excellent description comes from a key source this week. It's a book called Inside the Machine, Art and Invention in the Electronic Age. And that's by Megan Prelinger. And Megan Prelinger is one of the founders of the Pralinger Library.

in San Francisco. She's a science communicator. And her very short, good definition is that a cathode ray tube is a specialized vacuum tube and usually built for displaying images on one end. And there's still a lot more there. So like the tube is a vacuum tube, and a vacuum tube is a tube containing a vacuum, and a vacuum is a space with nothing in it, no gases, no nothing. Right.

So it's not like there's a tiny little. a hoover inside the television. It's that the air has been suctioned out. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And it's usually made a glass, but it's some kind of space to contain and protect a vacuum with nothing in it. And then cathodes are one of the two electrodes in an electrochemical circuits. I know that's a very technical sentence, but also a battery is a good example. And if folks remember the long ago SIF about batteries, we talk about batteries having, anode and a cathode. The anode and the cathode are the two electrodes of the circuit. Electrons move between them. So building back up to the name of this, it's an electrochemical circuit in a vacuum tube.

And then the one other element that we usually build in is that a beam of electrons goes from the cathode to the anode in a way where that displays something on one end. And so that's a lot of why these TVs were so massive back in the day is that if you can build a big enough one of those cathode ray tubes, then you get a big and clear picture. So when you're, when you look at like the guts of the television, I assume you don't have just like one nozzle from which the electrons are being sprayed. Is there like an array of things shooting electrons? It's so weird, you pretty much do have one nozzle with a cathode ray tube TV. Really? And it's often called an electron gun. Another thing folks may know about these devices is they're built to match the speed that the human eye sees things at.

But if you point a camera at it, that's at a different speed. And it can, like, see the steps of a cathode ray tube making a picture. And what it does is it shoots a narrow beam of electrons. in lots of rapid lines one by one, almost like a lawnmower pattern. So the electron gun emits a narrow beam of electrons. Those go through coils that deflect and intensify and direct the beam. And you get a rapidly repeating picture on the screen.

It's just built to look like one consistent image to the human eye. So if I'm like a tiny invisible person and I'm holding like a hose of electrons, drawing pictures with this hose of electrons over and over to make it seem like there's a stable picture made out of this hose of electrons. Yeah, that's it. Yeah. That's a lot of work for the tiny invisible person. One number here is between one-tenth of a second and one-fifteenth of a second.

You don't really need to understand that fraction, but between one-tenth to one-fifteenth of a second is how long the human eye retouching. pains an image after it's gone away. We call this the persistence of vision. The cathode ray tubes electron gun is just firing the image enough times and quickly enough that you'll keep seeing something you think. Right. But then a video camera that can do, you know, 30 frames a second, we'll see the action

instead of the fake illusion that we're being fooled by with our eyes. And that's why when you take like a video of a video with one of these old screens, it's kind of like flickering. Yes, yeah, that's why it looks weird. It's not built for them. It's built for our eyeballs in our squishy heads. Mm-hmm. Squishy eyeballs. And yeah, and that image display element was Farnsworth's key insight. Cathode ray tubes already existed. But as a teenager, he sketched the basics of how an optical image would be placed on a photoelectric surface with that sort of back and forth movement of an electron beam. Okay. So that's very amazing. Like, it's rare to be a kid in chemistry class and show your teacher the future.

Yeah, okay. He was a nerd. I got it. But I do want to hear more about what a photoelectric surface is. It can be a lot of different things, but one of them, especially with these TVs, is a screen coded in something that is phosphorescent, something that lights up when energy is shot at it. Oh, okay, okay. That makes sense. So you're shooting energy at it and you're shooting it in like little spots. And then every time you shoot one of the spots, it lights up. Yeah. Let's move on to how you get different colors, right? Because black and white TV, that's a little easier, right? Because you kind of have off or on, sort of. But with color TV, you need to have different colors being activated. Exactly. And that's why color TV was such a later step. And the super basics are that the machine needed to additionally combine red and blue and green into various colors in various spots. Okay. Yeah. Because yeah, before you're like doing that color mixing, essentially, you can just turn things on or off or an in-between level and get lots of black and white images. Yeah. And it's, it's our eyes see red, green, and blue. wavelengths the way we determine color and have such a since we don't just see red green and blue

it is the intensity of the wavelength the interaction of the different wavelengths hitting and activating the rods and cones at the back of our eyes yeah yeah this is this is such a combination of electronics and biology because every end user was a person in their minds like you know other animals like pet dogs or something would see this too but it wasn't built for them it's built for one specific species when my dog was a puppy she sat on the couch in front of my parents tv had somehow activated the remote with her foot and was just like sitting there like a tiny person and i was like i have a genius dog it was a fluke and she was not a genius dog Yeah. I've thought that about my cat really often. Mainly Watson. We have two cats. But Watson

loves nature programs and also computer animated movies. Yeah. My dog ran into a wall trying to chase a cat that leapt out of a TV. So like, you know, like the cat leapt out of frame. So could be chased after it and ran right into the wall. I'm proud. That's determination. That's dedication. Yeah. It's good stuff. Almost got it. And yeah, and then all of this stuff that is so TV specific, that gets us into mega takeaway number one, cathode ray tubes are only one origin of television. Whoa.

It turns out this was not the first way of making TV, and it quickly took over because it worked better than all the other tech. but there were other ways of creating television images, and CRTs and Philo Farnsworth were not the first. Little rats and costumes that you put behind a screen. I'm like way too hippie and woo-woo about it. I'm like the first way was dreams, man. And then... Screw you, Alex.

But rat theater's better. I like it a lot. Yeah. And yeah, this is both the history of TVs and the history of this technology. Lots of sources in here, including the Lemelson Center at MIT, the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City, it's a science library, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and then writing for JSTOR Daily, the BBC, and the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Because this, this like fits the conventional wisdom, especially in the U.S.

that Philo Farnsworth invented TV, but also lots of other people were doing it and in some different ways. Because Philo Farnsworth prototyped that cathode ray tube and put it together and made it happen. Key number is 1927, so that's five years after his high school diagram. What happened is Farnsworth was encouraged by that high school teacher to make sure to go to college, but then his father died and he needed to go straight to work to support his family. and then in his nights, weekends, bits of spare cash for parts invented TV. That's amazing.

Oh, you know, in a spare time, he invented TV. Because he didn't have TV to distract him. So, you know, it's easy. Right, right. And this 1927 machine was extremely basic. He used a camera to capture and transmit the image of a black line onto a CRT screen. Yeah. Just a line.

But what was the plot? So the line's an anti-hero, obviously. Any serious show. A bad boy, huh? His wife, another line, is a wet blanket. And then I'm doing Breaking Bad, basically, is what I'm thinking of. It's like a bald line once he turns. Right, right, right.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, she's a real wet. The wife line is a real wet blanket for not wanting there to be a meth lab. Meth. Yeah, yeah. And so Farnsworth did that, but also his camera wasn't quite cathode ray tube based yet. And another guy named Vladimir Zvoriken helped invent that right around the same time. And Zvorkin was born and raised and also trained in Imperial Russia.

He didn't leave until shortly before the Russian Revolution. He basically fled. But while he was a college student way back in 1910 in St. Petersburg, Russia, Zvorkin combined the work of two other scientists into like an early hybrid model of television and is also pretty credible as another inventor of television. Okay. So if he's not going the cathode ray tube route, what's he doing? Great question. Yeah, he's basically combining some cathode ray tubes with some pretty. principles from what's called mechanical television.

And mechanical television, the forerunners of that were all in Germany, like the early unified Germany. Back in 1884, very early for something like TV, 1884, a German scientist named Paul Nipko projected light through a spinning disc onto a photosensitive surface. and then the light changes as the disc spins and seems to create a moving image on the surface. It's both a forerunner of TV and basically not TV. It's almost more of a slideshow. Interesting. Okay.

So like does, so the disc spins at a constant rate or is like the rate of the spinning disc somehow affecting the image? Also a really good question. It's like a constant spin of disc and then you change the light. to make different things happen. The light is what you vary to get a moving picture. I see. So why does the disc need to be spinning? An incredibly mechanical version of the frame rate or the electron gun in later film and television.

I've seen, I think, like sort of modern versions of this where it's like spinning blades of LED lights, that there's probably some matching with the rate of the spinning, with the rate of the spinning, with the rate of the image being projected to kind of try to make what looks sort of like a hologram. It's not really a hologram. It's like a pseudo hologram. But it's like you have these spinning blades of LED lights and it's kind of like meant to sort of trick the brain

into seeing a 3D rotating image kind of open in the air without. And then because the blades are rotating at a certain rate, you kind of don't see the actual blades. So it looks like a floating. image. Yeah, I stumbled on some of things like that in prepping this because there are some articles that basically throw around the name cathode ray tube for something with kind of similar principles because people want to make a real version of the Princess Leia message holograms

from the first Star Wars movie. Like they want to 3D project a moving image that seems like it's physically there in the room like that. Yeah. The best way to do that is just a Pepper's Ghost Illusion. That's where you have a video or a light projection and you have it going at a certain angle and then you have a piece of glass where you're projecting that image onto the piece of glass from an angle. So you can't see the origin of the image like the projector or the video image, but you can see it reflecting on the piece of glass and the glass is upright and it gives you this illusion of like a little 3D ghost image. And it's used a lot in Disneyland, like on dark...

Yeah, Hanan Mansion. Dark, like Hanan Mansion, exactly. I remember first reading about those. And my initial first thought was, ha, ha, people of the past are so easy to entertain. But one second later, I thought, no, that's really cool. Like, that's great. It's obviously neat. And they were correct to be entertained by this.

And, like, sometimes they get really cool. clever about how it's done. So instead of it just being a projected image and a glass sheet, it's like you can have an extra mirror involved or a screen or something, right, or cut out. And then you can get really, really clever with it. And then it creates these optical illusions that are very cool. And yeah, it fits this whole story because basically a lot of people are trying to come up with a lot of different ways of both displaying an image and generating an image, and then you sort of piece those together into whatever contraption you can build. Svorekin used some of the principles of mechanical television and also some cathode ray tube type tech, because another landmark

of this is 1897. 1897 is when a German scientist named Carl Braun built a cathode ray tube oscilloscope. Ooh, oscilloscope. Asylloscopes are an earlier and major use of cathode ray tubes. I think of them with

either pictures of old-timey laboratories or the pop culture version like a Frankenstein laboratory. Basically, if you have a circular screen with one waveform on it and the waveform seems to be telling you some kind of data. And oscilloscope is a cathode ray tube

where the end of it shows you a visual version of something like a magnetic field or electrical power or anything that can be just shown as one line of data. Like, it's not a TV screen, but it's just one line of data shown visually. Right, because isn't it, it's like usually, I think I've seen an oscilloscope before and you can like mess with the knobs and it goes, where, and then like you see a line. That's it. Forming parabolic shapes and sine waves and so on.

it's that kind of thing and that was mind blowing in the 1890s right like data had basically never been visual before unless someone illustrated it by hand or printed something and so that was very helpful for the entire process of researching further electrical and electronic concepts I mean we go from that very simple like having a line of data and it's like oh visually representing data you just have to make that process a little bit more complex, and then you can have a whole image. Yes. Yeah, exactly.

They went from, instead of just one line graph, what if we show Bonanza or a gunsmoke or something? It's like when you learn how to use your graphing calculator to make a picture, usually a picture that might be only otherwise seen on certain television channels where you have to pay per view. Right. Or Katie Golden's earliest art works. which are in museums that are not uptight, you know what I mean?

Right, right. Yeah, and then like there's so many other people in this story. Another key one is a Scottish inventor named John Logie Baird. He basically took as many mechanical TV principles as he could and put them together into a large version of TV and before Philo Farnsworth. Yeah, he was working mostly in London. He made giant mechanical discs for a mechanical TV.

They were up to eight feet wide and eight inches thick. It also had glass lenses instead of just open holes for like better image quality through it. Also, these gigantic discs were dangerous. Apparently in his lab, they would frequently be spinning and then like come loose from the machine and zip around smashing things. So that's great. I think it's not, it's too bad we don't have still have the physical challenge aspect to having a television. Right. They're easy to lift pretty much.

And there's no giant dangerous discs like in that one part of the Will Smith, Kevin Klein movie Wild Wild West. You know, nothing like that. Sure. For those who, for those who have seen that movie, that makes a lot of sense. It's truly a waste of time to see it. And yeah, and so Baird two years before Farne, Sonsworth's line on a cathode ray tube screen, Baird built a giant mechanical version of television that was presented in the window of Selfridge's department store in London in 1925. And it was entirely these mechanical principles, which both meant it worked and also was never really going to be practical for people's homes.

Like, why would you do that? Right. And then the other amazing inventor here to talk about was focused on the. broadcasting elements, because all of these early TVs were based on pretty wired systems. And then there was an American inventor named Charles Francis Jenkins who built something he called Radio Vision, where you broadcast an image through the air. That sounds cool. Yeah.

And this basically just got replaced and out-competed by what became television. but as early as 1923, he set up a situation where what's being shared is really more like a slideshow. He's just sending a still image. But it was the first wireless transmission of images like we're used to today. And the prototype was basically an old-timey radio where it's a giant cabinet-sized thing, but it has a screen on the front. And through wireless transmission, it received a still image of Herbert Hoover. Now, why would you, why would that be the thing? Why would you put that out there for aliens to possibly intercept?

The aliens are like, he's going to cause a depression. Turn around, turn around the ship, he'll depression us. And that's why we have no contact. And the not joke about Herbert Hoover, before he was president, he was like a famous philanthropist. Everyone was convinced Herbert Hoover was the most generous man in America. Like, he helped feed Belgium in World War I and stuff. He was beloved. Right, right.

He just didn't know how to run an economy. Yeah, he knew how to, like, fundraise for charity, but he didn't know how to make the government help anyone. Right. Which is an interesting divide in skills. But that was his deal. Yeah. And so his particles of his image floated through the air onto a screen. yeah and before philo farnsworth built a TV and so there were like lots of ways of doing this without cathode ray tubes that radio vision used a machine part called a scanning drum that then reflected and enlarged an image to be seen on a screen and i hope people are comfortable with a lot of these descriptions being loose because it's just a ton of tech and electrical engineering to explain them completely but the upshot is both farnsworth and zvoriken and uh working

together and also competing in a way that turns cathode ray tube into the dominant technology for television. Okay. And it's also pretty fraught. They don't have any, like, initial antagonism toward each other, but both of them sketch out and prototype cathode ray tube TVs and cameras. And then Zvariken, when he moved to the U.S., he started working for RCA, Radio Corporation of America.

It's a giant tech company if you're in the 1920s. And then RCA sent Zvorkin to visit Farnsworth's lab in a way where then everyone accused each other of stealing everyone's work forever. I mean, that seems ill-advised, right? Unless there, you know, unless it really is something about like we're all here to share stuff and so on. Farnsworth agreed to him visiting the lab, and he knew that he was working for RCA? Yes, which is strange, because then Farnsworth very specifically worked with a different company called Philco. A lot of lawsuits ensued. One weird thing is part of why we still have the 1922 sketch that Farnsworth made for his teacher is that he dug it up to use his legal evidence in the battle with Zvorkan and RCA.

Yay. Did this other, did Svorkin just, was he just like, I'll bring over a pizza? Farns was like, curses, my weakness. The food from the Italian Americans who we don't think are white yet? I can't resist it. Oh, geez. The greatest ethnic food. It's so rare. They should do an Amadeus movie, but with Farnsworth and this guy whose name I just forgot.

Zvorkan, yeah. Svorkan. Yeah, and they both legitimately did a lot to advance this. And in super general terms, Farnsworth was a little ahead on like the television displaying stuff. And Farnsworth's camera was not as good as Vorekins' camera ideas at the time. Like Farnsworth's camera could only get a picture if the subject was being extremely brightly lit in a way where like a human actor probably would not be able to do a lot for a long time. Right. And so both of them iterate on this with the support of big companies behind them. And the last number here is 1939. Because in 1939, RCA, which was Voriken's company, made a licensing agreement with Philo Farnsworth. And that was significant for two reasons.

It basically ended this battle. The other way was significant as apparently RCA had never made a licensing agreement with anyone. that's like every other engineer they'd either crushed or absorbed and farnsworth was just doing work that was too good and winning too many legal battles i see i see farnsworth seems like someone you really shouldn't mess with and i look up a photo of him he looks like someone you could easily mess with is what i'm trying to say i don't mean to be mean but he looks very he's nebish sort of it seems like he was a very brilliant and devoted Mormon boy if we can stereotype a little bit like he just he worked incredibly hard on this and then also when RCA and Zvoriken came

along he didn't just lay down he was like no I'm not going to get messed with like I have a genuine legal standing and we'll fight this out like you know yeah it's all reasonable like putting a firm hand on Svorkan's shoulder and saying listen buddy You can't just do that. Right. Yeah, yeah, like not a pushover, but never rude, I feel like, was his vibe. Here, have one of these salt-free peanut snacks. Now, listen, buddy.

Come on. And I only bring up Mormons because he was extremely born and raised in Utah and also dropped out of college to support his family, you know, and trained at Brigham Young. And, like, that's just an exciting part of his background. He's one of the most important Mormon people in history. I guess Mormons aren't explicitly anti-television, although they might be against certain things being seen on TV. But it is sort of funny to think of like a Mormon as being the grandfather of television. It's true. And we have oddly run across a modern thing with our bonus show, the inspectors, inspectors from X-Men members, because it wasn't made by Mormons, but it is only available on BYUTV.org.

Right. Because it's appropriate to modern Mormon institutional vibes. Right. I mean, it's funny that it is because, like, well, you can. And they don't know the reason that's funny. Yeah, I mean, yeah, we've really gone in a lot on the, the us piss show, and it's got certain elements to it that make it either through folly or some strange conspiracy does make it seem like there's romantic tension between the, the college-aged son and the mother, which,

you know, you can find out more by listening to our inspectors and specters' podcast. It's truly a joy making it. There's four episodes right now if you sign up, maximum fun. org slash join. I don't know if I'd call watching it a joy, but making the episode for sure. It's fun. Love it.

Yeah, I only watch it because I get to talk to you about it. Yeah. And we've done an entire mega takeaway about all sorts of technologies. We have another takeaway here about another technology because takeaway number two. The first cathode ray tubes were also the first X-ray machines. Ooh, cool. It turns out that one. early kind of cathode ray tube, which got called a crooks tube after a guy named William Crooks.

Oh, I thought because a bunch of crooks were involved in this tube. Like a hamburger character, but for TVs, like he's made of TVs and he steals TVs and yeah. Yeah. Wait, hamburger, why would you say he's made of TVs? Because hamburger, sorry, hamburgler. It's not made out of hamburgers, Alex, you realize that, right? He's not like made out of hamburgers.

There are certain creatures in the Ronald McDonald extended universe who are, seem to be small hamburgeroid humanoids, which is odd because there's also like fry guys, I think, which, again, is very odd because in this universe, they're also eating like hamburgers and fries, but there's also things that are sort of synecdochies for hamburgers and fries where it's like. Yes. man McChese is made of their products If you look into the Ronald McDonald Extended Universe of Characters It gets Boschian really fast And we don't have time to talk about it You're 100% right

I think I was imagining That he was like dressed in TVs The way the hamburger has like a tie With hamburgers on it I think But then my mind just made his hat A television too I just I don't know It went psychedelic all of a sudden

But you're right The hamburger also, if I might just expound on this, just for a few more moments, he does wear, like, stripes like a prisoner, which I find really interesting in terms of his psychology, because he's not technically in prison yet, but he is committing burglaries. So it's like he's almost, he's sort of, it's like wear the clothes for the job you want, but in this very kind of desolate way because he's resigned himself to prison. rather than a life where he escapes with his precious hamburgers to Tijuana. You're right. And clearly our guy wants to get caught. You know what I mean? Right.

Like this is what he's into. It's a cry for help. Anyways. Yeah. This episode's about something completely different. I'm really sorry. Maybe we'll have an episode on McDonald's and then we can really get into it. Wow.

I wonder if McDonald's. is SIF or OIF, you know? I'm going to have to sit and think about it. OIF. I go either way. Yeah, like bonus show stuff. Like obviously incredibly fascinating. Yeah.

It does sound a little bit like a GI movement. But let's get back to what this episode was about. Speaking of body horror, the first X-ray terrified its subject. But it was made from a cathode ray tube type machine. Yeah. And the key sources here are digital resources from the London Science Museum, and then a feature for Atlas Obscura by Kelsey Kennedy. And this comes from the very beginnings of both vacuum tubes and electronics. Because before people are making images with vacuum tubes, and again, a cathode ray tube is a vacuum tube, they needed to come up with electronic vacuum tubes in the first place.

And we think there's kind of two people to do it first, because in 1869, a German physicist named Johann Hittroth sent electron through a vacuum tube. But my sources say he didn't quite understand what was happening. He just recorded that something was happening. And then in 1874, five years later, a British chemist and physicist named William Crooks prototyped a vacuum tube for experimental research. and, like, understood the electrons being sent through it, and they discovered cathode rays in general. Cathode rays are basically one classification of X-rays and other radiation, and electrons being sent through a tube.

Mm-hmm. Okay. And also Crooks' tube got named after him, partly because he was already world-famous. A decade earlier, he discovered a chemical element called Valium. He developed some of the first spectroscopes where you measure light. So he was already a hugely famous scientist in the British Empire. And when he developed this tube, people were like, of course, the Crooks Tube, sure. He was already on the front cover of Curious Findings Monthly.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, whatever magazine Jules Verne and H.G. Wells read all the time. He was on the front. Yeah. Right. And so with Crooks Tubes, people proceed to create two kinds of pictures. and one is the cathode ray tubes for electronic images that we've been talking about, stuff like oscilloscopes. The other image is x-ray images.

And the first one was the use that we use for it medically today to see bones inside of a person. And it was an accident. Oh, uh-oh. Yeah. Because in 1895, a German physicist named Wilhelm Runken accidentally invasement. the medical type of x-ray images. Ranken was terrified of the result because he wasn't trying to do that. His goal was to just play with a crooks tube and sent the beam against a piece of aluminum,

and that let him reflect the rays onto other surfaces. And then when he tried reflecting it onto various surfaces, some of them lit up. And he said, there's got to be rays in this besides what we think of as cathode rays. and because he found that mysterious, he named them x-rays because the letter X had a mysterious vibe. And there's a whole pass-f about the letter X talking about that. And Saren plays with these X-rays. Along the way, later, he learns that the radiation is dangerous if you're repeatedly exposed to it. Which is why today you might wear like a lead apron if you're getting an x-ray, right?

Makes sense. Right. Yeah. But as he's experimenting with this, he gets a. obsessed. He spends several weeks just in the lab with his wife bringing him some food sometimes. And he was stunned that when he would put x-rays through different kinds of photographic plates and with different objects in front of the photographic plate, the rays would either go through to make a picture or not go through to make a picture. So that was his big interest, was like, why does this only document some kinds of matter and not other matter?

Right, right. Because if an x-ray just completely went through everything, you wouldn't get any image because, like, you wouldn't get to see the bones because it'd be going through the bones as well. Yes. And then one day when his wife brought him yet another round of food, because it's a very patriarchal situation. He's the scientist. She's the food bringer. Right. One day when she brings in the food, he says, hey, stop, put your hand in front of this extra. ray thingy and on top of a photographic plate, right? Like, you have a hand. We can do that. Yeah.

All around the machine over here. Wives do usually have hands. Not always. Let's not be exclusionary here, but, you know, they usually do. I forget the topic. There was a recent episode where we talked about pregnant ladies losing their hands and just becoming tubes. That's right.

Well, it's like, no, it's that pregnant women can't be phone operators. So they, because, like, their arms fall off when they get pregnant. So they can't do phone operators. anymore. That's right. Yeah, yeah. And that's, it's a good idea to do it to your wife. Right, your beloved spouse.

Your beloved wife, like, this has never been tested on humans before, wife. Right, right. The result is what all of us in the modern era think of as an x-ray. He got an x-ray every hand. You see the bones. Great. Yeah. Can I just say from this x-ray, it's got a hot wife.

She's pretty hot. On my end, I got sirens right when you said that. It's as if the police are upset. They're upset about bones perverts. So, yeah, it's just some finger bones is what you can see in this image. And interestingly, a ring. Yeah, and they happen to use her hand with the ring, the wedding ring. And so that's a big blob, you know, kind of shape.

To us, it's an x-ray. To them, it's a terrifying thing no one had ever seen before. It's monsters. Right. And allegedly, like the legend of this is that his wife saw this and said, quote, I have seen my death and then refused to ever enter his laboratory ever again for any reason. I feel like it might be apocryphal, but of her like saying that, it could be that she never enters his lab again because it's like, you just showed me my own skeleton. I'm not bringing you more food. this feels real as a legend yeah right and then also renkin kept experimenting on it and by 1901 he won a Nobel Prize for you know this incredibly useful technology for all sorts of things and his wife won a slightly increased chance of cancer in her hand yeah exactly like it's it's just one she's fine and folks can google the danger of x-rays it's worth it for checking your medical stuff but but it's it's truly strange

It's repeated exposure that does it. Cathode ray tubes are not just important in the history of TV. They, before that, invented something arguably more important, medical technology that helps us all. And also people may not know that any cathode ray tube TV they've ever bought. If your country or governments have any kind of regulations, that TV is shielded so that the radiation of the cathode rays cannot impact you. But there is electrons and radiation going on.

there and it's also part of why it's so heavy they have to shield it so when my mom was like don't put your face too close to the TV she was trying to deprive me of that precious precious radiation yeah you would be a fantastic for right now mm-hmm damn it you'd gotten to do that damn it I think my power would be my arms being able to fall off but also be popped back on that's very funny and I have more sirens, sorry. That's okay. I'll keep explaining my power, which is that the arms would be able to fall off and I could put them back on, but also the arm could still move around

and kind of like crawl around independently, except I'm controlling them. So I'm like, I can pop off my arm, throw it at a bad guy, and then have the arm kind of like wrap itself around it and kind of smack the bad guy, while my other arm is like going towards the doomsday device and deactivating it. I'm not sure what my torso is doing at this time. You're a tube at that point, I think, yeah. Well, no, because I've got legs so I can kick stuff. Okay, a kick tube, yeah, sure.

But my legs don't come off. It's just my arms. Okay. Well, folks, that's Katie's superhero franchise and two takeaways, tons of numbers. We're going to take a quick break, then have a few more takeaways about, more cathode ray tubes and the whole rest of our lives. Wow. Folks, we're back and we have a couple more takeaways about cathode ray tubes you wouldn't expect,

starting with takeaway number three. The technological step before video games was a cathode ray tube. puzzle toy. Ooh. I like puzzles. It's often left off of video game history because the machine doesn't quite qualify as a game, like in the way video games are. But it was pretty much a puzzle of pointing a cathode ray tube at targets was the immediate

predecessor of video games. Whoa. Okay. It's cool. Right. So what is sort of the puzzle? Didn't really have a name or even my name. of a concept, but the targets looked like little airplanes.

When inventor Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. created this. Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. filed a patent for the cathode ray tube amusement device. Ah, nice. He didn't even need to differentiate it from other games because there weren't any. Right. This is the only amusement device. You can't find another one anywhere. Yeah, the cathode ray tube amusement device, period. Right. Yeah. And KeySource here, it's a wonderful feature for popular mechanics is by writer Matt Blitz. And I'm also going to link the past SIF episode about video game controllers because it talks about like a next step that is more definable as a video game. An atomic scientist named William Higginbotham built a game called Tennis for Two in 1958. There was another program called Space War built at MIT in 1961. Those both have like the interaction of a video game.

where the game is doing something rather than just presenting preordained targets. Right. So what was your goal with these planes? You just hit each of them and then you're done. Oh. I feel like I would, I feel like I could nail this puzzle, Alex. I think I could solve this puzzle really good. Yeah, I keep thinking of like jigsaw puzzles.

Like you just build it and then it's done. Right. It's that level of gameplay. That's why it's not quite a video game. Well, Alex, jigsaw puzzles do need to be like fit together. You have to kind of match things based on the image printed on the pieces and the shape of the pieces. This kind of seems more like you point a thing at a little still image of a plane and it blinks out of existence. And you do that several more times and then puzzle completed.

True. Yeah, it's the opposite that way. Okay. So it's not really a puzzle than is it, Alex. Yeah, basically, the entire challenge is turning knobs to manipulate the position of a beam. Okay. So you need to have a little bit of dexterity. But it's true, you're not like solving, solving a mystery of where pieces go. I just don't think if you hand an etch a sketch to someone and you're like, solve this puzzle, they're going to know what you're talking about. Yeah. Puzzle is kind of right and wrong for this, huh? Yeah. Right.

And also, a patent claim that you need to make the beam's path depart from a straight line, quote, so as to require an increased amount of skill and care, end quote. But you're right, it's like how an etchice sketch you need to be decent at drawing to draw something, you know, yeah. Right, right. And the one other way this is a lot like a video game is it sort of invented the arcade cabinet. Like this was a huge contraption mounted in sort of a closet. Basically one giant cathode ray tube with one pattern built into it and basically an arcade cabinet. So that's fun. Right. Called plane game.

Not even. It's cathode ray tube amusement device. It's so basic. Are you amused? Yes. It's the same logic as like, why is a strong. man at the carnival entertaining because he is a strong man that's it right there's not more yeah i feel like this is a i feel like this is a game built for cats who like who like really like to just like

sit on a desk and then push an object off the side of the desk until it's gone so like i think they'd be super into this yeah right you push it off and it's complete and you're like why did you do that Yeah. For amusement. The entire reason this game exists is the other developments happening with cathode ray tubes in its era. Because this game is from 1947, so shortly after World War II. And Thomas Goldsmith, Jr., built this basically in between his real job of advancing TV tech and advancing radar tech. Hmm.

He also, he got into electronics for very sweet reasons. He was born in 1910, and then when he was 10 years old, so he's a real Farnsworth, he got into this really young. When he was 10 years old, he taught himself enough electronics to build a sound amplification device because his grandmother was hard of hearing. So he was trying to help his grandma. That's very sweet. Yeah, this was old-timey enough that his grandma had an ear trumpet. I remember those from cartoons. Yeah, it was real. Not from real life.

At the time. And it worked well enough that she used it. Nice. Then he was so passionate about electronics that he was just like building a bunch of things for the joy of it. And then at one point he reached out to one of the earliest television companies. It was a business called Dumont. They're not from our lifetimes, but a generation or two earlier. They were a major TV maker.

He reached out to Dumont because he had like one technical quest. He just wondered if someone would be nice to him. And his letter was so impressive, they replied to hire him as their head of research. They were like, you were incredibly advanced. How old was he at this time? He was in his 20s, yeah. Okay. This isn't like Young Sheldon or something where he's coming in and 10-year-old running the place, chewing on candy cigars.

It would be fun if then he had a boss baby as his boss. That'd be great. Yeah. Just increasing use up the chain. I'm always trying to think of potential boss baby scenarios. Yeah, like he, in his 20s is helping Dumont win prizes at World's Fares. Wow. For being the leader in technological innovation in TVs, which is especially amazing because

they're not Farnsworth Orr's Vorrekin's employer, right? Like, they're doing amazing stuff. Mm-hmm. And then when World War II starts, Dumont switches their production over to better and better military radar systems for the U.S. military. Right. Because radar also, the displays were cathode ray tubes, was a whole nother use. As this guy becomes a leader in developing TV and radar, once the war ends, he has a little

less pressure and a little more free time and just builds this amusement device basically for fun. Right. And according to Alex Magoon, who's a historian at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, quote, there's no computer, no microprocessing. are generating random airplane paths. They're just sticking targets on the picture tube and then using a couple of controls to try to guide an electron beam.

In that respect, it is not a fully developed technology by any means, end quote. So basically, he invented the visual medium that video games would later add computers and a more interactive element to. Right. It's still pretty good because the concept is there. It's just you need more steps before you get to incredible games, like, such as Frogger or Final Fantasy 4. If Thomas Goldsmith Jr. had had more of the game elements and computing stuff available, he might have done the last step. Cathode ray tubes are truly a technology of seeing in such a fundamental way.

and so that's why he invented seeing a video game, kind of before he invented video games. Right. I mean, you got to see him to play them, usually. Oddly, we have one last takeaway for the main episode that zags from all that. Ooh. Because takeaway number four,

cathode ray tubes were an early storage medium for computer data. Oh. These were tubes nobody's looking at. So not even for displaying things, just for storing data. Yes. Yeah, they did that first, which is weird. Oh. And the key source here is an amazing piece for TDM.com.

It's by Ernie Smith, who created that wonderful website, TDM.com. And also citing Megan Prelinger's book here. Because that same year, 1947, when Thomas Goldsmith, Jr. is making a visual version of what's later a video game. In Britain, two scientists are turning cathode ray tubes into computer data storage. I keep wanting to call it a hard drive, but it's distinct technology, but it's for storing data on a computer. Right. But you're not, so you're not looking at anything.

I'm trying to kind of figure out how you might use it for data storage, because like you have this electron beam, you're shooting at a thing. So how is that storing it? is there still any kind of element of a display or is it just hitting some other kind of surface that is receiving this electron beam? Just as it's basically turning data into something that is visual in a way only a computer can read. Oh, interesting.

And then another part of the computer reads that like optically almost. It's very hard to describe. Okay. And the two scientists are Frederick C. Williams and Tom Kilburn. They were working at a British lab called the Telecommunications Research Establishment and had similar jobs to Goldsmith. They had been developing radar tech for the British military in World War II. Then after the war, they said, what else can we do?

They made an electrostatic tube that later became called a Williams Kilburn tube after their names. And in like a television's cathode ray tube screen, the face is received. electrons to make pictures for the human eye. In a Williams-Kilburn tube, the face is receiving electrons that are only readable as computer data. And then the tube repeatedly refreshes the image of that data in order to constantly store it. Oh, interesting. And this was both revolutionary and broke all the time. Right.

That's what I've been. called before in my 20s. Right. It's like what an innovative musician is busking. Revolutionary, but broke all the time. So later people developed what's called magnetic core memory, and the name hard drive more applies to that. This is a much less reliable system that was also developed a decade earlier, and so people

would build computers with these tubes and also other ideas for storing memory in order to try to increase the amount of memory they could store and also back up the Williams Kilburn tubes because you're basically refreshing a picture of data on incredibly early versions of cathode ray tubes all the time. And so each time you refresh it, it could break, and then it broke a lot. I see. Okay. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it doesn't seem, it's. It's a clever idea, but it doesn't seem super efficient. Yeah. And so it basically supported about 10 years of computer development by increasing their capacity

for data in a way that people also immediately wanted to move beyond. Right. And apparently engineers at MIT developed magnetic core memory in 1953. It wasn't common until the late 50s. but most of our computing advances from 1947 to around 1957 depended on this really weird version of like a TV that a computer shows itself. Mm-hmm. Right. And that's incredibly weird. I love it.

It's like a telenovela for a computer. Oh. That electron's being played by a different electron lady. Hey. Right. It gets amnesia all the time. It's perfect. Folks, that is the main episode for this week.

Welcome to the outro with fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode with a run back through the big takeaways. Mega takeaway number one, cathode ray tubes are only one origin of television. Takeaway number two, the first cathode ray tubes were also the first X-ray machines. Takeaway number three, the technological step before video games was a cathode ray tube puzzle toy in an arcade-style cabinet. Takeaway number four, cathode ray tubes were an early storage medium for computer data. And then lots of stats and numbers, especially within that first mega takeaway, it's about the entire timeline of this technology, also the persistence of vision and human eyes, the extraordinarily young ages of many other people developing this, and more. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode, because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at maximum fun. on.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists, so members get a bonus show every week where

we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is two ways old cathode ray tube TVs amazed the modern world, a tech thing and an art thing. Visit sifpod.fod.fund for that bonus show for a library of more than 21 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows and a cattle of all sorts of max fun bonus shows. It's special audio. It's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at maximum fun.org. Key sources this week include an amazing book called Inside the Machine, Art and Invention in the Electronic Age. That's by Megan Prelinger, who's a co-founder of the

Prelinger Library in San Francisco. Also a ton of digital resources from museums and scientific centers, including MIT and the Lemelson Center there, the Linda Hall Science Library in Kansas City, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, and then tons of excellent digital writing from writer Kelsey Kennedy at Atlas Obscira, from writer Ernie Smith at TDM.com, from writer Danny Robb at JSTOR Daily, and more. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenape Hoking, the traditional land of the Muncie-Lanape people, and the Wappinger people,

as well as the Mohican people, Skategoke people, and others. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode and join the free SIF Discord. where we're sharing stories and resources about native people in life, there is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord.

We're also talking about this episode on the Discord. And hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 228. That's about the topic of computer mice. Fun fact there, the two leading designs for what became the computer mouse where something you operate with your hand

and something you operate under the table with your knee. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast Creature Feature about animals, science, and more. Our theme music is Unbroken Unshavened by the Boodos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Sousa for audio mastering on this episode. Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support.

Extra extra special thanks go to our members. And thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. A worker-owned network of artists-owned shows supported directly by you.