"R. A. Lafferty - Stories 5" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lafferty R A)

very poor due to the "slow light" characteristics of selenium response and the
lack of amplification. There were, however, several men in the United States
who transmitted a sort of television before Nipkow did so in Germany.
Resolution of the images of these even earlier experimenters in the
field (Aurelian Bentley, Jessy Polk, Samuel J. Perry, Gifford Hudgeons) was
even poorer than was the case with Nipkow. Indeed, none of these pre-Nipkow
inventors in the television field is worthy of much attention, except Bentley.
And the interest in Bentley is in the content of his transmissions and not in
his technical ineptitude.
It is not our object to enter into the argument of who really did first
"invent" television (it was not Paul Nipkow, and it probably was not Aurelian
Bentley or Jessy Polk either); our object is to examine some of the earliest
true television dramas in their own queer "slow light" context. And the first
of those "slow light" or selenium ("moonshine") dramas were put together by
Aurelian Bentley in the year ]873.
The earliest art in a new field is always the freshest and is often the
best. Homer composed the first and freshest, and probably the best, epic
poetry. Whatever cave man did the first painting, it remains among the
freshest as well as the best paintings ever done. Aeschylus composed the first
and best tragic dramas, Euclid invented the first and best of the artful
mathematics (we speak here of mathematics as an art without being concerned
with its accuracy or practicality). And it may be that Aurelian Bentley
produced the best of all television dramas in spite of their primitive aspect.
Bentley's television enterprise was not very successful despite his fee
of one thousand dollars per day for each subscriber. In his heyday (or his
hey-month, November of 1873), Bentley had fifty-nine subscribers in New York
City, seventeen in Boston, fourteen in Philadelphia, and one in Hoboken. This
gave him an income of ninety-one thousand dollars a day (which would be the
equivalent of about a million dollars a day in today's terms), but Bentley was
extravagant and prodigal, and he always insisted that he had expenses that the
world wotted not of. In any case, Bentley was broke and out of business by the
beginning of the year 1874. He was also dead by that time.
The only things surviving from The Wonderful World of Aurelian Bentley
are thirteen of the "slow light" dramas, the master projector, and nineteen of
the old television receivers. There are probably others of the receivers
around somewhere, and person coming onto them might not know what they are
for. They do not look much like the television sets of later years.
The one we use for playing the old dramas is a good kerosene powered
model which we found and bought for eighteen dollars two years ago. If the old
sets are ever properly identified and become collectors' items, the price on
them may double or even triple. We told the owner of the antique that it was a
chestnut roaster, and with a proper rack installed it could likely be made to
serve as that.
We bought the master projector for twenty-six dollars. We told the owner
of that monster that it was a chicken incubator. The thirteen dramas in their
canisters we had for thirty-nine dollars total. We had to add formaldehyde to
activate the dramas, however, and we had to add it to both the projector and
the receiver; the formaldehyde itself came to fifty-two dollars. I discovered
soon that the canisters with their dramas were not really needed, not was the
master projector. The receiver itself would repeat everything that it had ever