At least half a century has passed since the Soviet people for the most part "mastered" regular TV shows. Today, our life without a TV is simply unthinkable.

The idea of transmitting images (or, as they sometimes say, "visual information") over a distance has long excited the minds of scientists, engineers, and even writers. The poet V. Bryusov, for example, has the lines:"...talking to our friends, we activated our home telekinema and were happy to see the faces of those we were talking to, or sometimes we admired the ballet in the same device " (Bryusov V. Ya. Vosstanie mashin (1908) / / Literaturnoe nasledstvo, Moscow, 1976, vol. 85; italics nash. - A. Sh.). The device named by the author is something like our videophone or VCR.

One of the first people in Russia to have a real idea of image transmission was an electrical engineer named P. I. Bakhmetyev. In the mid-1880s, he proposed his own apparatus, the telephotograph, "which could serve for our eyes what the telephone does for the ear" (Electricity. 1885. N 1). The model of this device is considered to be the prototype of modern television.

The term television itself appeared in Russian a hundred years ago. At the International Electrotechnical Congress in Paris (August 1900), Captain K. D. Persky, an electrical engineer, read a paper entitled "Television with electricity". The new word was formed by him according to the model that already existed in the language: telescope (long-range vision), telegraph (long-range writing), telephone (long-distance learning), i.e. the transmission of "sight", text, sound at a distance (tele - Greek. "far, far away"). A science fiction writer at the end of the XIX century even came up with a TV newspaper.

page 113

So, the hero of one of his novels is afraid to catch "the key of the morning and evening phonographic TV newspaper" (Robida A. The twentieth century. Electric life. St. Petersburg, 1894. The image of the newspaper is on page 57). The adjective telegazetny relatively recently flashed through our modern press (Pravda. 1989. 22 Feb.).

Television means: far-sightedness. This (then purely theoretical) neologism of Persky turned out to be extremely successful. With his light hand, over time, he entered all the languages of the world, giving many derived words, which we Russians have a right to be proud of.

However, the actual transmission of images over a distance was still very far away at that time. The founder of modern television was B. L. Rosing, who for a long time worked with Persky in the same department at the Konstantinovsky Artillery School in St. Petersburg. In 1923, he published a pamphlet (reprinted in 1925)" Electric telescoping (vision at a distance)", in which he tried, as we can see, to give the old term telescoping a new meaning. The author described in detail the technical idea of the future (!) long-range vision device, calling it a telescope in the old - fashioned way, but providing a special definition-electric. Rosing also recalled the idea of Bakhmetyev: "The transmission of a set of points in the form of a drawing or photographic image has already been carried out in electric telephotography" (Rosing B. L. Electric Telescope. Pg., 1923).

In that initial, search period, there were other variants of names. For example, a radiotelephot.

In the mid-1920s, the later famous inventor L. S. Theremin worked at the Institute of Physics and Technology under A. F. Ioffe, who offered him the topic of his diploma-"Electrical Foresight", as a result of which in 1926 Theremin invented his "TV" (For more information, see: Russian Thought. 1998. 3-9 Dec.).

First gears (still stationary!) The repairs were completed only in the fall of 1931. Then the Moscow newspapers gave such advertising: "Look out! Watch this! Transmits Moscow! (...) images are being broadcast (television). Tune in to the 379-meter wave! Watch this! Transmits Moscow!" (cit. po: True. 1981. 28 Aug.). Experimental transmission of moving images began a year later: "Yesterday, the opening of the television studio at the Leningrad Radio Center took place" (Evening Red Newspaper. 1932. May 3). But this was not yet a TV show in our understanding. The first" real " television program with sound accompaniment took place in Moscow on November 15, 1934. At the same time, the name of the video receiver - TV (the same issue of Krasnaya Gazeta) - also entered the language circulation. This device "in Russian should be called a far-sighted" (Zvezda. 2000. N 7) or farsighted. But we've already gotten used to the source code.

page 114

One of the experimental domestic TV installations was demonstrated in February 1935, and only in 1936 did broadcasts from the Moscow radio center (Ogonyok. 1936. N 22), which soon received the appropriate name-TV center (Technique-youth. 1937. N 9). And in July 1938, the Leningrad television center began broadcasting. At the same time, in the Leningrad Alexander Garden, a special pavilion (like a summer cinema) "TV" was even built, where the first public session of the TV program was shown, something like a movie show. The image quality on the small screen was, of course, very modest, and few people could really see anything from a long distance. But it was a true miracle of technology, and people remembered it.

And then the war broke out. It was only in 1947 that the Leningrad television center resumed its broadcasts. Contemporaries were then struck by the direct, out-of-studio transmission of the May Day parade from Palace Square... That's how TV came into our everyday life, life without which today is impossible to imagine. But at the same time, we should not forget about the "philological" merit of K. P. Persky.

Saint-Petersburg

Permanent link to this publication: