Rewriting the History of Television: An Interview with Doron Galili (Part Two)

You write, “Significantly, they [“the electricians, physicists, telegraph technicians, and engineers” invested in developing television] worked in almost complete isolation from the lanternists, photographers, opticians, mechanics, chemists and showmen who were to become the pioneers of cinema.” Why? What were the consequences of this isolation? 

One of the main things that I was curious about as I started this project was the simultaneous emergence of cinema and television. As technological histories show us, the origins of both animated photography and moving image transmission can be traced back to the 1870s and 1880s, and I was fascinated by the fact that although we typically think of television as a twentieth-century post-cinematic cultural phenomenon, it shares the same historical origins as cinema. Hence, early on in my research, I was looking for historical materials that could give an idea about how the projects of developing cinematic and transmission technologies had intersected in their very first years. To my surprise, what I found in popular and scientific magazines suggested rather that the professional circles that mobilized the respective two projects hardly overlapped at all and had very limited exchanges. 

On the most basic level, the distinction is simply on a professional basis. On the one hand, the challenge of realizing image transmission devices was primarily an electrical engineering enterprise; on the other, the pioneers of projected animated pictures, fromEadweard Muybridge and Émile Reynaud to the Lumière brothers, came from the fields of photography, optics, projection, and experimentations with vision.

In terms of media practices, too, the conception of television as a visual variant of the telephone placed it in a different realm from the popular spectacle context of early cinema. Yet this separated manner in which the two moving image media were originally conceived seems to me to hold a deeper significance to media historiography. It requires us to revise the old story about the origins of the moving image and acknowledge that parallel to the lineage of the so-called pre-cinematic toys and lantern shows ran a completely different historical trajectory of developing moving image media within the context of electrical telecommunications.

You suggest the two media give us an opportunity to revise older distinctions between storage and transmission media. How so?

The distinction between the fundamental technological affordances of recording and transmission is quintessential in media theory. Versions of it may be found in canonical texts such as Harold Innin's work on forms of writing, James Carey’s famous article on the telegraph, or McLuhan’s media metaphors of the nervous system. William Uricchio has demonstrated how this distinction is key in defining the ontological difference between film and television, which he influentially described as technologies of storage and simultaneity, respectively. However, the more I read into the early history of television and its relation to cinema, I felt that this distinction risks distracting us from crucial overlaps and cross-influences in the history of the moving image.

To be clear, I am not trying to suggest the distinction is wrong – but I find that in several important historical moments in their development the two media were not necessarily thought of as distinct. It is easy for us today to think of technological amalgamations in the form of VCR or TiVo, two technological forms that certainly trouble the binary opposition or recording/transmission. Likewise, it has become clear that today’s digital media operations such as buffering make it hard to draw a line between recording and transmission. But looking at the early history of moving image media, we see that recording and transmission were not taken to be mutually exclusive long before existing media technologies were combined into single multimedia systems. 

Overlaps and amalgamations were actually fundamental in thinking about the prospects of both film and television from their very beginning. Let us recall that hybrids of recording and transmission media existed before the first experiments with moving image transmission. Most important among those is probably Morse’s contribution to communication media, which was fundamentally a combination of telegraphic transmission with a writing mechanism. In similar fashion, some technicians speculated as early as the 1890s about combining televisual technologies with photographic devices, suggesting that they could produce records of transmitted moving images. During the same period, many commentators wrote about innovations in the field of moving image transmission not necessarily as marking the emergence of a new medium but simply as an inevitable future formation of film.

Furthermore, when the first prototypes of television were in place in the 1920s, film proved to be a crucial component in transmission systems. The earliest broadcasts carried by American experimental television stations consisted of filmed footage, that better suited the slow speed of the scanning devices

Thus, even if the differences between storage and transmission were self-evident from the start, the boundaries appeared quite flexible. This is important to note not only because it allows us to sketch a richer historical narrative of media configurations and transformations but also because it throws in question some of our most basic definitions of medium-specific traits.

Television became associated with liveness, largely contra the filmic mummification of time, not because of essential attributes of the medium, but because of discursive, intermedial, and institutional conditions that actually came into being at a fairly late state in the history of moving image transmission. 

Science fiction was taking shape alongside these fantasies (utopian and dystopian) of communication across distance. No wonder that Hugo Gernsback, considered the father of American science fiction, was also associated with the amateur radio movement and popular technoculture more generally. What might you tell us about the relationship between emerging technology and emerging genres in this instance? 

Indeed, the first ideas about the electrical transmission of moving images coincided with the rise of the science fiction genre in the late nineteenth century. Numerous sci-fi stories from the period my book covers speculated on future worlds and new formations of technologized environments and social realities in whic htelevisual devices are ubiquitous. Over the years, the genre came to play an important role in popularizing the idea of television, and I suspect that by the beginning of the twentieth century the reading public considered moving image transmission not as a fantasy but as an inevitable and imminent development in modern media technology.

I am interested in the early fictional depictions, therefore, not as prophecies that got the future of media correctly or incorrectly, but rather as commentaries on their own time. Imaginary scenarios about telectroscopes and telephonoscopes – whether they allow for long distance communication, the viewing of operas from afar, or tyrannical panopticon-like surveillance – reveal something about the period’s attitudes towards modernization and technology’s increasing impact on all aspects of everyday life. It is fascinating in particular to see how the early science fiction writers anticipatedby several decades of theoretical discourses on the power of technologically-mediated gaze, the globalization of cultural production, and surveillance and political control. 

            There are, to be sure, fundamental similarities between how fiction writers and inventors approach media technologies. Much like how science fiction authors speculate on the traits of future technologies, the engineers and technicians who develop new media forms also work with an imaginary configuration in mind (sociologists of technology call it “technological imaginary”). In some cases, we can trace direct lines of influence between fictional depictions and technical developments, as imaginary depictions may very well become one of the sources for ideas that inspire technicians’ experimentations. For example, when John Perry and W. E. Ayrton published their design for a system of “seeing by telegraphy” in 1880 they noted that the inspiration came from the now classic 1878 cartoon of the “telephonoscope” from Punch magazine. 

            Hugo Gernsback is a wonderful example for how imaginary forms of television coexisted in the realms of technology and of fictional writings. His radio station WRNY started operating experimental television broadcasts as early as 1928.

But Gernsback had been interested in television – both as a technology and a fictional trope –for two decades by that point. The various magazines that he published offered information about electrical technologies as well as science fiction stories – sometimes in the very same volume. As early as in December 1909, he published a survey of the state of the art in television development in Modern Electric In 1911, his science fiction serial (that was eventually published as a novel) Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660, depicted several different moving image transmission devices including ones for point to point communication and for theatrical display.

Gernsback continued to write on the topic and to revise his views on the future of the medium way into the 1930s, amassing an oeuvre that uniquely chronicles the dynamic changes in concepts of television. (The Perversity of Things, a volume of Gernsback’s works edited by Grant Wythoff, includes a lot of his fascinating works on television).

Reading this book at the current moment, how might we understand the increased popularity of Zoom to these older fantasies about point-to-point audiovisual connection across geographic distances?

This is a very good question, because the book came out in February 2020, the eve of the Covid-19 pandemic, which meant that the backdrop of current conversations about transmitted images abruptly shifted. When I thought about current changes in television as I was finishing the book, what mostly came to mind was the increasingly important place that streaming services have been occupying in our mediascape. Soon afterwards, though, for many of us the predominant form of moving image experience has become video-conferencing platforms like Zoom. This certainly brings to mind the earliest ideas about televisual communication when, long before the idea of broadcasting came up, the medium was conceived as a visual variant of point-to-point telephony. It might be tempting, therefore, to see our present as a return to the “original” or “true” essence of the medium

But we ought to be careful about making such broad historiographic claims, and so I find myself rather thinking of today’s shifts in media uses in the context of the dialectical relationship between physical distance and media. Simply put, even if the function of telecommunications media remains more or less the same – that is, enabling virtually instantaneous communication at a distance – the cultural meanings of distance and the social functions of audiovisual transmission keep changing. 

As I show in the book, the initial conceptions of seeing at a distance in the late nineteenth century were intimately linked to colonialism, the formation of global capitalist markets, massive migration, and new forms of transportation. Think, for example, of the common statement about “the annihilation of space and time.” This trope was not coined in order to describe telecommunications (it referred earlier on to God as well as to capital), but the coming of telegraphy and its offshoots certainly appeared to fulfill the desires for total speed and unlimited territorial expansion.

Frequently, nineteenth-century fictional depictions of television illustrated how the technology could link the European imperial centers with distant colonies and allow the middle classes to take full advantage of market and entertainment opportunities worldwide. This notion has been somewhat revised in the twentieth century. I found a brilliant magazine article from 1912, where the author complains about the crowded streets and jammed roads of modern metropolitans, suggesting that electrical technology can resolve such annoyances by allowing most work to be done from home without requiring excessive commute and face to face interactions. Isn’t this kind of thinking neatly applicable to today’s experience?

Today, given the pandemic, closeness rather than distance has become a problem, and as our societies seek technological solutions, the media forms that were famed for annihilating space are now used to literally give us some space. So whereas there are striking similarities between how we today conduct faculty meetings via zoom and how, for example, journalists in the 1892 novel The Twentieth Century report the news to their editors via portable telectroscopes, I am tempted to say that these similarities actually highlight the changes in the very conceptual framework in which we use media. Media can both cancel the distance between people and allow to expand it, and distance itself can be either a problem or a solution.