That is IMMENSE. Such an ambitious project at the time. I wonder what they used to switch between the messages. I'd guess a drum with pins on contacts.
Love it. I often have said that we do not give enough credit to the engineers of the past. The complex things they created with the technology they had at the time is just amazing. And, to do the calculations using a slide rule? They created the baselines we use today. No one today would call Wilbur & Orville Wright's airplane cutting edge technology but for their time, and for their creation of a wind-tunnel to test their designs? Brilliant. Aeronautical engineers today know that airplanes fly. For them, it is just a "how do we best do this?" For Wilbur & Orville, it was, "can this be done at all?" So, "a tip of the hat" to Mr. Rice and his sign. No pun intended, but "brilliant!"
Yeah, this holds even as you go even further back in the past, like how the Banū Mūsā brothers made water powered automatons around the year 850 in Baghdad, or how the ancient Greeks had the Antikythera mechanism, a sort of analog computer to help with navigation on ships. This is only some of the stuff we know about, who know what kind of cool inventions have existed for way longer than we think.
Well... Elon Musk are gonna try to do the belly flip manouver... which have never been done. Granted you can make a fighter jet make a 90 degree angle no problem flying up in the sky... but doing the same and suddenly dropping down without power... nope... And Elon is gonna do it with ROCKETS...
I wonder if we could ever easily replicate the mechanical calculators of that day and age. I have a Monroematic 8N-213 calculator that I restored. Videos on my UA-cam channel of it. I find it a very fascinating and complex device and commend the engineers that designed the thing.
Fran, gosh you really took my breath away with this. I grew up with my Grandfathers view on the world a man from 1899 my parents were at work. The stories he told me about how Egypt once looked and so many things that didn't make sense. We grew our own crystals from sugar in a milk bottle and made a crystal radio out of aluminum wrap and wax paper wrapped around toilet rolls. Thanks so much for the effort you put into these.
My grandfather was a young boy when this sign was erected and when I was a young boy in the late 50s early 60s he spoke in awe of what an amazing spectacle that sign was to then.
That sign is mind blowing! What a shame it was destroyed by a storm. I agree - film footage would have been - literally - out of this world. Mr. Rice was an incredible visionary. Thank you Fran for bringing this to us.
Interesting that the "W" is different between the "Welcome Home Col. Roosevelt" 4:51 and the "Porosknit" 4:43 displays. I guess with 42 characters, they had a few options for some of them.
@@rogerrabt given how different the Porosknit part of the image is to the rest, it looks like a before-built marketing paste-up to help sell interest in it with other companies
I agree, that is not a bad monospace font they ended up with. I wonder if someone has emulated it somewhere on one of the font sites already Wow that description actually helped me visualize it. That thing would be awesome to see even today.
I clicked "Play," watched the Bina-View opener but heard nothing, and said, "Oh crap, let me turn the stereo on and restart the video!" Thank you for bringing us this gem. It's amazing to see how they accomplished so much over a _century_ ago, and even by today's standards this display is truly an engineering marvel. The alphanumeric display is astounding in its clarity; they were way ahead of their time! I'd have loved to be around to sit and observe the brainstorming behind it. So sad that it was destroyed in our rough New England winters.
Cool stuff! Cutting edge in many ways. I'll bet the sequencing motors/switches were scary loud and likely rather sparky! And much fun changing bulbs! Thanks, Fran.
It is incredible, you would expect the first display sign to be small and dim but this looks epic. I really want to know how all these "switches" worked.
Absolutely Excellent work Fran . It did strike me that they could have possibly used Strowger switches (invented 1888 according to Wikipedia) with plug boards to program the character display. I came accross them used as a clock in some "Old" Elliot Automation gear in ~1980 used to print time data on a printer as part of a batch weighing system. It was "interesting :-)" to interface to that and the 50v valve (thermionic tube) logicof the various weight sensors to a "modern" Z80 system as part of the job to replace the ailing original electromechanical printer with a new serial device. Again thanks for all the work from Fran to put this Video together
Of course I can't find it now, but I saw an old 1950s film explaining how the scrolling "zipper" sign on an advertising display worked... punched paper tape over an array of contacts...one per bulb! They even showed the special typewriter-like machine that created the paper tape to program the display.
@@christianelzey9703 Thats the type of thing that really interests me. I love seeing how ingenuitive people can be. Its so boring these days, throw a microprocessor in there and write some python.
@@anonUK no, no, they only do that with life-threatening future plans, not with their archives. Paper Archives are kept in leaking cellars below the water table. Electronic files have made the process of loosing history so much cheaper, no more digging required- , we just put them on the city hall tower, firmly attached to the lightning rod.
Is a lifetime resident of Dayton Ohio it was nice to see some of it's history on your Channel. Even locals kind of forget how much technology came out of Dayton during the last century beside the airplane.
The Dayton Engineering Laboratories Co, which later became Delco Electronics in Kokomo IN, where I worked until we were sold off in 1999 as Delphi. The place became quite unpleasant to work at after that, as Delco it had been a great place to work.
This reminded me of a picture I saw many years ago of the back of a building-scale news ticker display, probably also in New York. a quick search for news ticker found a Wikipedia article mentioning a "motograph" in NY in 1928, and a brief Wired article but can't find much else - would be interesting if you could dig up some more technical info on this
neat vid, & I'm guessing this is similar tech, but the scrolling motograph electric signs are 1 big array, like the Good Year blimp, whereas the chariot race sign appears to have separate independent segments. Without video we may not know if it scrolled the messages or just changed words every 30 seconds. I'm thinking the latter. Remember the good ol' days when sign monkeys could still smoke, 23 stories up, changing lightbulbs?
What a fascinating history! Indeed I had never heard of this sign. Thanks so much for this well documented video! As a son of photographers I am well aware of orthochromatic film. Dad di his own film developing and printing using a red safelight in the darkroom. Old family photos from the 1940s and 1950s all show my mother's red lipstick as dark black! As a child this really creeped me out! Your theory about the horse's legs being flashed neon tubes makes sense. Good call.
I'm working on a theoretical display device, and videos like this help me stay motivated. It's nice to remember that the first 2D LED matrices where also extremely expensive and inefficient, yet still managed to impress the world. I hope my closed meshes of robotic nurbs can do the same.
In so many ways it must have been a hell of a time because of how pioneering a lot of that tech was. Since you mentioned the Wright Brothers I visited the site of the later flights and current park and museum in Kill Devil Hills (their early work was in nearby Kitty Hawk but they moved a little south because the up to 100 foot tall dunes were useful for their glider experiments) and there's what I presume to be a reproduction of one of their wind tunnels and drag vs. lift balance scale installed inside - made from old bicycle spokes and hacksaw blades from their bicycle building business.
Fran, these "documentaries" of yours are fantastic. The first video of yours I watched was the "documentary" on the history of the 45. Also fantastic. Keep up the great work.
Thank you for this. It's amazing stuff. I always thought the separation footage was reproduced, not to fool anyone but to inform them And I never suspected that there would be footage of the fuel flow I love the shutterless strobe camera footage.
Me too! I kinda want to work out how they would have made that type of font. I also feel so sad about that ending. Makes me wonder how much money that is in today's money
Especially considering the low efficiency meaning that it would have produced more heat than light. Possibly the structure was already weakened by thermal cycling when the storm hit it.
I would guess that the sign switching animation technique was similar to a barrel organ mechanism, or several of them probably wth replaceable segments for the alpha-numerics at the top. I really doubt that they had neon tubes, for the road part, probably just series strings of the lower candlepower incandescents. Attempts at highly complex incandescent array based television had been in development around this time too. Far too costly, except as an expiriment. Thanks for filling me in on the date of tungsten lamp developments. When I was a kid, during the mid 1950s, living in a house built in 1900 in Norwich CT, we had one incandescent from far in the past in the incomplete third floor. It took several long seconds to reach full illumination, and had a slip of paper inside the inner filament glass support tube. The patent dates ended at 1917 suggesting it was made just before the coiled tungsten era changed household lamps to something we all grew up with. I wish I had been able to take that old lamp with us when my family moved to California. As it is I now serve as a docent at the Mt, Wilson Observatory whose older electrical devices are all from that era. Original Edison carbon filament lamps still serve as resistive elements for several of the DC motors starting circuits. Modern AC supplied stepping motors replace a lot of them, but 110V DC still is used for a plethora of the other motors and several of the lighting circuits are "push button convenient" operated from DC solenoids on what we affectionately refer to as the "Frankenstein switch board" beneath the floor of the observing level of each dome..
THIS IS JUST AMAZEBALLS, FRAN. So... for the longest time I didn't think giant alphanumeric displays even existed before the 1970's. Think, like, the one on the Family Feud game show. Then, one day a few years ago I was watching some footage of a game at the Astrodome (1960s) and they showed the giant display THERE and I was just BLOWN AWAY! 1965! So now I'm trying to figure out how many "segments" there are on this thing from 1910 or if all the lights are individually controlled...
Had heard of it. My grandad built electric signs in NJ. Neon, electric lamp and fluorescent lights. This was legendary amongst the tradesmen. If the tubes were neon. I did hear that they came to America with several of Clauds glassblowers. They were forbidden to make or teach neon to Americans. They did anyway and for a few years neon was underground till the patents came. Then Claud France sued like crazy.
The sheet metal fences that appear to make up the horses legs (and elsewhere) were also being used in the animated illuminated tableau in Blackpool until well into the bright LED era - if you've never seen one in action it's like an open light pipe. sort of obvious how they work to give you a sharp outline you can fill with light or darkness by switching bulbs on and off... but effective.
The original Fremont Street Experience in Las Vegas was probably the last light bulb project of this magnitude. Each “pixel” of color was represented by 4 bulbs: red, yellow, blue and white; a total of 2.1 million bulbs. A team of bulb techs worked around the clock replacing the burned out lamps. The entire display was replaced with LEDs later.
Interesting video, and even more interesting citation of orthochromatic vs panchromatic. I've known since high school that astronomical filters were historically defined by the photographic emulsions, and that was why B and V were so common. This discussion makes it more obvious that this wasn't just an atmospheric effect attenuating the red/IR, but a physical constraint on how the measurement happened for ~60 years until CCD technology became commonplace.
I agree, the font looks great. If you look at something like a T or an E it looks like they're 7X5 pixels but if you look at an O it looks more like 9X9.
Check out at 3:55 it appears to be 20 segment characters, seems like these would have been used in other applications. The LOC has some footage of T. Roosevelt's return to NYC & speech at battery park on June 18, 1910, but not of the the sign. Supposedly they built 2 other signs, for Dayton & Detroit
some NJ Transit trains have LCD destination signs with many many segments, allowing for rounded corners, true diagonals for X Y Z, etc. My google-fu failed to find the mfgr or trade name for the bare unit. I agree with you, it's amazing that a pioneer went for such complexity early on instead of simplifications such as 5x7 matrix, 14 or 16 segments. It takes time to make something "as simple as possible but no simpler!"
Great job Fran! Never heard of this display before. I didn't see any pixelation in the photos you showed. Was that due to the camera or was there some sort of diffuser over the bulbs? Good thing that it was pre-radio, can you imagine the RFI generated by the sign.
what a pleasant little story! those animated signs of the past were a unique creation.....& the animated electronics were just basic circuit's...It would be interesting 2 know the mathematical formula's 4 these antique circuit schematic's..reminds me of an exhibit that should have been in a museum! it breaks my heart 2 see history like this just disappear!! wonderful video!
Fran: Thanks for this excellent well-researched presentation ! _-_-_-_-_ A few technical comments...s #1 Geissler / Crookes gas-filled bulbs existed 60+ years before this display and were used for commercial signage. Early tubes were quite dim and required high voltage. In 1910 everything was still 110 DC, so their use in very unlikely. _-_-_-_ #2 The practice of "flashing" standard lightbulbs was used in theatre marquees from the very beginning of "display" electric lighting. A very early technique used a resistor in series with the bulb, lighting the bulb to a minimum, but keeping it warm. It was then safe to short-out the resistor, getting to full brightness. This was done via relay contacts across the resistor; doing this rapidly "flashed" the bulb without stressing the filament. _-_-_-_-_ #3 Repeat programming techniques were widely known long before 1910. Early examples include Babbage (drum and platters with pins, derived from earlier music box and automata devices {e.g., see the recent movie Hugo} )
Okay - #1 due to the large motors and currents it was very likely Westinghouse two-phase power, #2 The reported rate of flash exceeds incandescent capabilities, and #3 check out my other videos on that - ua-cam.com/video/Yuw30SCP_98/v-deo.html ua-cam.com/video/Tv5U_fEvrMA/v-deo.html ua-cam.com/video/FK6zCvzG3oQ/v-deo.html
That is IMMENSE. Such an ambitious project at the time. I wonder what they used to switch between the messages. I'd guess a drum with pins on contacts.
Or from the textile industry. weaving machines were electro mechanized at this point.
If anyone would have a good idea of how the sign worked it would be you.
20000 slaves with lists when to switch what?
@@Damien.D : you mean paper punch cards ? Like from the old IBM key punch machines ?
@@Damien.D my thoughts too.
Love it. I often have said that we do not give enough credit to the engineers of the past. The complex things they created with the technology they had at the time is just amazing. And, to do the calculations using a slide rule? They created the baselines we use today. No one today would call Wilbur & Orville Wright's airplane cutting edge technology but for their time, and for their creation of a wind-tunnel to test their designs? Brilliant. Aeronautical engineers today know that airplanes fly. For them, it is just a "how do we best do this?" For Wilbur & Orville, it was, "can this be done at all?" So, "a tip of the hat" to Mr. Rice and his sign. No pun intended, but "brilliant!"
And they could work miracles with a few gears, cams, levers, and cranks.
Yeah, this holds even as you go even further back in the past, like how the Banū Mūsā brothers made water powered automatons around the year 850 in Baghdad, or how the ancient Greeks had the Antikythera mechanism, a sort of analog computer to help with navigation on ships. This is only some of the stuff we know about, who know what kind of cool inventions have existed for way longer than we think.
Well... Elon Musk are gonna try to do the belly flip manouver... which have never been done.
Granted you can make a fighter jet make a 90 degree angle no problem flying up in the sky... but doing the same and suddenly dropping down without power... nope...
And Elon is gonna do it with ROCKETS...
I wonder if we could ever easily replicate the mechanical calculators of that day and age. I have a Monroematic 8N-213 calculator that I restored. Videos on my UA-cam channel of it. I find it a very fascinating and complex device and commend the engineers that designed the thing.
@@phxmark They look really cool, would love to own one, one day.
Fran,
gosh you really took my breath away with this.
I grew up with my Grandfathers view on the world a man from 1899 my parents were at work.
The stories he told me about how Egypt once looked and so many things that didn't make sense.
We grew our own crystals from sugar in a milk bottle and made a crystal radio out of aluminum wrap and wax paper wrapped around toilet rolls.
Thanks so much for the effort you put into these.
My grandfather was a young boy when this sign was erected and when I was a young boy in the late 50s early 60s he spoke in awe of what an amazing spectacle that sign was to then.
I am fascinated. I wish someone would recreate this either in miniature or virtually.
That sign is mind blowing! What a shame it was destroyed by a storm. I agree - film footage would have been - literally - out of this world. Mr. Rice was an incredible visionary. Thank you Fran for bringing this to us.
this is pretty much very first electronic or electromechanic billboard. Fascinating
A great slice of history.👍👍👍👍😀
Wow! Just wow! I'm trying to imagine the effect it would have on someone who didn't even have electricity in their house!
Now _those_ are segments ..... Thanks Fran.
We should make a "Rice Electric" font !!! and try to replicate the look of the segmented letters :-) Who's with me ???
Would be a good video for you
If you need anything let me know good luck
Interesting that the "W" is different between the "Welcome Home Col. Roosevelt" 4:51 and the "Porosknit" 4:43 displays. I guess with 42 characters, they had a few options for some of them.
@@rogerrabt given how different the Porosknit part of the image is to the rest, it looks like a before-built marketing paste-up to help sell interest in it with other companies
I, too, would like to see this font created.
@@user2C47 Maybe I'll create a project on Hackaday.io then.
I agree, that is not a bad monospace font they ended up with. I wonder if someone has emulated it somewhere on one of the font sites already
Wow that description actually helped me visualize it. That thing would be awesome to see even today.
Thanks! Such an interesting story. That was Frantastic!
Great job, Fran. And you're right - I had never heard of this. Thank You.
Thank you Fran for an excellent analysis of the trackbed "flash bulbs" mentioned in the article!
That's incredible tech for the time. Thanks so much for sharing this story, Fran. Just lovely.
I clicked "Play," watched the Bina-View opener but heard nothing, and said, "Oh crap, let me turn the stereo on and restart the video!"
Thank you for bringing us this gem. It's amazing to see how they accomplished so much over a _century_ ago, and even by today's standards this display is truly an engineering marvel. The alphanumeric display is astounding in its clarity; they were way ahead of their time! I'd have loved to be around to sit and observe the brainstorming behind it. So sad that it was destroyed in our rough New England winters.
THANK YOU, Fran. This was a Ken Burns quality historical presentation. I loved every second of it.
Cool stuff! Cutting edge in many ways. I'll bet the sequencing motors/switches were scary loud and likely rather sparky! And much fun changing bulbs! Thanks, Fran.
It is incredible, you would expect the first display sign to be small and dim but this looks epic. I really want to know how all these "switches" worked.
Amazing, and yes, never heard of it until now! Thanks for sharing this.
Quite extraordinary!
Amazing research Fran. Incredible for it's time.
Absolutely amazing! Thanks Fran!
At least a few still photographs & illustrations of the billboard survived, this must have been so cool to see firsthand!
Absolutely Excellent work Fran .
It did strike me that they could have possibly used Strowger switches (invented 1888 according to Wikipedia) with plug boards to program the character display.
I came accross them used as a clock in some "Old" Elliot Automation gear in ~1980 used to print time data on a printer as part of a batch weighing system.
It was "interesting :-)" to interface to that and the 50v valve (thermionic tube) logicof the various weight sensors to a "modern" Z80 system as part of the job to replace the ailing original electromechanical printer with a new serial device.
Again thanks for all the work from Fran to put this Video together
I am amazed beyond belief, for all the reasons you mentioned. Thank you so much for documenting this display for posterity!
Wow! Classic Fran - such a good video!
Everything was invented by unknowns to solve a specific problem by necessity, not by those that got the credit years later for making it a luxury.
Wow. That was really cool. I wish there was some record or pictures of the controls. I can only imagine how they would have "programmed" it.
Of course I can't find it now, but I saw an old 1950s film explaining how the scrolling "zipper" sign on an advertising display worked... punched paper tape over an array of contacts...one per bulb! They even showed the special typewriter-like machine that created the paper tape to program the display.
@@christianelzey9703 Thats the type of thing that really interests me. I love seeing how ingenuitive people can be. Its so boring these days, throw a microprocessor in there and write some python.
I wonder if they patented it? That would contain some information about how it worked, maybe.
Fran, amazing! An interesting, unique device, but such detailed research and detail. Thank you... Amazing, as always!
Outstanding work Fran, very interesting. Thanks.
i wonder if there might be some more information or drawings lurking in the archives of the planning department?
They're on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard".
@@anonUK no, no, they only do that with life-threatening future plans, not with their archives.
Paper Archives are kept in leaking cellars below the water table.
Electronic files have made the process of loosing history so much cheaper, no more digging required- , we just put them on the city hall tower, firmly attached to the lightning rod.
Seriously though, i'm curious whether we'll ever find out more...
This popped into my youtube list this morning, 2 years later. Very cool.
Is a lifetime resident of Dayton Ohio it was nice to see some of it's history on your Channel.
Even locals kind of forget how much technology came out of Dayton during the last century beside the airplane.
The Dayton Engineering Laboratories Co, which later became Delco Electronics in Kokomo IN, where I worked until we were sold off in 1999 as Delphi. The place became quite unpleasant to work at after that, as Delco it had been a great place to work.
Wow...can you imagine how well made these signs were.
Your latest vids are amazing! I love it!
This reminded me of a picture I saw many years ago of the back of a building-scale news ticker display, probably also in New York. a quick search for news ticker found a Wikipedia article mentioning a "motograph" in NY in 1928, and a brief Wired article but can't find much else - would be interesting if you could dig up some more technical info on this
There is a film which covers how the motograph works, search for 'behind the bright lights 1935 chevrolet'.
@@jwflame Nice film but it's 25 years later.
@@jwflame Here's the link: ua-cam.com/video/wbxns7G5Kpo/v-deo.html
neat vid, & I'm guessing this is similar tech, but the scrolling motograph electric signs are 1 big array, like the Good Year blimp, whereas the chariot race sign appears to have separate independent segments. Without video we may not know if it scrolled the messages or just changed words every 30 seconds. I'm thinking the latter. Remember the good ol' days when sign monkeys could still smoke, 23 stories up, changing lightbulbs?
@@jwflame
Thanks for sharing. 😉👌🏼
What a fascinating story! Thanks, Fran.
Very cool indeed! you are correct, I had never herd of this thing.
This is fantastic and fascinating. Thank you for your great research.
What a fascinating history! Indeed I had never heard of this sign. Thanks so much for this well documented video!
As a son of photographers I am well aware of orthochromatic film. Dad di his own film developing and printing using a red safelight in the darkroom. Old family photos from the 1940s and 1950s all show my mother's red lipstick as dark black! As a child this really creeped me out! Your theory about the horse's legs being flashed neon tubes makes sense. Good call.
Fascinating!! I never heard of this. More vids like this, please!
I'm working on a theoretical display device, and videos like this help me stay motivated. It's nice to remember that the first 2D LED matrices where also extremely expensive and inefficient, yet still managed to impress the world. I hope my closed meshes of robotic nurbs can do the same.
Update?
Thanks for digging this out of history. Never heard of this before.
the song in the end is amazing!!
Wow that's a pretty cool blast from our innovative past.
$400,000 in 1910 = $11 million in 2020 dollars
Much appreciated
Weird that these days we spend more on college football score signs
Great story Fran. I love your videos!
In so many ways it must have been a hell of a time because of how pioneering a lot of that tech was. Since you mentioned the Wright Brothers I visited the site of the later flights and current park and museum in Kill Devil Hills (their early work was in nearby Kitty Hawk but they moved a little south because the up to 100 foot tall dunes were useful for their glider experiments) and there's what I presume to be a reproduction of one of their wind tunnels and drag vs. lift balance scale installed inside - made from old bicycle spokes and hacksaw blades from their bicycle building business.
Fran, these "documentaries" of yours are fantastic. The first video of yours I watched was the "documentary" on the history of the 45. Also fantastic. Keep up the great work.
Amazing to think this all went on 110 years ago!
I had never heard of this sign. Very interesting. You always seem to come up up with interesting display technology
I agree : that was a nice looking font. Better than some modern alphanumeric displays
Very interesting and fascinating! It must have been quite the spectacle.
GREAT VIDEO.
Thank you for traveling back in time and bring us knowledge of this beautiful art work of the 1910.
Loving the new intro - so satisfying. You should have it automatically cycle through your name in the background.
That's really cool, especially about the (probably) neon tubes. Maybe that's why they called it the 'fiery' chariot race?
Nice video Fran. I can appreciate all the research you did to put this together.
Thank you for this. It's amazing stuff.
I always thought the separation footage was reproduced, not to fool anyone but to inform them
And I never suspected that there would be footage of the fuel flow
I love the shutterless strobe camera footage.
Wow. Very cool! Enjoyed it!
Love these long form history videos! Thank you Fran!!!
Is there an actual segment layout for those displays anywhere?
I'm trying to pass the word around so people start to reverse-engineer the font and make a modern implementation of these segments :-)
I was hoping that you'd make a replica of the Letter displays... :-)
Me too !
Let's band and make/reverse-engineer the font :-)
Me too! I kinda want to work out how they would have made that type of font. I also feel so sad about that ending. Makes me wonder how much money that is in today's money
@@nat7278
One 1910 US dollar is $30.77 in 2022, so the display cost $12,308,000 o_O
I can only imagine the current draw
a 600 horsepower generator worth
600hp=~447 kW worth, which supposing that these were 112Vdc lamps it comes out to 3991 amps of current 😱
@@javaguru7141 something I wouldn’t stick my tongue on, lol
Especially considering the low efficiency meaning that it would have produced more heat than light. Possibly the structure was already weakened by thermal cycling when the storm hit it.
@@javaguru7141 those rotary converters (generator?) weren’t the most efficient things, probably got a lot less KW on the output side
Wow ... Great Job Fran. ...
I would guess that the sign switching animation technique was similar to a barrel organ mechanism, or several of them probably wth replaceable segments for the alpha-numerics at the top. I really doubt that they had neon tubes, for the road part, probably just series strings of the lower candlepower incandescents. Attempts at highly complex incandescent array based television had been in development around this time too. Far too costly, except as an expiriment.
Thanks for filling me in on the date of tungsten lamp developments. When I was a kid, during the mid 1950s, living in a house built in 1900 in Norwich CT, we had one incandescent from far in the past in the incomplete third floor. It took several long seconds to reach full illumination, and had a slip of paper inside the inner filament glass support tube. The patent dates ended at 1917 suggesting it was made just before the coiled tungsten era changed household lamps to something we all grew up with. I wish I had been able to take that old lamp with us when my family moved to California. As it is I now serve as a docent at the Mt, Wilson Observatory whose older electrical devices are all from that era. Original Edison carbon filament lamps still serve as resistive elements for several of the DC motors starting circuits. Modern AC supplied stepping motors replace a lot of them, but 110V DC still is used for a plethora of the other motors and several of the lighting circuits are "push button convenient" operated from DC solenoids on what we affectionately refer to as the "Frankenstein switch board" beneath the floor of the observing level of each dome..
Fascinating. You've got a dream job there. Although it sounds like a very dangerous one.
Brilliantly told piece of overlooked history. I hope everyone shares it around like I have done, you deserve more views.
THIS IS JUST AMAZEBALLS, FRAN.
So... for the longest time I didn't think giant alphanumeric displays even existed before the 1970's. Think, like, the one on the Family Feud game show.
Then, one day a few years ago I was watching some footage of a game at the Astrodome (1960s) and they showed the giant display THERE and I was just BLOWN AWAY! 1965!
So now I'm trying to figure out how many "segments" there are on this thing from 1910 or if all the lights are individually controlled...
Great story...cheers.
Please continue this interesting displays series. Great work.
Nice. That's immense!
Had heard of it. My grandad built electric signs in NJ. Neon, electric lamp and fluorescent lights. This was legendary amongst the tradesmen. If the tubes were neon. I did hear that they came to America with several of Clauds glassblowers. They were forbidden to make or teach neon to Americans. They did anyway and for a few years neon was underground till the patents came. Then Claud France sued like crazy.
The sheet metal fences that appear to make up the horses legs (and elsewhere) were also being used in the animated illuminated tableau in Blackpool until well into the bright LED era - if you've never seen one in action it's like an open light pipe. sort of obvious how they work to give you a sharp outline you can fill with light or darkness by switching bulbs on and off... but effective.
Absolutely fascinating, Fran. Thank you!
WOW!! I had never heard of either the sign or the Rice Electric Co of Dayton, OH
Fran you the man. Sorry woman great content always!!!
Thanks for sharing this...I had no idea this even existed, hope you are well...
Exceptional and rivetting content here. I think you have excelled yourself :-)
Thank you
The original Fremont Street Experience in Las Vegas was probably the last light bulb project of this magnitude. Each “pixel” of color was represented by 4 bulbs: red, yellow, blue and white; a total of 2.1 million bulbs. A team of bulb techs worked around the clock replacing the burned out lamps. The entire display was replaced with LEDs later.
Interesting video, and even more interesting citation of orthochromatic vs panchromatic. I've known since high school that astronomical filters were historically defined by the photographic emulsions, and that was why B and V were so common. This discussion makes it more obvious that this wasn't just an atmospheric effect attenuating the red/IR, but a physical constraint on how the measurement happened for ~60 years until CCD technology became commonplace.
I could only hope that somebody someday that's seen your video runs across film of this in they're great grandparents attic and sends it to you.
I agree, the font looks great.
If you look at something like a T or an E it looks like they're 7X5 pixels but if you look at an O it looks more like 9X9.
Thanks for sharing. 😉👌🏼
Excellent, Fran. Thanks!
Check out at 3:55 it appears to be 20 segment characters, seems like these would have been used in other applications. The LOC has some footage of T. Roosevelt's return to NYC & speech at battery park on June 18, 1910, but not of the the sign. Supposedly they built 2 other signs, for Dayton & Detroit
some NJ Transit trains have LCD destination signs with many many segments, allowing for rounded corners, true diagonals for X Y Z, etc. My google-fu failed to find the mfgr or trade name for the bare unit. I agree with you, it's amazing that a pioneer went for such complexity early on instead of simplifications such as 5x7 matrix, 14 or 16 segments. It takes time to make something "as simple as possible but no simpler!"
Great job Fran! Never heard of this display before. I didn't see any pixelation in the photos you showed. Was that due to the camera or was there some sort of diffuser over the bulbs? Good thing that it was pre-radio, can you imagine the RFI generated by the sign.
Great series!
Incredible.
Loving the history videos! Fran is awesome!
Wow. That is so cool. I love it. I would love to have seen That.
what a pleasant little story! those animated signs of the past were a unique creation.....& the animated electronics were just basic circuit's...It would be interesting 2 know the mathematical formula's 4 these antique circuit schematic's..reminds me of an exhibit that should have been in a museum! it breaks my heart 2 see history like this just disappear!! wonderful video!
That was an absolutely fascinating lesson in tech history. 😃
Fran the first digital display was 400 years before this one in Venice Italy, St. Marks "digital" clock. Great story, that's for sharing.
Fran: Thanks for this excellent well-researched presentation !
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A few technical comments...s
#1 Geissler / Crookes gas-filled bulbs existed 60+ years before this display and were used for commercial signage. Early tubes were quite dim and required high voltage. In 1910 everything was still 110 DC, so their use in very unlikely.
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#2 The practice of "flashing" standard lightbulbs was used in theatre marquees from the very beginning of "display" electric lighting. A very early technique used a resistor in series with the bulb, lighting the bulb to a minimum, but keeping it warm. It was then safe to short-out the resistor, getting to full brightness. This was done via relay contacts across the resistor; doing this rapidly "flashed" the bulb without stressing the filament.
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#3 Repeat programming techniques were widely known long before 1910. Early examples include Babbage (drum and platters with pins, derived from earlier music box and automata devices {e.g., see the recent movie Hugo} )
Okay - #1 due to the large motors and currents it was very likely Westinghouse two-phase power, #2 The reported rate of flash exceeds incandescent capabilities, and #3 check out my other videos on that - ua-cam.com/video/Yuw30SCP_98/v-deo.html
ua-cam.com/video/Tv5U_fEvrMA/v-deo.html
ua-cam.com/video/FK6zCvzG3oQ/v-deo.html
@@FranLab Fran: ACK & _thanks!_ /Mike
Thanks for a great video Fran!
Awesome to see how the technology changed lighting
great informative Video, with the history and details, must have been awesome to see :-)