Comment by mrandish
Several years ago I came across the first issue of "Television" magazine from 1928 and reading it blew my mind in a couple ways. First, the overall tone is remarkably similar to a 1970s homebrew computer club newsletter, including defining what "television" even is (and isn't). For example, We learn on page 10 that "television is not tele-photography."
It's clear from this magazine that early television was the domain of home tinkerers and hackers. On page 26 is a detailed tutorial on how to construct your own selenium condenser cell from scratch, including which London chemist had appropriately high-quality selenium, where to buy copper sheets, mica insulator (.008 thick) and brass bars. Well worth a read: https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=37097
That analog television not only was prototyped nearly a hundred years ago but then began being deployed at vast consumer scale ~75 years ago is still just so amazing. It's worth understanding a bit about how it works just to appreciate what a wildly ambitious hack it was. From real-time image acquisition to transmission to display, many of the fundamental technologies didn't even exist and had to be invented then perfected for it to work.
Although it's about wire transmission of photography - which, as pointed out, television is not - it's still well worth watching this 1937 newsreel explaining how it works, mostly because 1) they devote a LOT of time towards explaining the concept of scanning/rastering, which was clearly not widely intuited at the time, and 2) they do it with a brilliant physical analogy, with the incredible pedagogical clarity typical of such 1930s educational videos.
https://youtu.be/cLUD_NGE370?