Intriguing Occult History of Early TV Development
Fascinating - It occurs to me that television may still encompass the occult underpinnings of its early developmental predecessors.
The origin of the television set was heavily shrouded in both spiritualism and the occult, Stefan Andriopoulos writes in his new book Ghostly Apparitions. In fact, as its very name implies, the television was first conceived as a technical device for seeing at a distance: like the telephone (speaking at a distance) and telescope (viewing at a distance), the television was intended as an almost magical box through which we could watch distant events unfold, a kind of technological crystal ball.
Andriopoulos's book puts the TV into a long line of other "optical media" that go back at least as far as popular Renaissance experiments involving technologically-induced illusions, such as concave mirrors, magic lanterns, disorienting walls of smoke, and other "ghostly apparitions" and "phantasmagoric projections" created by specialty devices. These were conjuring tricks, sure—mere public spectacles, so to speak—but successfully achieving them required sophisticated understandings of basic physical factors such as light, shadow, and acoustics, making an audience see—and, most importantly, believe in—the illusion.
A Magic Lantern for Watching Events at a Distance
What's central to Andriopoulos's argument is that these devices incorporated earlier experimental instruments devised specifically for pursuing supernatural research—for visualizing the invisible and showing the subtle forces at work in everyday life. In his words, these were "devices developed in occult research"—including explicitly "televisionlike devices"—that had been invented in the name of spiritualism toward the end of the 19th century and that, only a decade or two later, "played a constitutive role in the emergence of radio and television."
read more: http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2014/06...ision-set.html
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