Television: “ tremendous advances during the first part of this century…”

I love reading about tremendous advances.

“The story of television, though equally as interesting, is not nearly as well known as that of wireless, possibly because in this age of scientific achievement people are inclined to take every new wonder as a matter of course.”

“Television, as a form of public entertainment, is yet many years away, not just “around the corner” as the popular press has been saying for some time.”

“Many great strides have been made in the last five or six decades but the obstacles to be overcome are still many and formidable, and until at least some of these difficulties are conquered television will remain in the hands of the research engineers.”

“The early demonstrations were followed by a transmission from London to New York, and from London to the liner Berengaria (http://www.bairdtelevision.com/ ) in mid ocean, on which occasion the wireless operator had the distinction of being the first man to see his fiancée by wireless.”

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I wonder how many would see these sentences and think they could be from an article in the Swinburne College magazine – “Open Door”, November 1935?



The writer, Alec H Clyne, in his article entitled “Television: its development and present state” proposes that he will “deal with the more outstanding developments in television made up to the present time, and to outline some of the systems now in the hands of the research engineers, with their attendant difficulties”. He concludes with “…”I have endeavoured to deal with the optical side of television, chiefly for the non technical reader.”

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Now for the present:


Future CD's to be a digital Aladdin's cave
Story by David Adams
Imagine being able to put your entire DVD collection on a single disc. And not just your collection, but also that of your family, friends and neighbours … the contents, in fact, of as many as 200,000 DVDs.

It sounds a stretch of imagination, but this is the aim of Professor Min Gu and his team at Swinburne University of Technology’s Centre for Micro-Photonics.

They are three years into a fiveyear project that is looking at how nanotechnology – particularly the use of nanoscopic particles – can be used to exponentially increase the amount of information contained on a single disc.

Their ultimate aim is to be able to include as much as a petabyte (PB) – 1015 or one quadrillion bytes – of data on a single disc, an amount 20,000 times greater than the amount of data currently able to be stored on a Blu-ray Disc, which is a high-density optical disc format. “The idea is to incorporate nanostructured material and to increase the data capacity without necessarily increasing the size of the CD or DVD disc,” says Professor Gu, who is director of the Centre for Micro-Photonics and leading the $1 million project.

From “Swinburne Magazine” March 2008

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Here are two perfect illustrations of the ever present theme at Swinburne – technology, research and explanation

-73 years apart?