No electronic device has changed our view of the world we live in quite like the electronic screen. Whether it’s a cathode-ray tube television from 1956 or a smartphone purchased ten minutes ago, our lives have been dominated by the desire to see beyond what is in front of us. For nearly a century, the world of electrical engineering has delivered an increasingly vast array of devices to help us see, whether beyond the horizon or beyond our imaginations. Over the coming months, we’ll re-trace a history of electronic vision, looking at the technologies, the people and how they shaped events in Australia, the world and beyond. This month, we begin back in the 1920s, with a Scottish inventor and an Idaho farm-boy each separately dreaming of moving pictures by radio-waves – and the little-known Australian engineer who beat them all to invent television some 40 years earlier.
Tea chest and sealing wax
Today, they’re known as the ‘Roaring Twenties’ and while it was the decade desperate to forget the horrors of a ‘war to end all wars’, it was also a decade eager to forge the new ‘electronics’ age. By the 1920s, the electronic valve had created the world of ‘wireless’ (what we now call ‘radio’) and as Sydney-siders began tuning into new local radio-station 2SB (today, ABC Radio Sydney) in late-1923, the ‘triode’ valve
