Orphan Film Symposium: All-Television Edition | Jeffrey Bickel

tonight I will be presenting a small selection of Hearst newsreels dealing with the early television developments from 1938 to through 1950. the first will be a sound British gamma newsreel from 1938 covering early British television technology then we will watch additional material from France the U.S and Japan these other news reels are without sound so while they screen I will give a little more background on the material and also talk a little more about the Hearst Metro tone news collection and the new Hearst newsreel website let's begin with the first newsreel with these pictures of the original television apparatus now in the South Kensington Museum we introduced Mr John bed the inventor showed the transmission of outline images to the fellow on the first day this is the scanning disc with its lenses this is the second disc by which the light is further divided and passes into the right cell this apparatus was shown to members of the Royal Institution and others on January 27 1926 and showed through television images in light and shade for the first stand the Crystal Palace destroyed much valuable apparatus but despite that great strides have been made in 12 years television pictures have even been shown in airliners today we are able to show television on streams large enough to be shown to a cinema audience and have recently been able to send wireless television pictures in color as we continue with footage on early French television's educational programming I wanted to mention a couple of things about the previous newsreel John Baird who was featured was a Scottish inventor who was a major contributor to the development of television as mentioned he demonstrated the world's first live working television system in January 1926 and went on to invent the first publicly demonstrated color television system a side note the newsreel mentioned the disastrous fire that destroyed London's Crystal Palace on November 30th 1936. before the fire sections of the palace had been used for tests by Mr Baird for his mechanical television equipped experiments but sadly much of his work was destroyed in the fire the first shot of the NBC television studio in New York is of the projection room including two iconoscope cameras and the camera operators this is followed by a shot at the production director the technical director of the video control engineer and the sound engineer at work the following brief description is from the Hearst documentation Emperor Hirohito and Empress nagako arrive at the radio Tokyo building to visit the Japan Broadcasting Corporation after watching an orchestra the Imperial couple have their first glimpse of Japanese television aided by American scap radio engineers scap being the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers General MacArthur the engineers are from his staff this is a reminder that in 1949 Japan was still under American occupation while we continue to watch this footage let me give a little background on the Hearst Metro tone news collection The Collection was donated to the University of California in 1981 including copyright the archive has approximately 27 million feet of newsrails The Collection includes both theatrically released newsreels covering a period from 1915 to 1967 and the tele news series news footage filmed for use by television newsrooms in the late 1950s and 1960s The Collection also contains a significant amount of unreleased material in fact the new referrals that we are watching tonight come from the portion of the collection that was labeled as a vault material all material includes footage purchased from other newsreel companies and footage filmed by the Hurst Corporation but none of this material was ever used in a released newsreel the Hearst Corporation kept this material solely for stock footage purposes regular television broadcasting began in Japan in 1950. the Hearst description of this footage is as follows interior of Television research lab workers testing television equipment a television antenna being installed and later spectators at a downtown department store watch a demonstration by the NHK the Japan Broadcasting Corporation of performances being filmed on camera and the broadcast shown on a television monitor set up at the department store earlier I mentioned that I would speak about the Hearst Metro tone News website over the past eight years UCLA along with its partner the Packard Humanities Institute have been digitally scanning newsreel material from the collection The Joint project is led by the Packard Humanities Institute which has built nitrate film storage vaults for the archive and provided funding equipment and technical support for this large-scale digitization project to date over 4 million feet have been scanned at 4K this ongoing project includes creating a website to make this material available to the general public and researchers the Packard Humanities Institute has recently launched a website to present a majority of the material that has been scanned so far approximately fifteen thousand newsreel stories about 15 of the collection this website includes original Hearst documentation on the release newsreels and unreleased material along with the scanned videos it is a very exciting development and the website is now available at newsreels.net in case you didn't catch that that's newsreels.net the archive is grateful to the Packard Humanities Institute for its role as the driving force in the project to share the Hearst Metro tone news collection for research study and public access the website is the first phase of a multi-year project to make the entire Hearst newsreel collection accessible to the public I hope that you all check out the website and of course this concludes my presentation thank you [Applause]