TV at Bosch

The fundamental technical prerequisites for television had been known since 1884, when Paul Nipkow was granted the first television patent. Using the eponymous Nipkow disk, an image could be scanned line by line, translated into a transmissible electrical signal, and then reassembled.

After many attempts and further developments, television was on the verge of being launched in the late 1920s. In Germany, the telegraphy department of the German postal service had officially taken over responsibility for supporting television in 1928, and television sets had been unveiled in the fall of that year at the fifth annual radio exhibition (now the IFA) in Berlin. The new medium seemed promising, but it was extremely sophisticated in technical terms, so it seemed obvious to bring specialists from various fields together to make it a reality.

On June 11, 1929, four companies teamed up to form Fernseh AG in Berlin. Baird Television Ltd., which was based in London, had experience with scanning images and electro-optical converters, and D.S. Loewe, from Berlin, had expertise with electronic amplifier technology. Bosch contributed its knowledge of precision mechanics and measurement technology, and Zeiss Ikon AG from Dresden, drew on expertise in optical and photographic methods.

The newly founded company made its first big appearance just three months later. At its very own booth at the sixth annual radio exhibition in Berlin, the company presented a functional television receiver, but one that never went into mass production, contrary to the official announcement. Another success came with the development of a film scanner to transmit normal film via television. It made it possible to transmit relatively clear, flicker-free images, but still struggled with inadequate brightness.

This problem was finally solved by the cathode ray tube. Inside each vacuum tube, a beam of electrons struck a phosphorescent screen to reproduce an image. A high vacuum department had been established at Fernseh AG in 1932, testing and finally incorporating cathode ray tubes into receivers. The fully electronic high vacuum tube delivered much brighter, clearer images. It went on to become the worldwide standard.

Still, good television images could only be transmitted from darkened studios, as the light beam scanners did not work outdoors in natural light. To solve this problem and broadcast television images of outdoor events, Fernseh AG began developing the intermediate film system in 1931. In this system, scenes were captured using a normal film camera, the film was immediately processed and developed, and then it was scanned again and transmitted. The delay between recording and playback was just 15 seconds, so the audience could watch in near real time.

The first big public television broadcasts took place at the 1936 Olympics, in Berlin. A television recording truck with an intermediate film system from Fernseh AG broadcast the events from various venues; an early fully electronic iconoscope camera from competitor Telefunken was installed inside the stadium. The sporting events generated a lot of interest, with about 160,000 viewers gathering around receivers in both private homes and special public viewing lounges over the course of the games.

Fernseh GmbH got a fresh start in Darmstadt in 1949, when the Allied forces occupying Germany allowed activity in the television segment. From its new location near the Fernmeldetechnisches Zentralamt (the central office responsible for telecommunications), the local technical university, and radio device manufacturer Blaupunkt, also a Bosch subsidiary, Fernseh GmbH resumed its work. Fernseh AG had supplied the necessary equipment for the television studio operated by Reichspost-Fernsehgesellschaft, the German national television corporation, back in 1938: new iconoscope cameras that used an electronic camera tube instead of mechanical scanning via a Nipkow disk, mechanical and electronic film scanners, and the equipment needed for the control room, including video control units and a video mixing desk. The first big order of the postwar period saw Fernseh GmbH developing the test studio for public broadcaster Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (NWDR), with all its basic equipment. This set the stage for the company’s future activities, which involved developing and producing all of the devices that made up a television studio, including the mobile equipment for television trucks. Blaupunkt took on responsibility for receivers.

Attempts to transmit television images in color had been made as far back as the early phase of television. The first regular color broadcasts were launched in the United States in October 1953. Color television sets remained very expensive for a long time, so few programs were offered in color at first. Electronic components became more and more popular starting in the 1960s, even as color television systems were being refined and further developed. That meant that many countries faced a double shift in the late 1960s: to smaller, more powerful studio equipment on the one hand, and to color TV on the other. Fernseh GmbH had supplied a large portion of the equipment for the color television test lab used by broadcaster Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) in Cologne in 1963 and had made a name for itself in Germany and beyond through its fundamental research on color television.