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History of Russian video recording

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"Russia is the birthplace of elephants!" - this is the key phrase of a well-known and rather caustic anecdote, stigmatizing the arrogance and indefatigable desire of our former rulers everywhere and everywhere by any means to assert the falsely understood national, and with it their primacy. And yet ... Once upon a time, it was in the vastness of Russia that the largest and most powerful elephants roamed - mammoths, so there are still some grounds for the statement with which we started. Another question is that mammoths are extinct. Alas, our history is replete with many examples when, having started briskly, we eventually lag behind in a conditionally alive state. The history of television is also rich in examples of this kind. Now our technical gap from the leaders is huge - and many, projecting it onto the past, are convinced: it has always been like this! And is it really so?

Approximately 20 years before the invention of cinema, almost simultaneously and certainly independently, the Portuguese de Pereira and our I. Polumordvinov for the first time expressed the idea and considerations about possible ways to implement far-sightedness. The term "television" itself was born at the turn of two centuries - its author was the Russian engineer K. Persky, who introduced the world to this term at an exhibition in Paris in 1903. The recognized creator of the electronic television system is the Russian emigrant V. Zworykin, he was a student of that same B. Rosing, who in 1911 in St. Petersburg for the first time publicly demonstrated an electronic television image using a Brown cathode ray tube. Leaving his homeland, Zworykin certainly carried away the ideas of the teacher, which fell on the fertile soil of another country. And one more thing - the first electronic television system was created by the RCA company, founded by another Russian emigrant - D. Sarnov.

It is known that the final touch on the way to electronic television was the invention in 1931 of the iconoscope - the first transmitting cathode ray tube. But 51 days before Zvorykin, an application for a tube with a three-layer target and charge accumulation, similar to an iconoscope, was submitted by the then young, and later one of the most respected television men in our country, and indeed the world, S. Kataev. The scientific and technical community left priority, and in general rightly, to Zworykin, who 5 years earlier had announced several schemes and methods for implementing cathode-ray receiving tubes, though not quite iconoscopes.

A group of young scientists, headed by 30-year-old professor Ya. Ryftin, began to develop the first Soviet experimental system of electronic television under the influence of V. Zvorykin's lectures in Moscow and Leningrad. But interestingly, the domestic version of electronic television was created a year after the lectures and less than two years after the American version - the swiftness of its creation amazed even Zworykin. This indicates a huge accumulated potential. And if the efforts of Kataev and his colleagues had not been hampered ... And in those days, "the authorities would not let go until they squeaked abroad!"

Two Pavel Vasilievich Shmakov and Timofeev in 1933 developed a tube with electronic image transfer, and therefore with appropriate amplification - an important, and note, the first step towards tubes with high sensitivity. Somewhat later (and also the first in the world!) G. Braude, by far the most inventive television man in Russia, develops a two-sided target. Combining the transfer section of the Shmakov-Timofeev tube with the Braude target led to the creation of the superorticon, the most sensitive transfer tube that has worked in television for many years. Much more can be added to what has been said, where the priority belongs to Soviet scientists and, above all, Russian scientists, but you cannot mention everything in a short note.

Therefore, in conclusion, let's say about the most important, in my opinion, contribution to world television - we are talking about the current 625/50 system - the world television decomposition system for countries with a power supply frequency of 50 Hz. This system was born and implemented as a broadcasting system in 1948 in Russia, and only years later other countries joined it. The authors of the idea of ​​such a system, S. Kataev and S. Novakovsky, expressed it in 1944.

So, we are not offended by ideas and priorities, and yet at the beginning we are a little, and now we are tragically lagging behind. Answering the question posed in the title, one should definitely agree that Russia did not become the birthplace of television, and the whole drama is that it could become it under other conditions. There are a lot of reasons why even now we are not inferior to the leaders at the level of ideas and theory, and we stubbornly fail to implement them. First of all, "the most advanced Soviet science in the world" has always and now remained Cinderella, feeding only on leftovers from the budget. Even prestigious ones: the atomic bomb, space, and at the best of times starved. It is known that the closer to implementation, the higher the financial investment and risk.

In the USSR and now in Russia there is not enough money for science. Therefore, the financial and technical support of developments cannot be compared with the West, and the bureaucratic commanders of science avoided risk in principle - so they were waiting for something to hatch abroad. Moreover, the most left-wing radicals - the communists - built a state system of the most right-wing conservative persuasion, in which any changes, including technical and technological ones, were inevitable. Therefore, we loved diligently, but slowly, to catch up and saw sedition in any attempt to sell something new. Is it any wonder that we have so many dramas - personal and whole teams. Here is a typical example. Our scientists began to develop HDTV several years earlier than the Japanese and achieved tangible success. These works were curtailed as unnecessary (unnecessary novelty!) Just when Sony started its own!

Russia, and its television too, has excellent scientists and engineers, at least many of those who left their homeland confirmed this by deed. I could cite a list of our television people with whom I worked side by side until recently, now they have taken leading positions as employees of very reputable foreign companies. There they were able to implement those ideas, breaking through which they only filled bumps here. Such a situation is shameful, but in our country "shame does not blind our eyes."

We consider it necessary and useful to objectively cover the history of television and the development of its various directions. There is much to learn from our past and to understand what to beware of. That is why we consider it necessary to open the history section. Unfortunately, the history of television in Russia is not dealt with by professionals, but by a few enthusiasts - witnesses and direct participants in the events, among them, first of all, Professor S.V. Novakovsky, who has worked in television since the beginning of electronic broadcasting.

We open the rubric with a series of essays on the history of Russian video recording, the author of which Lavrenty Grigoryevich Lishin, Honored Worker of Culture of the Russian Federation, Candidate of Technical Sciences, began with the development of the first Soviet video recorder. These are subjective essays, essays of a witness and a participant in the events - and for that, in my opinion, they are interesting. Some interpretation of events could be challenged, but the memoirist has the right to his own vision. The history of domestic video recording is one of individual successes, but more storms and erroneous decisions. The author touches on them, but touches them with restraint, and only between the lines can one guess the real tension, disputes and pressure from above, which sometimes led to fatal decisions.

When during the Moscow Olympics I spoke with representatives of various television companies, they spoke quite well about our studio equipment "Perspektiva", which had just appeared, but even politeness could not prevent them from harshly criticizing the video recording. How did we come to this? The answer, although veiled, is nevertheless contained in the proposed essays. We hope that it will be interesting for readers to get acquainted with how the domestic video recording was created, but how it got to its current state - this remains behind the guessing frame.

Essay 1. First successes

At the end of the 50s, almost all TV programs were broadcast live, and it was hard to imagine that in 30 years all programs would be played from videotape. The technological revolution at television centers was made by video recorders, the first mention of which appeared in print in 1956. Their first manufacturer was the AMPEX company (USA), which was created by Russian (!, ed.) emigrant Alexander Mikhailovich Poniatov.

 A colonel in the tsarist army, he was entitled to the title of "His Excellency" or in English Excellence. The abbreviation, made up of the first letters in the English transcription of the name, patronymic and surname, and the first two titles of Poniatov, became the name of the company. A.M. Ponyatov managed to assemble a very strong team of developers, among which, for example, was the now famous R. Dolby. The implementation of AMPEX video recording made a very strong impression. For many years, photographs of Poniatov hung in video recording equipment all over the world, and the recording process itself was often and for quite a long time called "ampexing".

At that time, many designers, including Russians, dreamed of creating a tape recorder for recording TV images. So, at the Institute of Sound Recording (VNAIZ), back in 1956, under the leadership of B.I. Chernyaev, research was carried out on TV recording (only a draft of the working program on this topic has survived), but it ended in failure, since the device was based on a method of recording several components of a video signal on parallel longitudinal tracks.

The problem of creating a video recorder became especially relevant after the American Exhibition, held in 1958 in Sokolniki. At the exhibition, the American Ambassador met with N.S. Khrushchev, which was recorded on a VCR. The videotape recording the meeting was donated by N.S. Khrushchev, who sent it to VNAIZ for decoding. We first saw a tape 2 inches wide with a cross-line recording of a video signal and could not "decipher" it. Under the conditions of the Cold War, work on video recording was classified, so obtaining serious technical information was excluded.

By decision of the Central Committee of the CPSU, work on video recording began in parallel in Moscow (VNAIZ) and in Leningrad (Lenkinap and VNIIT). Although the Moscow and Leningrad devices were based on the same method of transverse-line recording by rotating signal heads with frequency modulation of a low carrier, the developers went their separate ways. The creators of "Kadr", that was the name of the Moscow video recorder, led by Ph.D. IN AND. Parkhomenko (A. Goncharov, V. Lazarev, A. Spirin, I. Orekhov, A. Langen, P. Zon, L. Markovich, L. Lishin and others) set themselves the task of ensuring the interchangeability of their own video phonogram with foreign ones. Leningraders, led by M.G. Shulman, used a tape 70 mm wide in their KMZI video recorder, which was a gross mistake and completely excluded the possibility of playing foreign programs.

Muscovites' perseverance and perseverance were rewarded: they were the first to prepare a model of a VCR for work. On February 20, 1960, a "historic" event took place. The newspaper "Soviet Russia" in the article "This you will see today" reported on the transfer of the experimental program on the central television in the recording on magnetic tape. On the street Kachalova, 24, the PTS drove up to the House of Sound Recording. TV cameras were installed right in the concert studio, and the cables were thrown to the 6th floor, where there was a video recorder. A pop concert was held, which was hosted by the then-famous announcer Svetlana Zhiltsova.