Canadian World War Two (?) Camera

[Steve McVoy]

An employee of a Canadian television station has found an unusual TV camera, possibly from World War Two:

http://www.earlytelevision.org/canadian_ww2_camera.html

Any ideas what is is?

[earlyfilm]

Originally Posted by Steve McVoy

An employee of a Canadian television station has found an unusual TV camera, possibly from World War Two

The first problem, would be the Iconoscope cameras required lots of light, so that would eliminate all except daylight flights. During war time, one would not want a TV signal transmitted from a plane acting as a direction finder for the enemy anti-aircraft guns, and there were no video recorders at the time. I think this eliminates it being made for in-flight combat use.

The newly invented and secret Norden bombsight required the bombardier to fly the plane during the bombing run. The US Army Air Force correctly thought this might be rather dangerous during bombardier training if the bombardier messed up.

The first trainers were actual tall carts where the bombardier rode over a painted surface and used an optical simulated bombsight. This training proved to be not realistic enough.

They then build a realistic miniature of German sites and had the new bombardiers train by "flying" a remote controlled TV camera over the miniature landscape in a studio. The camera marked the hits and misses in real time.

Could the Canadians have made one also?

I remember these US AAF devices being written up in Popular Mechanics during WWII and the US Government also made a propaganda film for distribution to theaters on the TV system during the war.

A quick search of the internet only found images of the crude early ones.

Jas.

[old_coot88]

It'd be cool to see the air-to-air television equipment used in Operation Aphrodite in WW2.

[Steve McVoy]

We have a camera and monitor on display at the museum.

[Steve McVoy]

We think we have figured it out. The knobs with the military labels appear to have no such functions. It is probable that the camera was built by station engineers in the mid 40s to experiment with television.

[baursam]

CFRN is up the road three hours from myself. Here is some history on the station, first broadcasting in 1954

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CFRN-DT

This maybe doesn't apply here, but I was looking up WWII military uses of televison and I ran across this article: http://books.google.com/books?id=cOE...20bomb&f=false

It mentions a Vericon pickup tube developed by Remington Rand. I never heard of that and couldn't find any more on it. I know I'm new here, so maybe it is common. Just wondering.

[Steve McVoy]

Here is some information about Remington cameras:

http://www.earlytelevision.org/remington_rand.html

[old_coot88]

Just found this link on the Museum's website. A fairly detailed discussion, including a vid animation of Operation Aphrodite..

http://www.earlytelevision.org/military_tv.html

Steve and coot: Thanks for the info. I should have known there'd be something on earlytelevision.org. It's such a great site.

In college I had a history professor who used to say that all wars have elements in them that predict future wars. These are some great examples of that.