Radio TechCon 2022 - 100 Years of BBC Technology in a Dozen Objects

please welcome Dr Rachel Boone Bill Thompson and Simone Eubanks thanks everyone uh we're going to be busking this so because um we've got some stuff we've got a clicker we've got a camera which I think can show what's on the screen no no no yeah yeah okay so we've got a camera so I think I'm camera operator aren't I and you're going to and we're going to kick off momentarily until I find my glasses look it's been a long day one of us had to go to broadcasting house first thing this morning to collect this thing but it was worth it and one of us had been to the Science Museum this morning another thing so we'll show you that Shall We Begin most people think of the BBC as a broadcaster we turned 100 this year for its sighting and most of the celebrations have been focused on radio and television but we've been significant technical innovators too you could argue it's the main thing we do and the BBC is a mechanism through which the Technologies of radio television and the internet are developed and made available to the world in order to improve people's lives you might say that and in fact the 1926 Charter that created the BBC on the 1st of January 1927 the British Broadcasting Corporation rather than the company says it out loud it says that we believe was it God where's my script come just need to quote it properly otherwise the ghost of John wreath will descend on me we deem it desirable that the service should be developed and exploited to the best advantage and in the National interest and Technical Innovation is part of that process and of course the impact of the BBC has been felt really widely helping shape broadcasting sound and vision and online so in this brief presentation we want to talk about some of the things the BBC has done over the last hundred years and prepare you and everyone else and for the next Century of innovation from this remarkable organization as a science museum curator it's brilliant that we'll be highlighting the value of artifacts and material culture in this telling of such a history so we're going to start with sound and microphones and I believe we might get a clip if it plays this is the best I can manage London Calling Marconi house London Calling oh absolutely professional there you go it should be my ringtone really so those were the infamous words of Arthur Burrows um and the start of it all November the 14th 1922 not the beginning of the British um Broadcasting Company later the corporation and also Daily broadcasts radio listening changed from a um a specialist hobby to a national Pastime and the London transmitter Tolo installed in Marconi house quite close to where we are today was quickly networked to new transmitters across the country in Manchester Birmingham and Newcastle um and at that time the post office had only issued around 30 000 radio receiving licenses but within four years it had increased to 2 million so a real Mass take up of this new technology early programs were recorded using a meat safe style um microphone named because it resembled the meat storage cupboards used at the time I think we might have a picture of it if you jump back just one more slide there we go it's just on on the um right hand side or left um so uh and the first was actually used here at Savoy Hill studios in May 1923. the microphone was exceptionally sensitive and was supported in a sling of rubber to help isolate it from vibrations and surrounded by a copper mesh box which formed a faraday cage blocking electromagnetic interference but microphones and Technology improved rapidly in those early years and in the 1930s the BBC developed the famous Lodge and shaped BBC Marconi type a ribbon microphone that bill is showing us here we're really uh channeling blue Peter this morning so it was based on a RCA U.S designed photophone but a lot cheaper nine pounds instead of 130 and they were used until the 1950s and came to symbolize the BBC more than that the axbt version has become the icon for all for audio in nearly all computer software so you'll see it with you in the bottom right hand corner of your screens the ribbon microphone was particularly good in studio situations and the double-sided design which accepted sound from the front and the back um but not from the side was particularly good for voice the design was the pioneering work of the BBC's FW Alexander working for the BBC research department and was developed for manufacture by Marconi the tiny pressure changes caused by the aluminum ribbon which was less than the thousandth of the millimeter thick vibrate between poles of a large magnet and it was used to broadly sadly not plugged in but I think Bill if we need an author boroughs of 2022 you are the man and it was used to broadcast some of the most extraordinary moments in history including Charles de gaulle's 1940 Appeals and the BBC and Marconi continue to work together developing other microphones such as the L1 which was a close distance commentator's lip microphone um and the metal guard ring that kind of the the commentator would push against and gave the precise speaking diff distance of 6.35 centimeters everything was very precise and it completely transformed the effectiveness of outside broadcasting so I think do we have um we have it we're going to jump over here so if we jump a slide ahead I love it it's like directing um but microphones have become increasingly miniaturized and the versions you'll find in many studios today like the AKG 414 are rather different Bill showing us a picture here on the screen and this is seen when looking at the multi-pattern microphone polar response graphs of both microphones so if we jump ahead one more slide we can see the different poles comparing our the first microphone the xbt on on the on the right and the more modern versions day which has we have seen the five polar diagrams but it has extra diagrams in between so um but even these are being superseded for a lot of basic consumer Technologies like smartphones and today you're actually more likely to see a reporter like Bill waving around his smartphone with the BBC Essentials recorder app um and while the Taipei as we've just been looking at is on display and broadcasting house but let's not forget that the BBC's early work developing mics and the theoretical work on microphones speakers and other studio equipment was published over the years and it had an enormous impact on the development of radio and now online audio and we can see this in some of the white papers and research papers that the department published and continue to do so so over to Simone it was me and on to Vision back in the 1930s a group of Engineers and program makers were exiled to Alexandra Palace while I'm sure director General John wreath thought that their experiments in sending pictures over radio waves was destined to fail and yet they succeeded getting pictures onto screens has been our Focus since the late 1930s back when early sets were just monochrome CRTs with tiny screens and poor resolution um Alexandra Palace housed the first trial between the Marconi Emi and bed transmitting systems Marconi Emi ended up winning and became the standard of the future as the BBC just abandoned Bird's mechanical system after three short months the steel frame of the Alexander Palace transmitter became a symbol of the new TV broadcasting technology and you can see it in early BBC opening credits as the phrase I'm looking for like newsreel it's there and it still stands and I think personally it is very cool in 1953 millions of viewers gathered around their newly purchased television set to watch the coronation of popular young Queen Elizabeth II homes pubs and community centers were absolutely packed to the brim with people as they jostled around trying to view the grainy black and white footage on these very small screens the BBC rolled out transmission TV transmission post 1945 that started to pick up the pace as the coronation started to loom and TV manufacturers saw this as a golden opportunity to start Hawking their Wares and they were completely correct because in the two months preceding at the coronation the British public bought more television sets than they had previously in any comparable period period with an estimated 2.5 million sets being

installed up until the big day and the day itself was the largest outdoor broadcast ever up until this point and it came with its own set of formidable challenges getting the large bulky television cameras into Westminster Abbey alongside the 8251 heads of state and other dignified guests was a feat in and of itself and yet they succeeded they also had the challenge of cabling all of the cameras and microphones from The Abbey across London as the queen did her tour post coronation and then connecting all of those cables back to the broadcasting Command Center so that everybody could see it and yet they succeeded uh the other broadcast got underway you could effectively hear a pin drop as 20 million people watched as the queen took her coronation oath which was over double that that listened on the radio subsequent survey suggested that for every screen that was showing the coronation 17 people were crowded around it watching the queen take her oath the arrival of color TV in the UK was a long time coming and a collaboration between domestic Innovation and international influence on July the 1st 1967 after Decades of experimentation BBC Two broadcasting color for the first time with the Wimbledon Tennis Championships color programming was introduced gradually and it was available to about half the national population of the time with it only being available in the London Midlands Northwest and Yorkshire TV regions major sporting events have always been linked to color TV so we started with Wimbledon and then things like snooker that had the green felt and the colorful balls were absolutely ideal when it came to broadcast color TV licenses were introduced on the 1st of January 1968 and cost 10 pounds which was double the five pound standard black and white TV licenses that were otherwise available and this high cost was a barrier to entry for some people as color TV sets didn't outnumber black and white TV sets until 1967. and we also had a big hand in introducing stereo to the UK which is great oh was it oh there we go we're good um after color the most significant uh sort of switch that the BBC helped sort of implement was the digital switch over which took place between 2007 and 2012 and this benefited enormously from standards work that was carried out by the BBC dvb T2 is the enhanced second gen terrestrial broadcasting system that supports high definition broadcast it was developed in only three years by a Consortium that was led by the BBC and when it was implemented in 2009 it created Freeview HD broadcast which improved image quality for everybody across the UK and of course we're working hard on what the next generation of Freeview would look like when we're using IP rather than RF and beyond that we're looking beyond the TV screen to Virtual Reality to augmented reality like civilizations you can see on the screen and perhaps even the metaverse once we figured out exactly what that is it was Bill when somebody figures it out yes thank you thank you very much so we go let's go we don't just care about program makers uh in r d we care about program makers as well the ones who write code the ones who build the applications and services that we rely on iPlayer Sounds new sport and all the back end technology the engineer to keep it all going the people who manage all the studio kits and make all that work particularly as we transition to an IP first DJ calls it digital first BBC some would argue being digital for some time let's not have that debate here we can discuss it over coffee we're starting and the work the practice the work to replace radio mics with local 5G networks and see that as being a key technology moving forward there's a whole load of work to build the um software infrastructure that will replace a lot of our Hardware infrastructure and we're moving forward but it's also worth looking to the past and I have a chunky piece of the past with me now which is my very own personal BBC Minecraft oh sorry about the radio mate um brought down on the train from Cambridge today I was so tempted to put it on my table put a light an iPod on the top of it and pretend I was just working away but the train was sadly a bit too crowded I couldn't get away with it but maybe on the way back tonight BBC micro marked a significant turning point I think for the BBC in many ways because when it was launched in 1982 to accompany the air the computer program series visible on the BBC website by the way we did guitar not digitized we resurrect them all and have made the computer literacy archive you can watch all the old programs please do um it was a massive intervention in public education I think of an enormous scale and it had such a significant effect and we're often asked you could the BBC do something like that ever again because it was seen as being groundbreaking you know essentially the BBC went to a small company in Cambridge called Acorn computers and gave a bunch of research scientists freshly out of the University a hollow to public money to make something on the basis of a demo that was only just working um and it was a very contentious um uh Choice there was a very well known ad TV program called the micro men you can watch which sort of fictionalizes the history of that time but is worth looking at but it's clear that the micro along with the other Technologies of the time the Spectrum and of course um the Atari system had a big impact on the development of computer science in the UK BBC did do it again just five years ago and I've got some of these with me pass them around if you haven't seen them before we don't give those to you yeah no you've seen them before ask them around exactly this is this can I have a camera this is the BBC micro bit single board computer now this is quite special because it came out after the Raspberry Pi and Raspberry Pi has been enormously successful but this one is different because it's got this led Matrix on it and you can program it and then you can store the program on the micro bit and it will carry on working without a computer because it is a computer so you just need power now why does that matter well that matters because if you're the sort of person who's going to a back to a family home that doesn't have computers doesn't have particularly sympathetic parents if you're given a Raspberry Pi you need a monitor and a keyboard and mouse to plug it into you give them one of these things you can program it at school with a game or something and when you take it home it will still work it will still be useful to you and I think the micro bit demonstrates the way the BBC thinks about Public Service as well as technological innovation and that's really quite significant in the approach that the BBC has taken over the years to to making things better and it continues there's a project at the moment as part of the Centenary called 100 objects of the BBC and it was launched at the end of last year with only 99 objects the hundredth object was an object from the future that was designed by my colleagues Libby Miller and Jasmine Cox working with school children in the UK to come up with a new theme that's interesting and there it is I'm sorry it's on this slide to come up with a new thing is here this from 2041 is the micro bit MZ environmental sampler that detects the health of the mycorrhizal network that connects fungal connections between trees and other plant life below the ground and it Taps into a whole system of environmental sensors created by the UK government in response to the great floods of 2031 when the Denver sluice overflowed and took out the fence this is the origin story of this device so we have something from the year 2041 demonstrating both that the microbit thrives it's running on a microbit mz-27 and also that the BBC continues to care about the public and societal implications of the technologies that we're deploying but it's not just about shiny toys and dotted about making them fast it's also thinking about how it links in to the rest of society and that can be seen going backwards if we look at the other hundred objects because there are so many of them from the BBC's history and you can visit the website and see them all including our two biggest Machines of course television Center and broadcasting house for a century the BBC has built on the work of others shared its Innovations and inventions with the world and developed International standards that can be universally adopted expressing its corethian values in the design and implementation of every kind of technology related to its mission and it's this commitment to developing a public service ecosystem first for sound then for moving image and latterly for online services that really characterizes the BBC's relationship to Technology Innovation and which continues to work which continues in the work of today's research and development department and it isn't all smooth obviously spending on research and development activity has reduced over the years in line with other BBC and expenditures other income has dropped and there's been increasing pressure to justify that investment in r d so sometimes making the public service case can be quite hard but Innovation and Technical standards continues to be at the heart of our mission even if the impact only felt years or decades afterwards as we look to the future we plan to continue this tradition and work with all of you to secure the future in the same way that we have shored up the past thank you thank you very much these objects will be here for the morning including the crystal radio yeah which Rachel has brought from the science museum uh try not to break anything do I gather your sort of on these exhibitions around the country as well there is yeah there's there's an exhibition in the National Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester and there's an exhibition in Bradford as well at the National Science and media Museum and a very small showcase at the science museum which includes uh early Cyberman costume as well as some of the uh disc recorder that we saw in our PowerPoint so do pop along all well worth seeing questions we've got a couple of minutes for questions not often do you get a chance to ask these group of people questions there you go I'm not very good at Cricket thank you David uh Simon tough um obviously today you're a bit constrained by what we could get up the stairs and into the room if you were given free reign to choose other objects uh what would they be I know that some of my colleagues on the organizing committee were very keen for you to bring the transmitter but obviously um that that wasn't really a goer right but I didn't want to see that what would you guys choose oh well that would have been the first one I jumped to would be um the 2lo transmitter that's on display in the science Museum's Information Age Gallery which is about it's a bit further width and it's about five meters wide so yeah I'm not quite sure how it got out of places or got in but it seemed to spend most of its life in the attics of buildings but that and so significant to see the kind of mixture of technologies that kind of cobbled together and although we've got it on display now and telling that story for most of the people who heard the 2lo calling phrase had no idea what the technology looked like or they their interaction was with the voice so it's great that we can now kind of celebrate the Technologies as well as the presenters and the programming and the listeners of course yeah I bring Vera uh one of the very early sort of recording TV recording devices just so I could show it people and say stop complaining we didn't keep stuff from the 50s and 60s bloody hard and frankly television was always tended to be an ephemeral medium so just stop whinging about it I would have brought the BBC box but it is currently on display in a museum so it can't be here and in my eyes I've gone the complete other way so instead of looking in the past it's sort of the beginning of the next phase of the BBC it's it's sort of like the physical implementation of what it would look like if you carried all your data with you the BBC box effectively so I would like to have that on display so we've got you've got radio we've got TV and then you've got the future the internet your data excellent I think the aerial for too early wasn't it on top of selfridges uh yeah it got moved uh the second iteration got moved to there later on once the one that's in the museum was retired but yeah obviously Engineers could go shopping I think so one more question which is from whom stand here until somebody there we are thank you sir I knew you'd rescue me this isn't a programmers conference [Laughter] hi um Alexander Robinson you said about the past big steps being from color television then to digital TV what do you think is the next big step that we've got coming what's the next Revolution something to do with the internet and I know that's so vague and it's such a cop-out answer but the internet is something that is living and it's evolving and it's changing all the time and it can get to a point where you feel like you've caught up with something but actually that was two months ago we're over here now you should have been looking here so once we figure out the shape that the internet is taking and things that we thought were going to be here forever have just sort of started to implode a little bit so it's a case of what is what is secure what is public service what is good what are we looking forward to do so I think at least in my eyes it is the internet but we don't quite know what that is yet because everything is moving and changing and figuring itself out at the same time we're figuring it out if that would you guys agree yeah I could live with that also also we've sent our dog frankly I was once at a conference with my six-year-old daughter and at the end she filled in the form said your talk was boring and lacked interest put it in the assessment if you've fallen asleep Ellie's have there been over the years because r d is all about that isn't it you know seeing if something goes blind alleys yeah well I like to say that we do experiments and a well-formed experiment can never fail because if the thing you've learned is for God's sake don't do that ever again that's actually useful knowledge um so I think the 3D TV was the is the is the obvious one which we managed to avoid we didn't really invest that much in it and obviously you can read the copious reports from the National Audit office and other places about the duties digital media initiative but I'd rather not revisit that pain because it may still be traumatized people in the audience so excellent right we must track down those people who say they've still got a black and white TV because they've still behind the back of my license because they exist don't they thank you very much indeed thank you Dr Rachel Boone Bill Thompson and Simone Eubanks thank you very much indeed

2023-08-07 02:49

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