Philo Farnsworth: You may not know him, but he invented TV (He did it first, but RCA got the glory)

AP - Seattle Post ^ | Thursday, August 17, 2006 | FRAZIER MOORE

[GSlob]

About everybody and everything involved with so-called "pop culture" - root, branch, leaves, trunk and that big pile of crap on the ground near its trunk, its content and its technicalities.

[Fresh Wind]

The Philadelphia Electric Company (aka PECO) is the name of the electric utility in the Philly area. I don't think the predecessor of Philco ever used that name. You can't always trust Wikipedia.

A Brief History of Philco

[Tribune7]

You're probably right.

[Borges]

Throw in Gutenberg and the Printing Press!

[GSlob]

Indeed. When everything written had to be hand carved in stone, the very difficulty and laboriuousness of carving served as a beautiful junk filter: only the really important things got recorded. Imagine Bronze Age sales flyers, if you could.

[Borges]

There was printing before Movable Type and it wasn't stone carvings. Things just had to be done by hand and books were much more expensive. No Printing Press = No Protestant Reformation, No Renaissance, No Scientific Revolution.

[LexBaird]

Indeed. When everything written had to be hand carved in stone, the very difficulty and laboriuousness of carving served as a beautiful junk filter: only the really important things got recorded. Imagine Bronze Age sales flyers, if you could.

How about bronze age sales receipts and bills of lading? From the age of cuneiform pressed into clay, writing was used for mundane day-to-day transactions. The only reason you have that impression is that the ephemera was tossed, while the art was kept and passed down. Still, there's quite a bit of graffiti on the walls of Pompeii.

[SunkenCiv]

Old topic, from a few years back, about the inventor of the Stellarator. :') No ping, just adding.