Tuesday, June 03, 2008
Droitwich BBC Longwave Broadcasting 1934
As someone documenting the change from analogue to digital broadcasting, this 10 minute film from 1934 posted by the BBC Engineering Dept on YouTube is fascinating. I love the fact that the first announcers were engineers with local accents. I wonder what other gems are in the vaults. Mike Barraclough in the UK tipped me off to it and adds
The film was contributed to BBCeng as a result of help from Neil
Wilson of the Washford Radio Museum, John Phillips, Jeff Cant and Dave
Porter. The original film was 14 minutes long but it has been edited down to
just under 10 minutes by Martin Ellen in order to avoid having to split it before uploading to YouTube. The commentary has not been cut, but some relatively unimportant scenes have been shortened (such as a bucket being hauled up the side of the building). [A new version will be uploaded in due course as a few short gaps in the sound appeared after rendering!] The commentary is by E.A. Pawley, who later became editor of the book BBC Engineering 1922-1972.
An excellent article on Droitwich can be found here, for the site is still home to BBC Radio 4's main longwave transmitter site, now on 198 kHz rather than 200 kHz when it started out way back then.
lol, I have a book that was printed in 1938, that tell's me a lot about the BBC's underground FREE Hydro-Electricity Station situated in Wychbold, Worcestershire, that was then powering enough FREE Hydro-Electricity to power a city of over 5000 inhabitent's, ie; an underground city!
ReplyDeleteApparently, the million's of gallon's of sea that passes through the BBC's underground FREE Hydro-Electricity Station, also run's from the neck of the England and Scotish boarder, all the way down to the South. So it beg's the question of why the BBC is involved in hyping up the British public over global oil war's, energy increases, and burning fossil fuel's and pump pricing hyke's, when they've been sitting on FREE Hydro-Electricity since 1938! Isn't that like the BBC is saying, "Fuck you and your econemy", and make them look totally full of bullshit! !.