> At one point sales of punchcards and related tooling constituted a completely bonkers 30% of IBM’s annual profit margin, so you can understand that IBM had a lot invested in getting that consistently, precisely correct.
> At around this time John Logie Baird invented the first “mechanical television”; like punchcards, the first television cameras were hand-cranked devices...
It goes on to argue that the television standards influenced terminal dimensions, but there is no link (unless I missed something) between the banknote/punchcard discussion and that of the television - other than the fact that they used hand-cranked devices. No mention as to the punchcard's size/dimensions being carried over to television (and by extension, terminals) other than what appears to be a coincidence in the number of characters fitting on a line of a punchcard.
Looking at the origins of the television standards (at least for the number of terminal lines, since the number of characters per line seems to have been influenced by typewriters), one could trace it back to William Kennedy Dickson (created the 35mm standard by cutting 70mm roll film in half), or previously to Peter & David Houston and George Eastman for their creation/marketing of early roll film cameras.