Louis Le Prince
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
I can imagine scenario where we find historic broadcasts being reflected back to us via astronomical bodies, but given the already faint signal its a long shot at best.
Edison made the first film transport mechanism with intermittent motion, a synchronized shutter, and continuous film with sprocket holes.[1] Almost all later movie cameras and projectors work that way.
(Yes, there's an approach with a rotating prism and continually moving film. Some of the pre-Edison cameras worked that way. That's sometimes used for very high frame rate cameras, in the thousands of FPS range.)
[1] https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa...
What's described here is a single lens device that could successfully capture images in quick succession, if that doesn't count as a video camera i don't know what does.
Maybe someone with more historical knowledge can correct me but I was a little surprised to read how little influence Robert Goddard had on modern rocketry — at least from reading Wiley Ley's "Rockets, Missiles, and Space Travel" (1957). Of course Ley can be accused of bias since he was (from Wikipedia) "one of the first members of Germany's amateur rocket group, the Verein für Raumschiffahrt". At the same time, growing up in the U.S., I would not be surprised if a patriotic bias would also lead to over-representing our own Robert Goddard in our history books.
I can't deny the contrast between the secrecy of Goddard's work in the U.S. when compared to the openness and sharing of the amateur rocket group in Germany. Goddard seemed unable to develop a reliable means to supply the fuel and oxidizer to the combustion chamber while the German rocket group brought all their shared ideas and abilities to bear on creating, at last, the reaction-powered centrifugal pump that made all the difference in the world.
It always struck me as a kind of loose analogy to closed vs. open source.
At the same time, the analogy falls down with regard to cinematography as Edison was not known as an open collaborator and yet he "won".
Also, perhaps Goddard was cursed as well to have been born just a bit too early (he died the day after the bomb was dropped on Nakasaki, just as WWII was ending, too soon to see the fruits of what the Allies would bring back from Peenemünde).
von Braun (and his VfR team) ran into exactly the same two problems- they were damn hard problems- but because WvB was a gifted team leader he went out and got others to solve the problems for him. He got expert metallurgists to design an engine, and electronics engineers to solve those problems for him. He understood how to build teams- for example, he built the most powerful supersonic wind tunnel in the world, even though the V2 was already designed before the wind tunnel was complete. But he knew that offering the chance to work with the best wind tunnel in the world would ensure that the best aerodynamics engineers would want to work with him, and they would solve his design for him, even before the actual tunnel was complete.
That was why WvB built rockets that worked, while Goddard didn't, and why WvB had such a larger influence on others than Goddard. [1] Of course, team work can have downsides- sometimes you are on a team with nasty evil people. That's why Werner von Braun ended up a Sturmmbanfuehrer in the SS, because he was working for the Nazi's, and used concentration camp slave labor that was being worked to death to build his rockets. (It is estimated that more people died in Camp Dora being forced to build the V2- roughly 10,000- than from the rockets falling on them- roughly 7,000.)
[1]: At one point some debris from a crashed V2 were shown to Goddard, and he jumped to the conclusion that fit his priors about everyone trying to steal from him: the German rocket used control vanes like he did, therefore they must have stolen it from him. The best English language expert on von Braun and Goddard, Michael Neufeld, does not believe that any such thing happened- the German team documented their work enough that it's pretty clear where their ideas came from, and it seems unlikely that Goddard allowed enough information to leak out. But that was where Goddard's mind naturally went- any sophisticated rocket idea must have been stolen from him.
I first encountered it with a BuzzFeed Unsolved video of all things[0]. I think that shows stopped and Shane and Ryan have their own unrelated channel but it was an excellent series. They had that Saturday morning presenter chemistry down pat but with adult content.