Quote:
Originally Posted by Argus25
It is an interesting situation in that the American TV engineers were years ahead of the ones in the UK in the 1940's, with designs that included energy efficiency scanning and proper interlace systems.
The paradox is though, that many of the revolutionary ideas about TV technology in fact originated in the UK, from people like Blumlein. However they were only paid attention to in the USA initially, for example RCA labs taking up Blumlein's idea for energy recovery scanning in the early 1940's.
So UK TV's were slow to get these improvements, along with slow to get turret tuners as well compared to their American counterparts.
The same thing repeated itself in the field of computing where the theory in the UK was well ahead in the 1950's, but more successfully commercialized in the USA. I guess they had the population to support this.
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I'm sure there are many examples of other industrial and technological developments where different countries moved at different paces and in different directions, regardless of the origins, tradition, know-how and even patents related to a given technology or product. As you point out, the population is also important, as well as the whole economy, as both are determinant for the growth potential (education --> research --> development --> industry) and also relate to the size of the potential internal market. Perhaps american companies were more risk prone, and when you have a big market to start with, any new solutions that are more reliable and/or efficient (e.g., the energy efficient scanning) can be very appealing within the context of an economy of scale.