Dimensions Of Darth Vader

The Day of Dimensions, that’s how December 30 could be called. It was this day, the year 1924, that American astronomer Edwin Hubble (1889-1953) was able to show that the universe is expanding with his discovery of the relation between velocity and distance. On this very same day, the year 1953, the first color television, offering us a very new dimension too, got on sale for 1,175 us dollars (to get some idea of the price tag: in the 1930s television sets cost the equivalent of about 7,000 us dollars today and had little available programming, for sure compared with the still ever expanding number of tv-channels today). Although there had been a 1884 patent by Paul Nipkow for a electromechanical system, a 1924 demonstration for a television system by John Baird, the earliest television sets were merely radios with a television device added that produced a very tiny postage-stamp sized image, hardly a breakthrough to new dimensions. A blessing in disguise perhaps, it’s told that in the 1930s a certain Hitler didn’t see the opportunities of television. His profile on the tube could have meant a devouring Black Hole of human history and would dwarf Darth Vader to a very innocent and cuddly gnome.