Industrial television

As industrial television is called television systems, which are used for surveillance and monitoring in industry, research and trade. It has now been largely replaced by the webcam .

history

The first system was built by Walter Bruch in Peenemünde in 1941 in order to be able to safely follow the launch of the A4 rockets. Series-produced systems came onto the market in the USA as early as the late 1940s, and in Germany for the 1953 radio exhibition , with Grundig AG being particularly active in this area. The technology aroused unexpectedly great interest there.

technology

Industrial television works with the usual television standards, i.e. in Europe with 625 lines and 50 fields / s. For applications that require high resolution, the 819 line standard originally used in France is also used, especially for the transmission of processed radar images, for example in air traffic control.
The transition from the iconoscope , which began in autumn 1956, brought great progress - to the vidicon as an image pick-up tube in video cameras, as it allowed very small cameras, which opened up new areas of application.

Applications

In geology , miniature cameras can be used as borehole probes. For this purpose, a dummy with the same dimensions is first lowered into the depth, it does not get stuck anywhere, then a special camera follows, which shows a cross-section of the ground and also the borehole inclination with great accuracy. In the mining industry , people and shunting operations can be monitored underground, and the firedamp-proof cameras even make it possible to observe explosions. During lignite mining, the bucket filling of the huge excavators can be checked immediately, whereas before this was only possible with a considerable delay due to the immense distances, by observing the conveyor belt. Since coal dust is an electrical conductor, special protective measures are necessary for this, and the low light reflection also requires bright lenses at night. At power plants , the chimney can be observed from the control center, as can the combustion chamber and slag flow. Controlling water levels with a video camera is more complex than using sensors, but it is reliable: if the screen shows something, then the correct level. And electricity meter monitoring in energy-intensive industrial companies allows the tariffs to be exploited particularly well. Originally, people even experimented with television-based paging systems: the name of the employee or special messages appeared on a screen.

Traffic monitoring also plays a major role from the start, especially when it comes to ship traffic at locks, as strict safety regulations are designed to prevent traffic from being paralyzed.

Originally, industrial television was also used for document transmission. In this way you could avoid expensive pneumatic tube lines or speed up processes. This was especially true for banks and especially for the car counters, which also appeared in Germany from 1957. A submitted check was placed under a camera by the customer service representative so that the dispatcher could check it on a higher floor using the account card for signature and funds. Both the check and the bank card could also be forwarded to screens in the management. In this procedure, the approval note was carried out by a special stamp, which could be activated from a desk phone, secured by locks.

literature

Christian Rose, Industrial Television, R. Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 1959