The BBC asked me (Neil Smith – Technical Historian!) to appear on another episode of The Secret Genius of Modern Life with Professor Hannah Fry.
They wanted me to show my work-in-progress replica of Leon Theremin’s ground-breaking closed-circuit television systems from 1925/6/7.
The program is due to be broadcast on April 23 2025. It was still in a fairly early stage of development when we recorded the episode last October. I’m aiming to have it all finished by the centenary in late 2026.
The program is available in BBC iPlayer now at https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0029ktf/the-secret-genius-of-modern-life-series-3-4-doorbell
Here are some images of the replica. The main mirror drum is about 11 inches/280 mm diameter. I machined all of the parts in my home machine shop.
What a masterpiece of home-produced engineering! Very well done, Neil.
That must be Gold medal material at any model engineering exhibition, Neil. Will it work on QO-100 😉 ?
I look forward to seeing it at some point e.g. CAT26.
David M0YDH
The plan is to get it all functional for 2026. It needs about 50 kHz bandwidth plus a sync channel, so any wideband segment will work, even via QO100. If I get really keen, I’ll make a thermionic 28 MHz radio link to emulate what Theremin did. I’ve got some electronic receiver and test-card generating code cobbled together with help from an excellent chap in Texas, so it ought to be feasible to have multiple receivers watching. Runs on an STM NUCLEO board, with USB out that pretends to be a webcam.