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Best references to electronic engineering in film or TV?

bluescreen

Hi Guys.

 

I was watching The Conversation starring Gene Hackman a few nights ago and came across a nice exchange between two of the main characters discussing the design of (then) advanced surveillance equipment:

 

Bernie: That's very nice, Harry. What did you use?

 

Harry: A three-stage directional microphone. MOSFET amplifier of my own design.

 

image

 

It's always nice when a serious attempt is made by filmmakers to include accurate depictions of technology. It made me wonder: what other cool references to electronic engineering have you come across in popular film or TV? Post them below in the comments!

 

And if you haven't seen The Conversation, it's an amazing film that's just as timely today as when it first came out in 1974.

  • Electronics and the enabling of the surveillance state

    starting with Hollerith

    ending with Whitfield Diffie.

  • There aren't enough films about this exciting field.  There are a few good biographies of Michael Faraday out there.  Michael Faraday was a bon homme, a helper at a bookstore.  Oliver Heaviside is equally appealing in that regard.

     

    Ben Franklin had a road-show about electricity.

     

    The documentary I would like to produce, get your wallets out, this will have to be a group thing, is about the introduction of radio to Britain.  Birth of the BBC.

     

    Radio started with spark-gaps.  Bandwidth-narrowing was first attempted by tuning antennas.  The immediate consumer of this technology was ships at sea.  By the time of the documentary, this had been going on for thirty years.

     

    Guys in the English government got the idea for terrestrial broadcasting.  But they were faced with a recursion issue:  Who would buy a receiver when there were no broadcasters?  Who would establish a transmitter when there were no receivers?  By now top valves had come along.

     

    The government decided to build a radio and give it away to every mailing address!

     

    This is probably the first expansion of government services beyond the traditional ones.  This was also the first time women were employed, en-masse, outside the home.  Because this was a new job for society, it was decided to use people who weren't already working formally.  Up until 1980 electronic line assembly was the leading employer of women in the USA.  Two million of them were dumped on the street without warning when surface-mount came in. 

     

    They made everything from scratch to save costs. 

     

    Travellers to the Isles returned to their home countries and demanded wireless service.

     

    ==========

     

    EH Armstrong deserves a bio that has some dramatic rendering to it rather than just a litany of occurrences.  Some narrative arc.

     

    The Op-Amp story.  Started out as a contract with Fairchild to develop automatic exposure for 35mm film cameras.  Still (arguably) the best soln for IRL challenges.

     

    The PLL/FFL story.  I know why we were in better shape back then!  We had to de-couch in order to trim the roll out of our tubes as they warmed up.

     

    The feedback story.  Drama as Dr. Harold Black gets stiffed at the patent office.

     

    Masers and Lasers.  Also cosmic masers and gravitational lensing.

     

    Magnetic cores.  Start with the universal phenomenon of reactance.  Spin pairing, intermediate (4) valence stability, Curie point.  Antecedence.

    Choke Inductor 4 pie RF, 0.5 mH, Price for 2

    Meaning of complex terms describing magnetic materials.  B-H.  What the quantitative differences in hysteresis curve imply for core application.  Global issues with rare-earth minerals, mining and smelting.  This may sound dry, but the kids are real hot on magnetics nowadays.

     

     

    Beyond and before the transistor.  SCRs, thermionics, spark-gaps, cryotrons.  Saturable reactor amps.  PIN diodes.

     

    Thoradson Transformer, first commercially viable electronics part fab.

     

    Development of TV from an international perspective.  Ends with cold war race for the Jumbotron.

     

    Soviet electronics, then and now.

     

    Electronics in WWII.  Cascode loads, tetrodes and pentodes.  Radar.  Sonar.  Remote control.  Computing.  Developments in quartz oscillators and solid-state theory.  Air war over London, robot guns.  Statistical process control.  Sniffing, jamming, spoofing.  FM.  Spread-spectrum.

     

    Transformers and T-lines.  Waveguides

     

    Antennas

     

    History of modulation schemes and the possibilities created by them.  Detection schemes.

     

    Monsters of linear

     

    Digital filtration

     

    Analog filtration

     

    superconductivity T&A

     

    information theory -- philosophy meets e- to their mutual benefit

     

    computing fabrics versus VonN processors.  Tips in architectural choices.

     

    optical and quantum computing

     

    A. Volta.  I, for one, am glad that we have dispensed with the frog-leg detector!

     

    Monsters of rock, signal processing in popular music.  the dream teams behind the Beatles and Jimi.

     

    Superhet and alternatives

     

    history of memory.  who can resist talking about SIU's Hg column!

     

    The diode, then and now.

     

    Intel 8008 to Zilog Z-80

     

     

    Anyway, if you  ask me, the field is replete with barely-explored cinematic topics.

  • in reply to johnbeetem

    Ah yes, another favourite. "It's not about reality but the perception of reality"

  • Westworld (1973) has awesome electronic and computer technology.  I like the underground workshop where they fix the robots that got shot up the night before.  Great image of Yul Brynner's face being removed to do an ill-advised upgrade.

     

    I like the computer room scenes.  I think one of the monitors is showing PDP-8 assembly language image

     

    I really got interested in robotics from seeing Westworld, but the interest waned when I saw how primitive real technology was circa 1973.