Old Familiar Memories - Photo 154

TV Pattern

In the twenties test patterns (or test charts as they were referred then) were more or less varied, but in the late thirties, when a few hundred receivers became commercially available, a standard was embraced by broadcasters. The chart was designed to both check transmitter performance from the studio to the antenna and allow the audience to determine the degree of performance of their individual receivers. In addition to the advantage of being a static signpost, of sorts, the chart revealed geometrical defects, horizontal and vertical degrees of picture resolution, and a range of shading gradations.

By the early fifties every TV station in America used a version of the same basic test chart until twenty-four hour broadcasting made it obsolete in the seventies. But one question remains unanswered. What about the most ubiquitous of all the pattern designs - the one with the picture of the indian? Where did it originate? Everyone recalls it, yet no one knows why the indian was used.