When was the first electronic bitmap sign invented?

[W-B_LiteBrite]

The Motograph News Bulletin, or “zipper” as it was known informally, was an impressive sight when it was first unveiled in the fall of 1928. It extended 380 feet around the fourth floor of what was then the Times Tower at One Times Square—the second tallest building in Manhattan when it opened in 1904. With a band five-feet tall, the moving letters, comprising 14,800 light bulbs, were visible from a distance of several city blocks.

With all due respect, and from looking at key pictures and old films of the "motograph" in action, no way was it 14,800 bulbs.

First of all, there are the dimensions of the building itself:
43rd Street - 20' (240")
Broadway - 143' (1,716")
42nd Street - 58' 4-1/8" (700.125")
Seventh Avenue - 137' 11-3/4" (1,655.75")

Also, several photos were taken of the 43rd Street side during World War II when it was not running. The "Motograph" (as it was originally known) was built 12 rows high on a 60" high ribbon (thus each row was separated by 4.5"). On 43rd Street, 720 bulbs were on that side. Or an average of 60 per row. Meaning that the vertical columns were spaced 4" apart. 18 bulbs were missing from the bottom left side, and 6 from the top right - all to conform that side to the angles at which they were built and positioned (about 9.4 degrees, from what I could tell in terms of the slant).

Thus, by such measurements, it is estimated that the Broadway side had a total of 5,149 bulbs (>429 average per row), the 42nd Street side 2,103 ( > 175 average per row) and the Seventh Avenue side 4,963 ( < 414 average per row). The grand total of bulbs, give or take:

12,935

The other factor, in studying old photos and films, is how many characters were on each side at one time. Close-up, character spacing was about 12.5 bulbs, give or take. (The way the characters moved seemed reminiscent of the old interlacing on analogue TV's.) Thus by that factor, there was an average of:
- 4.8 characters on 43rd Street
- 34.32 characters on Broadway
- 14 characters on 42nd Street
- 33.12 characters on Seventh Avenue
As the headlines passed, on each corner one letter disappeared for a bit. This was where the ornaments connecting each side were mounted.

If the four sides were attached end to end, they would consitute 1,078 average rows for a total of 359' 4".  On each corner as the message advanced, about one character was missing; if accounted for, that would add 16 feet (4 feet per side) to the figure, thus the total would be about 375' 4".  (That's on the level where the top row was; going to the furthest up it'd be about 5' max per side, thus close to the 380' figure cited.)

On the 1997 updated (Mark III) zipper around the building, there may have been 227,200 LED's, but I counted 22,720 pixels total.  Meaning, 10 LED's per pixel.  That used Daktronics Sans Serif 16.

But the Mark II zipper, my personal favorite, used from 1965 to 1997, used the same dimensions for bulb spacing (4" between columns, 4.5" between rows), 11 rows high on a continuous band measuring 57" tall.  Its initial controls - operated by Life magazine from 1965 to 1971 - were from Chicago-based Naxon Telesign with which sign-maker Douglas Leigh had a long relationship (developed in part because of Artkraft Strauss' exclusive arrangement with Trans-Lux whose zipper controls were used for many a "Flashcast" or "Adcast" traveling message sign on Artkraft billboards up and down the Square).  For this the company devised a round display font for use on zippers like the one being built not only there, but also atop the Walgreens building on the corner of State and Randolph Streets in Chicago.  (Before then, they used a square / boxy font that had been in use on all their machines built since 1939.)  The Times Square "Mark II" zipper consisted of 12,408 bulbs - or 1,128 per row.  Three sides had the Life logo flashing in-between headlines (after Life dropped out and Reuters began operating it later in '71 for a 6-year period, the red bulbs were taken out and replaced with other A19 inside-frosted bulbs, making them look like Velcro add-ons).  The bulbs used to flash the headlines at the start were (apparently) 30 watt (definitely) A21 reflector bulbs.  From about 1972 to '77 they used a Digital Equipment Corporation-derived dot matrix font that was used on Reuters' Extel 70 teleprinters (see below - would anyone know the exact name of this predecessor to the RO3-2513 font used on Apple II computer monitors?).  Then starting in 1986 when New York Newsday took over operation, they began using an early Daktronics Venus system with Sans Serif 7 for the headlines . . . and Fixed Width 7 for the time and temperature checks.

[jonpaul]

1928:

Times Square Manhattan NYC
NY Times news
Incandescent lamps and relays.

https://www.timessquarenyc.org/history-of-times-square

Jon

[tooki]

1928:

Times Square Manhattan NYC
NY Times news
Incandescent lamps and relays.

https://www.timessquarenyc.org/history-of-times-square

Jon

The link in reply #11 above contains a much larger version of that photo, rather than the uselessly small thumbnail you attached.

[W-B_LiteBrite]

I also wish to note that on the Smithsonian Institution website relating to Douglas Leigh's papers and photos, a picture of the Times Square zipper's 1965-71 Chicago sister (see below) had the caption misidentify the period taken as 1940-45, though clearly the Life logo as it looked from 1961 to its demise as a weekly in 1972 was clearly in evidence (as was the round Telesign display type).  Maybe they confused the pic with that of the World War II-era zipper across the street (at Seventh and 42nd, atop the Rialto Theatre) that flashed news headlines in the daytime per dimout requirements - but was mounted by Artkraft Strauss and its zipper controls from Trans-Lux, and operated by Coca-Cola and the radio station then known as WJZ, now WABC.  (Some pics taken from the SE corner of 42nd and Broadway facing northwest on D-Day showed this "other" zipper in operation, across from The Times' as their headlines were flashing.)

[AlbertL]

This film shows the paper-tape equipment for the Motograph on the giant Chevrolet sign in Chicago:

[ebastler]

This film shows the paper-tape equipment for the Motograph on the giant Chevrolet sign in Chicago:

Looks almost like the great clip posted by a guy named AlbertL in reply #18, 3.5 years ago! 

[W-B_LiteBrite]

Sometimes you'll just come up with a question, maybe even one you've had for a while but suddenly decided, damn I need to know the answer to that one, it's got to have an interesting history.

Put simply, I want to know what the first installed use of an electronic bitmap sign. This means any large format, think Times Square size, display which utilizes a grid of lights (or non-illuminating active elements), to automatically display information (text).

Now Wikipedia proclaims the first *computerized* sign ever installed was the famous Westinghouse Sign. How computerized it actually was I believe it still up for minor debate, but regardless, Wikipedia claims this was completed in 1967, and construction was first initiated in 1966. Now that might be good enough, except just today I was watching some Beatles music videos on YouTube. In particular, I was watching the Vevo music video for Eight Days a Week, which has footage of the Beatles' concert in Shea Stadium.

https://youtu.be/kle2xHhRHg4?t=107

If you were to pause this video at around 1:46 and 1:47, you can see in soft focus, quite obviously, a bitmap text display in the background. Now I wouldn't say a bitmap screen must be computerized, so the Westinghouse Sign may have genuinely had a "computer" on it, with these signs simply having some other sort of controller logic, but that still leaves the original question. If this concert happened in 1965, and as of that point Shea Stadium had a large format bitmap sign, what was the first large format bitmap sign?

Any ideas or insight would be helpful. I've tried to Google, but this question is particularly strange in that it seems like something someone should know, but I can't find that specific information documented anywhere. That being said, I haven't researched too hard, and thought I'd try here before digging through patents and such.

May or may not have been the first, but the sign at Shea was built by General Indicator Corp.'s All-American Scoreboards division and first put in use at the Mets' first season there - 1964.  Their font was similar to what Stewart-Warner had.

[W-B_LiteBrite]

As to the Motograph, I did a slight miscalculation.  Instead of 15 bulbs missing on the left end of the Seventh Avenue side, there were five (only seven shown on the first column).  And based on the measurements of the building from end to end on that side, the bulb count from end to end would have been ~4,963 bulbs (rather than 4,965), thus the total would actually have been ~12,934 bulbs.  But in any case . . . no way was the tally actually 14,800.  With the building measurements, Motograph row height and the spacing of the columns, it would have been impossible to attain such a high number.

I counted a total of 175 full panels (24" x 60", 72 bulbs in a 6 x 12 arrangement) and 7 partial ones - two on each end of the 43rd Street, Broadway and 42nd Street sides, only one on Seventh Avenue on the left.

[TimFox]

As a kid, I found a stash of prewar Popular Mechanics and similar magazines collected by my uncle.
I remember a short article featuring a wall of light-bulb pixels controlled by another wall of photocells (probably gas-filled, driving relays) so that a human could dance in front of the “electric eyes” and be represented by the lights.

[rdenney]

All these Motograph signs were electromechanical, not electronic. They used paper tapes or conveyor-driven switch contactors, and the messages they displayed were mechanically produced.

The question was the first "electronic bitmap" sign, which seems to me to require a matrix of on-off instruction stored electronically. I haven't been able to find good info on this, but it would appear that the first large-scale computer-controlled bitmapped display was the Astrolite scoreboard installed in the Astrodome in Houston in 1965. The central part of the scoreboard complex was a bit-mapped display of about 30 by 40 feet that used incandescent bulbs and was computer-controlled to show animations and real-time messages.

Character-matrix signs such as those used on lighted scoreboard were older, and were probably switched from electromechanical patterns, not from electronic storage prior to the 60's.

The first freeway-management signs were used on the New Jersey Turnpike in the 50's, but those were "changeable" message signs, not "variable" message signs, and could only light or not light specific words that were formed in neon. These were in use until a little over ten years ago. Other forms of changeable message signs were used on freeways going back to the 40's, using rotating drums with a fixed and limited set of messages on them, that were remotely switched. The first true variable-message signs that were bitmapped (but still character-based) were used in the late 60's, though I can't find a concrete example of those before the Santa Monica Freeway surveillance, communication and control system that was built in 1972.

The use of electromechanical displays with flip disks or rotating triface targets also date to the 70's.

The first scoreboard that could show video was in 1970's, and the first to show color video was actually quite a bit later.

Japan switched to fully bitmapped graphic displays on freeway signs in the 80's. Prior to that, they used fixed bulb signs depicting the main road network in Tokyo that would be lighted with different colors to show motorists current conditions on the freeways. These became computer-controlled bitmapped displays in the 80's, mostly showing the same thing. Character-matrix signs using neon and later LED's followed up these large graphic displays show show travel times to specific downstream landmarks.

Bulb-matrix, flip-disk, fiber-optic and LED technology were competing for traffic control signs up until the early 2000's, when LEDs took over.

Back to the Astrodome--they built an LED-based color scoreboard to replace the original in 1988. I'm sure it was not the first, but it was pretty early.

But the main answer is: The first electronically controlled bit-mapped sign dates to the 60's.

Rick "marched around in the Astrodome as a Boy Scout the year it opened" Denney