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When was the first electronic bitmap sign invented?

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Ampera:
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.

james_s:
I don't remember what sign it was but I remember seeing an old photo somewhere of the controller for a scrolling text sign that used a paper(?) tape floating on a trough of mercury with a grid of contacts on top of the tape. Holes in the tape allowed the mercury to touch the contacts lighting the associated lamps.

bsdphk:
The worlds first scrolling electronic sign was invented by the danish engineer and inventor Viggo Jensen and put into operation in 1914, based on the principle of perforated papertape and using mercury as one of the contacts.

Since 1926 the danish newspaper "Politiken" ran one of these "Light-Newspapers" on their building at Copenhagens "RĂ„dhuspladsen", it was later upgraded to have multiple colors, green, red and yellow/white.  These days it's been replaced with LEDs.

There is a short movie-clip from 1939 here: https://www.danskkulturarv.dk/dr/bt-centralen-og-politikens-hus-lysavis/

Viggo was a very prolific inventor, from variable speed motors for newspaper presses to what essentially became "Technicolor".



Ampera:
That's an absolutely ingenious design. Way simpler than how I'd have thought to make it, and definitely what I was looking for. Thanks for finding/knowing about this.

jmelson:
In about 1977 or so, I built an electronic controller for the "Nite Sign", a grid of incandescent lights suspended from a small aircraft or helicopter.
The original control used a wide punched cloth tape dragged over a "bed of nails" in a mercury bath!  They wanted to get rid of the mercury both for health hazards and because mercury eats aluminum.  We used a 6800 demo board with a keypad and LED segment display and custome drivers, and the user could save and reload their messages via audio casette tape.

Jon

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