Listen to my interview with Steven Johnson about TV technology on and episode of  American Innovations.

A History of Color TV 

Bright Signals is  40 year history of the technological, aesthetic, industrial and cultural development of color TV. The governing idea of this book is that color television was an incredibly complex technology of visual culture that disrupted and reframed the very idea of television, while also revealing deep tensions and aspirations about technology’s relationship to and perspective on the “natural” world and, relatedly, our potential to extend human sight and experience.

Medical Television

This research, which serves as a bridge from Bright Signals to my new book project, examines the collaboration between hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and
​U.S. broadcast networks in the late 1940s and early 1950s to develop and market color television for medical education and as a improvement upon the surgical amphitheater. This research includes study of the use of in-house television studios by hospitals for both closed-circuit and locally broadcast medical programs in the 1950s. I have a book chapter and journal article (Technology & Culture) published on this area.

A History of Closed Circuit

While we now tend think of closed-circuit television (CCTV) almost exclusively as a technology of governmental or commercial surveillance, historically it has served as essential infrastructure and form of automation for a set of diverse fields such as medicine, education, engineering, manufacturing, and the military. The aim of Closed Circuits, Distant Bodies, a book project in process, is to detail the history of CCTV development and use from the 1940s up until the 1980s these various settings in order to better understand the technology as both an aid to the expansion of U.S. post-war consumer society and industrial science, militarization, health care, policing, social reform and education, as well as to consider it as a pre-history to our current moment of increasingly expansive and invasive deployment of digital-based surveillance.