Reading about Boris Hrabovskiy and the television at the history museum yesterday aroused my curiosity. I suggest going to the 375 metre high Tashkent TV tower, the tallest building in Central Asia, where we can get a view over the city.
Although we take a taxi to what looks like the nearest road to the Tashkent TV tower, it takes considerable exploration on foot to actually find it. We pass some ramshackle caravans and a barking dog straining on its chain.
The Tashkent TV tower is perched above the scrubby trees and painted bungalows in this part of town on three concrete legs, a special earthquake resistant design. We have to show our passports and be scanned for weapons at a guard point outside, and again when we get into the building.
A very earnest young Uzbek lady then gives us a short spiel about the wonders of Uzbek science and technology, of which I understand about one word in twenty. There’s a display about Hrabovskiy, explaining that he was the first person to transmit a remote motion picture. Born in Ukraine, Hrabovskiy moved with his family moved to Tokmok, Kyrgyzstan, when he was a boy. He went on to study Physics at Tashkent University, where he made his discovery in 1928.
The first fully electronic TV set
The road to success wasn’t easy. Hrabovskiy and his two partners applied for a patent in 1925, but it wasn’t patented until 28 June 1928. This patent certified that they were “the inventors of the first fully electronic television set in the world”. But by the time it was granted, only Hrabovskiy was still in Tashkent.
He started working with his lab assistant, Ivan Beluanskiy, to create a prototype. On 26 July, a transmitter was installed on Sailgokh Street in central Tashkent, and a crowd of people gathered round the television set, 500 metres to the west. There they saw the first live moving images – a moving tram and people walking.
“You want ordinary meal or special meal or…?” I don’t follow the rest of what the woman in the ticket office is asking us. The young lady guide explains that there’s a restaurant at the top of the Tashkent TV tower, or rather 110 metres up it. The ticket price will depend on what we plan to eat once we’re up the tower.
My mother and I exchange glances. We don’t have very high expectations of food served on a revolving platform at the top of a concrete pole in Uzbekistan.
We ask for “just a coffee”. The guide and the lady on the cash desk confer, exchanging ‘but they’re foreign’ glances, and we are allowed through.
Up in the Tashkent TV tower
Up at the top of the Tashkent TV tower, a ring of metal tables is fairly whizzing round the edge of the observation platform. As soon as we step from the stationary central part of the deck, we find ourselves doing the splits as one leg is dragged off while the other is left behind.
The restaurant is decorated in crimson velvet and dark wood, and cloudy windows give a view down over Tashkent. Loud Russian and Turkish pop is being played on several speakers around the room. I’ve grown used to the deafening muzak in every Central Asian café or restaurant, but my mother sighs with relief every time we rotate away from one of the speakers, then immediately starts to wince as we approach the next. A waiter is following the tables around the room offering a plastic tray stacked with lurid soft drinks, apples, chocolate and sunflower seeds.
On this grey July day, the city looks washed out. From up here I can see grey roofs, and white and pale blue tiled apartment blocks, then in the far distance on the horizon, dusty brown hills, merging with the murky sky.
Right below the Tashkent TV tower is the huge Tashkent Land amusement park, with swimming pools and long plastic slides. Despite the dampness of the day, and last year’s disaster at a Moscow aquapark, which killed over 100 people, little dots of people are splashing in the water and lounging by the pools. The bright chlorinated azure contrasts with the muddy canal next to the park. In the middle, a thick jet of water shoots 50 feet into the air.
Steppe in Style 
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