Warehouse 13, Baird Scanning Disk & Caretaker Ribbon Artifacts

original movie prop

In fourth season finale episode The Truth Hurts, Artie and team come up with a desperate plan to stop Paracelsus from taking complete control of the Warehouse. Wrapping a Caretaker Ribbon, used to break or transfer a Caretaker's connection to the Warehouse, around an antique television scanning disk artifact capable of projecting the Ribbon's power between electronic devices, Claudia fires her Tesla through the disk and ribbon, directing the energy into Artie's Farnsworth and out of Pete's. Unfortunately Paracelsus manages to deflect the blast back at them, knocking Pete to the ground and leaving a dumbfounded Artie holding this charred artifact.

The electromechanical television, which Scottish inventor John Logie Baird first successfully demonstrated in 1926, used a spinning disk with spirally positioned holes that had been invented some years earlier called a scanning disk (or Nipkow disk). In use, the rapidly spinning scanning disk produced a series of curved lines across an arc sector of the disk face, representing a primitive precursor of the purely electromagnetic scan lines to come.

"After" prop version, consisting of weathered 11.5" (29 cm) spoked hard resin disk with metal/acrylic central spindle, and encircling burned, blackened, torn green ribbon. The prop used to represent a scanning disk in this episode oddly lacks the series of holes that define the device.

From VIP Fan Auctions & NBCUniversal.