History of Television
Television is among man’s greatest inventions, but it was not invented overnight nor was it created by one man alone. It was the outcome of several scientists’ developments that contributed to its final all-electronic version. The history of television dates back to the breakthrough of photoconductivity through the element selenium in 1873 by Willoughby Smith, along with the discovery of telectroscope and creation of scanning disk in 1884 by Paul Nipkow.
These inventions in the history of television were first connected for realistic use in electronic transmission of photographs and still pictures; and by the early decade of 20th century, transmission of halftone photographs were being done through telephone and telegraph lines like newspaper service.
In the 1920’s to 1930’s, electrochemical methods were developed, most particularly by John Logie Baird. He provided the world’s first public exhibition of a functioning television that conveyed moving images by means of tone graduation or grayscale on the 26th of January 1926 at his London laboratory, and created a comprehensive investigational broadcast system surrounding his technology. On the 3rd of July 1928, he further showed the world’s first-ever color television broadcast.
Other famous “mechanical television developers’ in the history of television included Charles Francis Jenkins, who in 1923 exhibited a primordial television system; Frank Conrad in 1928 showed a converter of movie film to television at Westinghouse; and Herbert E. Ives and Frank Gray in 1927 established a wired long-distance TV, followed by a two-way TV in 1930.
The systems of color television were created and patented still before ‘black and white’ television was functional. The complete electronic TV in the history of television depended on the inventions of Vladimir Zworykin, Philo Taylor Farnsworth, and other inventors who produced similar system that were appropriate to be used for mass distribution in TV programming.
On the 25th of August, Farnsworth gave the world’s first public exhibition of the all-electronic TV system in Philadelphia at the Franklin Institute. Standard broadcast programming took place in the US, Germany, United Kingdom, Soviet Union, and France prior to World War II. In 1936, the first standard television transmission having modern level definition was produced in England, and was later upgraded to System A. In the 1950’s it was common for an American home to have television sets.
For many years in the history of television, different countries utilized different technological standards. And as the years passed, and with the coming of modern advancements and high technology innovations, television today is one of the most first-rate devices that have become a part of almost anyone’s way of life.