History of TV

Imagine life without a TV.  This single invention gave rise to other modern industries whose lives thrive in the world of TV.  Personalities like Oprah Winfrey, or talk shows like "Tonight with David Letterman" would not be "them" if not for the TV industry.  Even Hollywood would be half as successful as it is today if it relied solely on movie houses while manufacturers of TV components would be out of business in the absence of TV.  TV essentially, is one of the fundamentals that distinguish a modern society.

Unlike other inventions, the history of TV is indeed a long history involving several scientists whose works became building blocks of the TV common to almost every American household today.

History of TV: Timeline

With much gratitude to the two scientists, Joseph Henry and Michael Faraday, the discovery of electromagnetism in 1831 opened the door of electronic communication - the essential aspect of TV broadcasting.  Following this, between 1862 to 1900, several other scientists invented and theorized how to transmit still images through electronic wires. 

In 1873, in the same manner, while experimenting with selenium and light, May and Smith revealed the possibility of transforming images from a particular source to electronic signals..  Overall, within this period, the whole idea of electronically transmitting and transforming images into a vacuum tube, having light emitted as end result, was realized.  Eugen Goldstein called these cathode rays.

The first TV system to have successfully produced an image was the creation Paul Nipkow's mechanical TV utilizing rotating disks and a lamp.  This was in 1884, and was called the electric telescope having 18 lines of resolution. 

During the first International Congress of Electricity, at the World's Fair in Paris in 1900, Russian Constantin Perskyi was the first person to use the word TV.  The period after that may be considered the history of TV systems.  From theories, people contributed to the development of the TV sets.  Other inventions, in search of the possibility of transmitting or "broadcasting" moving images over wires, failed in this aspect since they lacked the required fields to make their idea a reality. 

Vladimir Zworkin's iconoscope patented in 1923 became the basic foundation of the contemporary TV technology.  An iconoscope was a TV camera tube from the idea of transmitting images using cathode rays incepted by Campbell Swinton and Boris Rosing.

After this period, the history of TV focused on improving screen definitions.  The first screen definition in this type of system had only 30 lines, thus, is not able to reproduce small details.  By 1926, a higher definition but still poor in detail was the 30-line definition.  While improving on screen definitions, other broadcasting companies began individual efforts to achieve well-broadcasted images.