Television:
The birth of television is one of the greatest inventions of mankind in the 20th century. In modern society, life without television is unimaginable. Black-and-white and color TVs of various models and functions are flowing from assembly lines into factories, schools, hospitals and homes around the world, miraculously changing people's lives rapidly. All kinds of TVs bring people into a colorful and wonderful world.
Nipkov Disk
Russian-German scientist Paul Nipkov was very interested in electrical appliances when he was still in middle school. It was a period of rapid development of cable technology. Electric lights and trams have replaced the ancient oil lamps, candles and horse-drawn carriages. Telephones have appeared and become popular. Undersea cables have connected Europe and the Americas. All of these have brought great convenience to people's daily lives. Later he came to the University of Berlin to study physics. He began to wonder if he could use electricity to transmit images to distant places. He began an unprecedented exploration. After painstaking efforts, he discovered that if the image is divided into individual image points, it is very possible to transmit the image of a person or scene to a distant place. Soon, an instrument called the "television telescope" came out. It’s an opto-mechanical scanning disk that looks clumsy but is extremely ingenious. On November 6, 1884, Nipkov reported his invention to the Royal Patent Office in Berlin. On the first page of his patent application, he wrote: "The apparatus described here enables an object located at point A to be seen at any point B." A year later, the patent was approved.
This is the first patent in the history of world television. The patent describes three basic elements of how a TV works: 1. Break the image into pixels and transmit them one by one. 2. The transmission of pixels is performed line by line. 3. When using pictures to convey the movement process, many pictures appear quickly one after another, and in the eyes the process merges into one. This is the basic principle for the development of all subsequent TV technologies, and even today's TVs still work according to these basic principles.
The word television was used for the first time in 1900 at the World's Fair in Paris. However, the simplest and most primitive mechanical television did not appear until many years later.
Baird and Mechanical Television
By chance, the British inventor John Baird saw information about Nipkov's disk. Nipkov's genius idea aroused his great interest. He immediately realized that what he wanted to do in the future was to invent television. So, he immediately got to work. It was Baird's persistent pursuit and great enthusiasm for the invention of television that supported Baird. In 1924, a TV set that embodies Baird's hard work and sweat finally came out. This television used Nipkov's principle and used two Nipkov disks to transmit a cross silhouette four feet apart for the first time.