The way people watch television has changed dramatically since the medium first emerged in the 1940s and 1950s and changed American life forever. TV technology advanced steadily from decade to decade: color arrived in the 1960s, followed by cable TV in the 1970s, VCRs in the 1980s, and high definition in the late 1990s. In the 21st century, viewers are as likely to watch programs on their phones, laptops and tablets as they are on their television sets. What’s surprising, however, is that all of these technological changes are essentially just improvements to basic systems that have worked since the late 1930s—with roots that go back even further.
Early Television Technology: The Mechanical Turntable
No single inventor deserves credit for television. The idea surfaced long before the technology existed to realize it, and many scientists and engineers made mutually reinforcing contributions that ultimately resulted in television as we know it today.
The origins of television can be traced to the 1830s and 1840s, when Samuel FB Morse developed the telegraph, a system for sending messages (converted into beeps) along wires. Another important advance came in 1876 in the form of Alexander Graham Bell's telephone, which allowed the human voice to travel over long distances through wires.
Bell and Thomas Edison both speculated that a telephone-like device might transmit images and sounds simultaneously. But it was German researchers who took the next big step toward developing the technology that makes television possible. In 1884, Paul Nipkow proposed a system for sending images over wires via a rotating disk. He called it an electronic telescope, but it was essentially an early form of mechanical television.
Television was made electronic using cathode ray tubes
In the early 1900s, Russian physicist Boris Rosin and Scottish engineer Alan Archie Working independently, Boulder Campbell-Swinton improved Nipkow's system by replacing the rotating disk with a cathode ray tube, a technology earlier developed by German physicist Karl Braun. Swinton's system, which placed cathode ray tubes inside the camera that sent the picture and inside the receiver, was essentially the first all-electronic television system.
Russian-born engineer Vladimir Zworykin served as Rosin's assistant before emigrating after the Russian Revolution. Zworykin was employed by the Pittsburgh-based manufacturing company Westinghouse in 1923 when he filed for his first television patent, the "Iconoscope," which used a cathode ray tube to transmit images.
In 1929, Zworykin demonstrated his fully electronic television system at the Radio Engineers' Congress. Among the audience was David Sarnoff, an executive at RCA, the largest communications company in the United States at the time. Born into a poor Jewish family in Minsk, Russia, Sarnov came to New York City as a child and began his career as a telegraph operator. He was actually on duty the night of the Titanic disaster; although he may not have—as he later claimed—coordinated the distress messages sent to nearby ships, he did help spread the names of survivors.
Utah Inventors vs. Giant Corporation
New York City, April 30, 1939: This was the scene seen on television receivers in the metropolitan area when the U.S. The broadcaster launched the first regular television service for the American public, televising the opening of the New York World's Fair. Later, viewers heard and saw President Roosevelt opening the fair.
Sarnoff was one of the first to see that television, like radio, had great potential as a medium of entertainment and communication. Appointed president of RCA in 1930, he hired Zworykin to develop and improve television technology for the company.
Meanwhile, an American inventor named Philo Farnsworth had been working on his own television system. Farnsworth reportedly came up with his big idea while growing up on a farm in Utah—a vacuum tube that could break images into lines, transmit those lines, and convert them into images—and He was a teenager in chemistry class.
In 1927, at the age of 21, Farnsworth completed the first working prototype of an all-electronic television system based on this "image dissector." He soon found himself embroiled in a long legal battle with RCA, which claimed that Zworykin's 1923 patent took precedence over Farnsworth's invention. The U.S. Patent Office ruled in Farnsworth's favor in 1934 (aided in part by an old high school teacher who retained the young inventor's key drawings), and Sarnoff was eventually forced to pay Farnsworth a $1 million licensing fee. Although considered by many historians to be the true father of television, Farnsworth never made more money from his invention and was plagued by patent appeals lawsuits from RCA. He later turned to other areas of research, including nuclear fission and died in debt in 1971.
In 1939, Sarnoff used his marketing prowess to introduce television to the public on a massive scale at the World's Fair in New York City. Under the umbrella of NBC, the broadcasting arm of RCA, Sarnoff broadcast the fair's opening ceremonies, including a speech by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The Rise of New Media
By 1940, there were only a few hundred television sets in use in the United States. With radio still dominating the airwaves—more than 80 percent of American households owned one at the time—television use grew slowly over the past decade, and by the mid-1940s, the United States had 23 television stations (and counting). By 1949, a year after the debut of the popular variety show Texaco Star Theater hosted by comedian Milton Berle, there were 1 million television sets in the country.
By the 1950s, television truly entered the mainstream, and by 1955, more than half of American households owned a television set. As the number of consumers increased, new stations were created and more programs aired, and by the end of the decade, television had replaced radio as the primary source of entertainment for American homes. During the 1960 presidential election, the young and handsome John F. Kennedy clearly outperformed his less-televised opponent Richard Nixon in televised debates, and his victory that fall would make many Americans feel the media transformative impact. ?