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Writers such as Walter Scott,
Jules Verne, Mark Twain, and H.G. Wells began
postulating the idea of "seeing at a
distance" - as the earliest concepts of television
were predicted in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Scientists from around the world worked to perfect
television for decades, with the key breakthroughs
coming in the early 20th century, the invention
springing from the work of many minds. The 1890s
advertising card shown above depicts a representation
of the possible future of "home
theater."
 American inventor Charles Francis
Jenkins transmitted pictures of Herbert Hoover, then
Secretary of Commerce, from Washington to
Philadelphia by radio in 1923, and he demonstrated a
mechanical television scanning system using a revolving
disk in 1925. He called his invention
"radiovision." He correctly predicted:
"It will not be very long now before one may see
on a small white screen in one's home notable
current events, like inaugural ceremonies, ball games,
pageants, as well as pantomime performance broadcast
from motion-picture film." But Jenkins' system
was slow and its images were murky.
American Telephone &
Telegraph also got into the act in the early days of
television, transmitting moving images of Herbert
Hoover from Washington to New York over phone circuits
in 1927 using a 185-line system developed by Herbert E.
Ives. In 1928, General Electric began broadcasting a
24-line mechanical image from a New York station thanks
to engineer Ernest Alexanderson's development of a
mechanical television system. German Denes von Mihaly,
Kenjiro Takayanagi of Japan and Scottish engineer John
Logie Baird built various systems in the 1920s, but
none of them is seen as the "inventor" of
TV.
 Philo Taylor
Farnsworth, 21, (pictured at left) developed what he
called the "image dissector," the first
working electronic camera tube, in San Francisco in
1927. As a youngster growing up in Utah and Idaho
he'd read in a magazine about the idea of the
broadcasting of images and sound, becoming so
fascinated that he was motivated to study molecular
theory and electricity. His work led him to invent the
first fully electronic television system.
In the late 1920s, Radio
Corporation of America president David Sarnoff was
intrigued with Farnsworth's work, and he sent
engineer Vladimir Zworykin to visit Farnsworth's
lab. He returned to RCA and by 1933 he had perfected
his "inconoscope" - an invention nearly
identical to Farnsworth's image dissector. A patent
battle ensued. Litigation followed for many years, with
a series of appeals before Sarnoff finally agreed to
pay Farnsworth royalties.
In the 1930s, a number of
experimental broadcast stations began producing some
special television programming. Radio powers NBC and
CBS built New York stations. World War II impeded the
development of the medium, slowing it as people and
materials were directed to this major world conflict.
Television replaced radio as the dominant broadcast
medium by the 1950s and took over home entertainment.
Approximately 8,000 U.S. households had television sets
in 1946; 45.7 million had them by 1960.
The pace of innovation and
improvements in television and other information
technologies developed in the United States over the
past 100 years has been rapid, thanks to a confluence
of several factors: the competitive atmosphere of the
free-market economy; the laid-back role of government,
which is a watchdog thus far preventing wholesale
monopolies; and the spirit of invention and
entrepreneurship prevalent in U.S. society.
Because other nations usually
have had some sort of government control of
communications technologies, they have not developed as
much quality program content for television over the
decades. Regulation stifled creativity and constrained
production, and the economics of regulation created a
situation in which producers of U.S. programming found
themselves making broadcast content for the entire
world.
The worldwide success of the
freewheeling U.S. film and television industries over
the course of the 20th century has spread images of the
American culture - good and bad - to the most-distant
corners of the planet. It has made entertainment one of
the nation's most lucrative and influential
exports.
Radio pioneer Lee DeForest said
in 1926:
“While theoretically
and technically television may be feasible,
commercially and financially I consider it to be an
impossibility…a development of which we need
waste little time dreaming.”
A report in the "Radio
Mirror" of the Daily News reported Dec. 30,
1926:
“There may come a time
when we shall have 'smellyvision' and
'tastyvision'. When we are able to broadcast so
that all the senses are catered for, we shall live in a
world which no one has yet dreamt
about.”
A report in the Indianapolis Star
April 9, 1927:
"Spectacles may be
staged in distant cities and be transmitted for the
entertainment of individuals hundreds of miles away.
Conversations may be held across the sea and the
parties see each other as clearly as though they were
gathered in the same room. Distance will be annihilated
for sound and sight and the world made immeasurably
smaller for the purposes of
communication."
At a special event unveiling the
new AT&T experimental television April 7, 1927,
Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover said:
"Human genius has now
destroyed the impediment of distance in a new respect,
and in a manner hitherto unknown."
British television pioneer John
Logie Baird - whose experiments were with mechanical
television - said during a visit to the U.S. in
September 1931:
"There is no hope for
television by means of cathode ray
tubes." (And in
1940, Baird said: "Cathode ray tubes are the most
important items in a television receiver.")
 A 1939 New York Times review of a
demonstration of television at the 1939 World's
Fair:
“The problem with
television is that people must sit and keep their eyes
glued on a screen; the average American family
hasn’t time for it.”
George Boar, a farmhand from
Suffolk, was quoted in the Feb. 1939 issue of Radio
Times in an interview just after he had "invested
his whole fortune" to buy a television
receiver:
"Television's far
more entertaining and much less trouble than a wife
would be."
Film mogul Darryl F. Zanuck of
20th Century Fox said in 1946:
“Television won't
be able to hold on to any market it captures after the
first six months. People will soon get tired of staring
at a plywood box every night.”
J.W. Ridgeway, chairman, Radio
Industry Council, United Kingdom, Oct. 1950:
"It is inevitable that
television will become the primary service and sound
radio the secondary one.”
Sumner Redstone, president and
CEO of the major media company Viacom, as quoted in
Screen International, Oct. 21, 1994:
"I am very skeptical of
this talk of 500 channels. I just don't know
what's going to play on them."
View history of other
information technologies:
<Telegraph>
<Radio>
<Telephone>
<Television>
<Internet>
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