The History of Television
Television was not invented by a single inventor,
instead many people working together and alone over the years,
contributed to the evolution of television.
At the dawn of television history there were two distinct paths of
technology experimented with by researchers.
Early inventors attempted to either build a mechanical television
system based on the technology of Paul Nipkow's rotating disks;
or they attempted to build an electronic television system using a
cathode ray tube developed independently in 1907
by English inventor A.A.
Campbell-Swinton and Russian scientist Boris Rosing.
Electronic television systems worked better and
eventual replaced mechanical systems.
German, Paul Nipkow developed a rotating-disc technology
to transmit pictures over wire in 1884 called the Nipkow disk.
Paul Nipkow was the first person to discover
television's scanning principle, in which the
light intensities of small portions of an image
are successively analyzed and transmitted.
In the 1920's, John Logie Baird patented the idea of using arrays
of transparent rods to transmit images for television.
Baird's 30 line images were the first demonstrations of television
by reflected light rather than back-lit silhouettes.
John Logie Baird based his technology on
Paul Nipkow's scanning disc idea and later
developments in electronics.
Charles Jenkins invented a mechanical television system called
radiovision and claimed to have transmitted the earliest moving
silhouette images on June 14, 1923.
Electronic television is based on the development of
the cathode ray tube, which is the picture tube found in modern
TV sets. German scientist, Karl Braun invented the
cathode ray tube oscilloscope (CRT) in 1897.
Russian inventor, Vladimir Zworykin invented an improved
cathode-ray tube called the kinescope in 1929.
The kinescope tube was sorely needed for television.
Zworykin was one of the first to demonstrate a television
system with all the features of modern picture tubes.
In 1927, Philo Farnsworth was the first inventor to transmit a
television image comprised of 60 horizontal lines. The image
transmitted was a dollar sign. Farnsworth developed
the dissector tube, the basis of all current electronic televisions.
He filed for his first television patent in 1927 (#1,773,980).
Louis Parker invented the modern changeable television receiver.
The patent was issued to Louis Parker in 1948.
Marvin Middlemark invented "rabbit ears", the "V" shaped TV
antennae. Among Middlemark's other inventions were a waterpowered potato peeler and rejuvenating tennis ball machine.
Color TV was by no means a new idea, a German patent in 1904
contained the earliest proposal, while in 1925 Zworykin filed a
patent disclosure for an all-electronic color television system. A
successful color television system began commercial broadcasting,
first authorized by the FCC on December 17, 1953 based on a
system invented by RCA.
Cable television, formerly known as Community Antenna
Television or CATV, was born in the mountains of Pennsylvania
in the late 1940's. The first successful color television system
began commercial broadcasting on December 17, 1953 based on a
system designed by RCA.
It was in June of 1956, that the TV remote controller
first entered the American home.
The first TV remote control called "Lazy Bones,"
was developed in 1950 by Zenith
Electronics Corporation
(then known as Zenith Radio Corporation).
The American Broadcasting Company first aired
Saturday morning TV shows for children on August 19, 1950.
The very first prototype for a plasma display
monitor was invented in 1964
by Donald Bitzer, Gene Slottow, and Robert Willson.
Closed captions are captions that are hidden in the video signal,
invisible without a special decoder. The place they are hidden is
called line 21 of the vertical blanking interval (VBI). A law in the
United States called the Television Decoder Circuitry Act of 1990
mandates since July 1993, that all televisions manufactured for sale
in the U.S. must contain a built-in caption decoder if
the picture tube is 13" or larger.
In 1970 the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) began to research
the possibility of using a portion of the network television signal to
send precise time information on a nationwide basis. The ABC-TV
network agreed to be involved in the research and development.
The project didn't pan out, but ABC suggested that it might be
possible to send captions instead.
Captioning was first previewed to the public in 1971, at the First
National Conference on Television for the Hearing Impaired in
Nashville, Tennessee. A second preview of closed captioning was
held at Gallaudet College on February 15, 1972. ABC and the NBS
presented closed captions embedded within the normal broadcast
of the television show The Mod Squad. The federal government
funded the final development and testing of this system. The
engineering department of the Public Broadcasting System started
to work on the project in 1973, under contract to the Bureau of
Education for the Handicapped of the Department of Health,
Education and Welfare (HEW).
The Federal Communications Commission set aside line 21 in
1976, for the transmission of closed captions in the United States.
PBS engineers then developed the caption editing consoles that
would be used to caption prerecorded programs, the encoding
equipment that broadcasters and others would use to add captions
to their programs and also prototype decoders.
On March 16, 1980, the first, closed captioned television series
was broadcast. The captions were seen in households that had the
first generation of the closed caption decoder. The ABC Sunday
Night Movie (ABC), The Wonderful World of Disney (NBC),
Masterpiece Theatre (PBS) were all broadcast on March 16, 1980.
In 1982, the NCI developed real-time captioning, a process for
captioning newscasts, sports events or other live broadcasts as the
events are being televised.
"Zenith Electronics is planning a television set that will
incorporate a microprocessor and modem, as well as technology
developed by Diba Inc. that allows viewers to surf the Web via a
remote control device." - Wall Street Journal,
May 10 1996 Edition
WebTV was invented (I'd rather say that the technology was
developed) in 1996 by Diba Inc and Zenith Electronics,
who produced and marketed the first WebTV sets.
C/Net reported that, "Zenith will roll out two TVs with "Netvision"
Internet access technology in the fall [1996]: a 27-inch model with
a built-in 28.8-kbps modem priced at $999, and a larger 35-inch
model called Inteq targeted at home entertainment users priced at
$3,499." Later companies produced $300 webtv add-ons including
Sony and Philips Electronics, who made webtv boxes separate
from television sets. WebTV sets are currently under $100.
In April of 1997, Microsoft bought the WebTV network for $425
million dollars and have trademarked the name. Today, webtv is an
add-on device that compliments a regular television, usually a box
that provides the internet connection and conversion of web pages
for viewing on your own television screen with an added special
remote control and keyboard so that you can
surf from your sofa in comfort.