Since this kind of media first appeared in the 1940s and 1950s and changed American lives forever, the way people watch TV has changed dramatically. Ten years and ten years, television technology developed steadily: color appeared in the 1960s, followed by cable television in the 1970s, video recorders in the 1980s, and high-definition in the late 1990s. In the 21st century, viewers are as likely to watch shows on mobile phones, laptops, and tablets as on televisions. What is surprising, however, is that all these technological changes are essentially just improvements to the basic system that has been effective since the late 1930s—the roots of which can be traced even further afield.
No inventor deserves praise for television. This idea has surfaced long before the advent of technology, and many scientists and engineers have made mutually reinforcing contributions, and finally produced the television as we know it today.
The origin of television can be traced back to the 1830s and 1940s, when Samuel FB Morse developed the telegraph, a system that sends messages (converted into beeps) along wires. Another important advancement appeared in 1876, in the form of Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, which allowed human voices to travel long distances over electrical wires.
Both Bell and Thomas Edison had speculated that a phone-like device might transmit images and sound at the same time. But the next important step towards developing the technology that makes television possible is the German researchers. In 1884, Paul Nipkow proposed a system for sending images through wires via a rotating disk. He called it an electronic telescope, but it was essentially an early form of mechanical television.
In the early 1900s, Russian physicist Boris Rosing and Scottish engineer Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton worked independently to improve Nipkow’s system by replacing rotating discs with cathode-ray tubes. It is an earlier technology developed by German physicist Karl Braun. Swinton’s system placed the cathode ray tube inside the camera that sent the picture and inside the receiver, and it was basically the earliest all-electronic television system.
The Russian-born engineer Vladimir Zworykin worked as Rosin’s assistant before emigrating abroad after the Russian Revolution. In 1923, Zworykin was employed by Westinghouse, a manufacturing company in Pittsburgh, when he applied for his first television patent, the “Iconoscope”, which used a cathode ray tube to transmit images.
In 1929, Zworykin demonstrated his all-electronic television system at the Radio Engineers Conference. Among the audience was David Sarnoff, an executive of the American Broadcasting Corporation (RCA), the largest communications company in the United States at the time. Sarnov was born in a poor Jewish family in Minsk, Russia. He came to New York City as a child and started his career as a telegraph operator. He was actually on duty on the night of the Titanic disaster; although he might not-as he later claimed-coordinate the distress messages sent to nearby ships, he did help spread the names of the survivors.
April 30, 1939, New York City: This is a scene seen on a TV receiver in a metropolitan area. At that time, the National Broadcasting Corporation opened the first regular TV service for the American public and broadcasted the opening ceremony of the New York World’s Fair. TV program. Later, the audience heard and saw President Roosevelt announce the opening of the fair.
Sarnov was one of the first people who saw television and radio have great potential as a medium of entertainment and communication. Appointed as president of RCA in 1930, he hired Zworykin to develop and improve TV technology for the company. At the same time, an American inventor named Philo Farnsworth has been working on his own television system. According to reports, Farnsworth, who grew up on a farm in Utah, came up with his great idea—a vacuum tube that can break down images into lines, transmit those lines, and convert them into images—and he still Teenager in chemistry class.
In 1927, the 21-year-old Farnsworth completed the first working prototype of a fully 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 US Patent Office ruled that Farnsworth won the case in 1934, and Sarnoff was eventually forced to pay Farnsworth a $1 million license fee. Although regarded by many historians as the true father of television, Farnsworth never gained more from his inventions and was troubled by patent appeals from RCA. He later turned to other fields of research, including nuclear fission, and died of debt in 1971.
In 1939, Sarnov used his marketing capabilities to introduce television to the public on a large scale at the World’s Fair in New York City. Under the protection of the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC), the broadcasting arm of RCA, Sarnov broadcasted the opening ceremony of the fair, including a speech by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
By 1940, there were only a few hundred televisions in use in the United States. Since radio still dominates radio waves—more than 80% of American households at the time had one—TV use has grown slowly over the past decade, and by the mid-1940s, there were 23 television stations in the United States (and still increasing). By 1949, a year after the popular variety show hosted by comedian Milton Berle (Milton Berle) made its debut at the Texaco Theater, there were 1 million television sets nationwide.
By the 1950s, television had truly entered the mainstream, and by 1955, more than half of American households had television sets. Replace the radio as the main source of American home entertainment. During the 1960 presidential election, the young and handsome John F. Kennedy was significantly better than his lesser opponent Richard Nixon in television debates, and his victory that fall that year will make many Americans feel the media Transformative impact.
Sarah Pruitt is a writer and editor on the coast of New Hampshire. Since 2005, she has been a frequent contributor to History.com and is the author of “Breaking History: Disappear!” (Lyon Press, 2017), which records some of the most famous disappearances in history.
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Post time: Jun-30-2021