Invention of the Television
Television or TV is one of the biggest sources of entertainment in today’s world. When you get back home from a long day of work at the office, you sit down in front of the television to watch some news or soap operas. Children come back from school and watch Nickelodeon or Disney cartoons and other shows on the television. People love to watch cooking shows on lifestyle channels and documentaries of nature on Animal Planet and the Discovery channel. Many families also like to sit in front of the television and have dinner. There are so many people in the world, almost all of whom use a TV on a regular basis. With a device having such a versatile set of users all over the world, doesn’t it bring up a certain curiosity about how it came to be?
In its least technical form, the television is simply a device which sends and receives moving images or videos — we can also call these videos “signals.” Where do these images and videos come from? How do they go from one place to another? Well, they come and go from the network providers responsible for displaying different programs on different TV channels. These signals come in the form of electrical impulses, which can be sent through both wires and wirelessly. In the wireless form, they become radio waves which bounce off satellites that are in space, then back to our TV screens. However, these are more the advancements in television. What was it like before all of this came in? Let’s find out how the television was invented.
There is not one single name to whom we can give the title “inventor of the television” because there are many people who played a part in its development. Many of the developers of the TV are people who used the developments of their predecessors and modified and improved upon that version of the TV.
It was in 1878 England that a Scottish amateur scientist by the name of John Logie Baird began to develop a way to send signals to a screen. In 1884, a man named Paul Nipkow developed a mechanical camera, which was made of a spiral disc with a set of spiral holes in it which spun round in circles. John Baird used this very technology and modified it to make his mechanical system. This worked a good forty or so years later, when he was able to successfully transmit the first ever television image in the year 1926.
The next attempt at this came in the city of San Franscisco, USA the following year — 1927. An American man here, named Philo Farnsworth, was the first to begin thinking about the electric television, and that at the young age of fifteen. It is not a coincidence that he lived in a home without access to electricity till he was fourteen years old.
Farnsworth is majorly credited with the invention of the television as we know it today — the electric television. When he turned fifteen years of age, he began to brainstorm ways in which the television could be made to be used with electricity. This curiosity about how to make television electric would often hit him while he was working in the fields, as did the game-changing idea which revolutionised the television forever. Farnsworth’s idea was that a picture could be dissected into a series of electric lines by using a simple television camera. The next thing to do was to attach a cathode ray tube, so that previously converted signals into lines could turn the lines back into images available to see on a screen.
Another name associated with the invention of the television is the name of the man who invented the cathode ray tube in the first place — nobel laureate Ferdinand Braun. Vladimir Zworykin is the man credited with the invention of the completely electric camera of which televisions in today’s world make use. This consisted of the Iconoscope and the Kinoscope, the camera and receiver, respectively.
It is a well known fact that the initial televisions that came into the world only showed images in black and white. A few years after its initial invention came colour televisions as well, but they were a bit more expensive than the regular black and white ones. As we know, over time a lot of things about the television have changed, which includes the quality of image, colours, size, shape, etc. Today, our TVs are flat-screen televisions with different size proportions as compared to those from even fifteen years ago. Televisions, like most other devices, are developing by the year, and aren’t all of these developments a result of someone’s utter curiosity about how it can become better?
Curiosity can take you to the lands of great discoveries and life-changing inventions, if you let it. Click here to find out your Curiosity Type by taking the Curiosity Test.
