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 water- powered 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.