When Was Television Invented?

A difficult question, the television we watch today is based on a few concepts that were all brought together to create the modern day television. There is the mechanical side of things, and the electronic side of things. The electromechanical television was first patented in 1885 by Paul Gottlieb Nipkow. It was a spinning disk design that Nipkow patented but it wasn't until 1907 that the amplification tube technology was created to make Nipkow's design practical. In 1911 Boris Rosing and Vladimir Kosma Zworykin created a television system that used a mechanical mirror-drum scanner. This scanner would transmit 'very crude images' over wires to the CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) in the receiver. At this stage, televisions were only able to project still images. In 1925 John Logie Baird demonstrated a televised silhouette of images, but these were still basically still images on a spinning disk. In 1928 Baird's company send the first transatlantic television signal, it went form London to New ...  more

The Television was invented a lot earlier than you might think. The first electrically transmitted TV pictures were the work of J.L. Baird, who built his first TV system in 1926. J.L. Baird was Scottish, and was born in Helensburgh, Scotland. The first person to appear on television was a young office boy in the building where Baird worked. The lad was paid about 60 cents for his appearance! The first broadcasting of TV pictures didn't begin until 1935, in Germany, with American TV broadcasting following six years later, in 1941. By 1949, there were a million TV sets in this country, and by 1959, there were 50 million. During the 1960s, color television became popular. In 1980, about half of all the sets in America were color sets.  more