History of Television
The History of Television records the work of numerous engineers and inventors in several countries over many decades. The fundamental principles of television were initially explored using electromechanical methods to scan, transmit and reproduce an image. As electronic camera and display tubes were perfected, electromechanical television gave way to all-electronic broadcast television systems in nearly all applications.
Electromechanical Television
The beginnings of mechanical television can be traced back to the discovery of the photoconductivity of the element selenium by Willoughby Smith in 1873, the invention of a Nipkow disk|scanning disk by Paul Gottlieb Nipkow in 1884 and John Logie Baird's demonstration of televised moving images in 1926. [More...]
Electronic Television
It all starte in 1908 when Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton published a letter in the scientific journal Nature in which he described how "distant electric vision" could be achieved by using a cathode ray tube (or "Braun" tube, after its inventor, Karl Braun) as both a transmitting and receiving device. It was the first mention and explanation of the electronic television method that would dominate the field until recently. [More...]
Colour Television
Colour television is part of the history of television, the technology of television and practices associated with television's transmission of moving images in color video.
In its most basic form, a colour broadcast can be created by broadcasting three monochrome images, one each in the three colors of red, green and blue (RGB). When displayed together or in rapid succession, these images will blend together to produce a full colour image as seen by the viewer. [More...]
Broadcast Television
Programming is broadcast by television stations, sometimes called "channels", as stations are licensed by their governments to broadcast only over assigned channels in the television band. At first, terrestrial broadcasting was the only way television could be widely distributed, and because bandwidth was limited, i.e., there were only a small number of channels available, government regulation was the norm. [More...]
Technological Innovations
The first national live television broadcast in the U.S. took place on September 4, 1951 when President Harry Truman's speech at the Japanese Peace Treaty Conference in San Francisco, California was transmitted over AT&T's transcontinental cable and microwave radio relay system to broadcast stations in local markets. [More...]
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