The way people watch television has changed dramatically since the medium first appeared in the 1940s and 1950s and forever transformed American life. Decade after decade, television technology has never stopped advancing: color arrived in the 1960s, followed by cable in the 1970s, VCRs in the 1980s, and high definition in the late 1990s. In the 21st century, viewers are just as likely to watch shows on cell phones, laptops and tablets as they are on TVs. Surprisingly, however, all of these technological changes were essentially just improvements to a basic system that had worked since the late 1930s, with roots going back even further than that.
READ MORE: 11 innovations that changed history
First television technology: mechanical rotating discs
No inventor deserves the credit of television. The idea was circulating long before the technology existed to make it happen, and many scientists and engineers made contributions that built on each other to ultimately produce what we now call television.
The origins of television can be traced back to the 1830s and 1940s, when Samuel FB Morse developed the telegraph, the system for sending messages (translated into beeps) along wires. Another important step forward came in 1876 in the form of Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, which allowed the human voice to travel through wires over long distances.
Bell and Thomas Edison both speculated on the possibility of phone-like devices that could transmit images as well as sound. But it was a German researcher who took the next big step towards developing the technology that made television possible. In 1884, Paul Nipkow developed a system for sending images through wires via rotating discs. He called it the Electric Telescope, but it was essentially one of the earliest forms of mechanical television.
READ MORE: 6 Key Inventions by Thomas Edison
Television goes electronic with cathode ray tubes
In the early 1900s, Russian physicist Boris Rosing and Scottish engineer Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton independently worked to improve Nipkow’s system by replacing rotating disks with cathode-ray tubes, a technology earlier developed by the German physicist. Karl Braun. Swinton’s system, which placed cathode ray tubes inside the camera that sent an image, as well as inside the receiver, was essentially the first fully electronic television system.
Russian-born engineer Vladimir Zworykin had worked as Rosing’s assistant before the two emigrated following the Russian Revolution. In 1923, Zworykin was employed by the Pittsburgh-based Westinghouse manufacturing company when he filed his first television patent, for the “Iconoscope,” which used cathode ray tubes to transmit images.
In 1929, Zworykin demonstrated his fully electronic television system at a conference of radio engineers. In the audience was David Sarnoff, an executive with Radio Corporation of America (RCA), the country’s largest communications company at the time. Born into a poor Jewish family in Minsk, Russia, Sarnoff came to New York as a child and began his career as a telegraph operator. He was actually on duty the night of the Titanic disaster; although he probably did not, as he later claimed, coordinate the distress messages sent to nearby ships, he did help disseminate the names of the survivors.
READ MORE: How TV Killed Hollywood’s Golden Age
Utah inventor battles Giant Corporation
April 30, 1939, New York: This is the scene seen on television receivers in the metropolitan area as the National Broadcasting Company inaugurated the first regular television service to the American public broadcasting the ceremonies marking the opening of the Exposition New York Universal. Viewers later heard and saw President Roosevelt proclaim the opening of the fair.
Bettmann via Getty Images
Sarnoff was among the first to see that television, like radio, had enormous potential as a medium for entertainment and communication. Appointed president of RCA in 1930, he hired Zworykin to develop and improve television technology for the company. Meanwhile, an American inventor named Philo Farnsworth was working on his own television system. Farnsworth, who grew up on a farm in Utah, reportedly had his big idea – a vacuum tube that could dissect images into lines, convey those lines, and turn them back into images – while still a teenager in the process of chemistry.
In 1927, at the age of 21, Farnsworth completed the prototype of the first working fully electronic television system, based on this “picture dissector”. He soon found himself embroiled in a lengthy legal battle with RCA, which claimed that Zworykin’s 1923 patent took precedence over Farnsworth’s inventions. The United States Patent Office ruled in favor of Farnsworth in 1934, and Sarnoff was eventually forced to pay Farnsworth $ 1 million in license fees. Although considered by many historians to be the true father of television, Farnsworth never earned much more from his invention and was sued by RCA’s patent appeal lawsuits. He then moved on to other areas of research, including nuclear fission, and died in debt in 1971.
Sarnoff, with his marketing power, introduced television audiences in a major way at the New York World’s Fair in 1939. Under the aegis of RCA’s broadcasting division, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), Sarnoff broadcast the opening ceremonies of the fair, including a speech by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
WATCH: The Machines That Built America premiered Sunday, July 18 at 9 / 8c. Watch a preview now.
The rise of a new medium
In 1940, there were only a few hundred televisions in service in the United States. While radio still dominated the airwaves – over 80% of American households had one at the time – television use grew slowly over the decade, and by the mid-1940s the United States had 23 television stations (and that is not all). In 1949, a year after the debut of the successful variety show Texaco Star Theater, hosted by actor Milton Berle, the country had 1 million televisions in service.
By the 1950s television had truly entered the mainstream, with more than half of all American households owning televisions by 1955. As the number of consumers increased, new stations were created and more programs broadcast. , and by the end of that decade, television had replaced radio as the primary source of home entertainment in the United States. In the 1960 presidential election, the young and handsome John F. Kennedy had a noticeable advantage over his less telegenic opponent, Richard M. Nixon in televised debates, and his victory in the fall would bring many Americans the transformative impact of the media.
