She didn’t have a single father, quite the contrary: she was developed simultaneously by several inventors. The first steps were taken at the end of the 19th century, when it was discovered that the ability of a chemical element, selenium, to conduct electrical energy, varied according to the amount of light it received. In theory, this made it possible to transmit, by currents of electricity, images composed of points of different degrees of luminosity. From there, a young engineering student, the German Gottlieb Nipkow, conceived, still in 1884, the first television system. According to him, a kind of camera would contain a disk full of holes that would rotate quickly.
The image of an object placed in front of this camera would pass through the various holes and be divided into brighter or darker points, according to the outline of the object. These light signals would then be captured by selenium atoms and transformed into electricity.
Connected to a receiving device, the electric current would activate a lamp that would turn on and off according to the impulses received. Inside the receiver, the flashing light from the lamp would then pass through a second perforated disk, which would rotate at the same speed as the camera. When passing through it, the light from the lamp would reproduce the image of the original object on the receiver’s screen. Nipkow’s project was brilliant, but it never left the theoretical plane. Putting it into practice was up to other inventors who, in the following decades, carried out various experiments based on Nipkow’s ideas, adding technological innovations. One of the first to demonstrate a TV set to the scientific community was Scottish engineer John Baird in 1926.
Parallel to Baird, however, other machines were developed in the 1920s, by names such as engineers Vladimir Zworykin (Russian), Philo Farnsworth (American) and Ernst Alexanderson (Swedish). Adding up all these contributions from different countries, modern television was formed, which, surprisingly, was slow to conquer the public: ten years after Baird’s demonstration, there were no more than 2 thousand televisions in the world. The great boom would only happen after the end of the Second World War. By 1948, there were over 350,000 devices in the United States alone. Since then, TV has not stopped proliferating and developing, going through color equipment and portable models, until it reaches today’s digital equipment, with high definition and plasma screens.
1926 – British Pioneer
In London, engineer John Baird presents to fellow scientists one of the first television transmissions, with images of moving objects. The canvas measured no more than 8 by 6 centimeters. In the photo on the side, taken in 1954, Baird shows the invention already old
1940 – The turn of electronics
In the 1940s, the old electromechanical devices lost ground to electronic ones, which used electron guns to redraw the images, offering better resolution. An example is the Zenith model above, made in the United States
1951 – Farewell to Black and White
CBS launches the first commercially viable color TV in the United States. The quality was good, but the model, still mechanical, proved incompatible with the black-and-white electronic transmission. Three years later, in 1954, the Westinghouse H-840CK15, the first color electronic TV, would come out.
1959 – Smaller and Better
The first fully transistorized TV appears in Japan: the portable Sony TV8-301. The replacement of tubes by transistors caused an incomparable technological revolution, making electronic devices smaller and faster when switching on.
2002 – The State of the Art
The TV of the third millennium transmits digital video, free of interference and noise, with high image definition. Its format is longer, like a movie screen. The last word is the plasma screen, so thin it looks like a picture to hang on the wall.
When the new technology was publicly demonstrated at the New York World’s Fair in 1939, the New York Times decreed: «Television will never be serious competition to radio, for people have to sit with their eyes glued to the screen and American families don’t have time for that.” In 1956, it was Time magazine’s turn to state: «Color TV is the most resounding failure of the year.»