Historical Review, Invention of Television

In the word Television Tele-” is a prefix that means “far off” or “operating at a distance.”  The word "television" was agreed upon quite rapidly, and while other terms like "iconoscope" and "emitron" referred to patented devices that were used in some electronic television systems, television is the one that stuck.

A television basically consists of three parts: the TV camera that turns a picture and sound into a signal;  the TV transmitter that sends the signal through the air;  and the TV receiver (the TV set in the home) that captures the signal and turns it back into picture and sound.  TV creates moving pictures by repeatedly capturing still pictures and presenting these frames to your eyes quickly that they seem to be moving.  The images are flickering on the screen so fast that they fuse together in your brain to make a moving picture.

Earlier televisions were monochrome mono means single and chrome means colour, having single colour known as black and white televisions.

Historical review

No single inventor deserves credit for the television.  The idea was floating around long before the technology existed to make it happen, and many scientists and engineers made contributions that built on each other to eventually produce what we know as TV today.

Television's origins can be traced to the 1830s and '40s, when Samuel F.B.  Morse developed the telegraph, the system of sending messages (translated into beeping sounds) 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.

Both Bell and Thomas Edison speculated about the possibility of telephone-like devices that could transmit images as well as sounds.  But it was a German researcher who took the next important step towards developing the technology that made television possible.  In 1884, Paul Nipkow came up with a system of sending images through wires via spinning discs.  He called it the electric telescope, but it was essentially an early form of mechanical television.

The word "television" first appeared in 1907 in the discussion of a theoretical device that transported images across telegraph or telephone wires.  Ironically, this prediction was behind the times, as some of the first experiments into television used radio waves from the beginning.

TV Goes Electronic With Cathode Ray Tubes

In the early 1900s, both Russian physicist Boris Rosing and Scottish engineer Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton worked independently to improve on Nipkow's system by replacing the spinning discs with cathode ray tubes, a technology developed earlier by German physicist Karl Braun.  Swinton's system, which placed cathode ray tubes inside the camera that sent a picture, as well as inside the receiver, was essentially the earliest all-electronic television system.

Russian-born engineer Vladimir Zworykin had worked as Rosing's assistant before both of them emigrated following the Russian Revolution.  In 1923, Zworykin was employed at the Pittsburgh-based manufacturing company Westinghouse when he applied for his first television patent, for the “Iconoscope,” which used cathode ray tubes to transmit images.

 Meanwhile, Scottish engineer John Baird gave the world's first demonstration of true television before 50 scientists in central London in 1927. With his new invention, Baird formed the Baird Television Development Company, and in 1928 it achieved the first transatlantic television transmission between London and New York and the first transmission to a ship in the mid-Atlantic.  Baird is also credited with giving the first demonstration of both color and stereoscopic television.

Earlier television shows were in monochrome, but with advancements in technology, they also started coming in colored versions. And remote control invented later for more convinece. By clicking on link You can read the articles colour television and invention of remote control in detail.