History of television

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The History of television technology can be divided along two lines: those developments that depended upon both mechanical and electronic principles, and those which are purely electronic. From the latter descended all modern televisions, but these would not have been possible without discoveries and insights from the mechanical systems.

Contents 1 Electromechanical television 2 Electronic television 3 Mechanical color television 4 Electronic color television 4.1 Color television in North America 4.1.1 United States 4.1.2 Cuba 4.1.3 Mexico 4.1.4 Canada 4.2 European color television 4.3 Asia Pacific color television 4.4 Middle East color television 4.5 African color television 4.6 South American color television 5 Broadcast television 5.1 United States and Canada 5.2 United States 5.3 Canada 5.4 France 5.5 Germany 5.6 United Kingdom 5.7 Soviet Union (USSR) 5.8 Later development 5.9 Technological innovations 5.10 Overview 6 Television sets 7 Television inventors/pioneers 8 Television museums 9 See also 10 References 11 Further reading 12 External links

[edit] Electromechanical television

Main article: Mechanical television

The origins of what would become today's television system can be traced back to the discovery of the photoconductivity of the element selenium by Willoughby Smith in 1873, the invention of a scanning disk by Paul Gottlieb Nipkow in 1884, and Philo Farnsworth's Image dissector in 1927.

The 20-year old German university student Nipkow proposed and patented the first electromechanical television system in 1884.^[1] Nipkow's spinning disk design is credited with being the first television image rasterizer. Constantin Perskyi had coined the word television in a paper read to the International Electricity Congress at the International World Fair in Paris on August 25, 1900. Perskyi's paper reviewed the existing electromechanical technologies, mentioning the work of Nipkow and others. The photoconductivity of selenium and Nipkow's scanning disk were first joined for practical use in the electronic transmission of still pictures and photographs, and by the first decade of the 20th century halftone photographs were being transmitted by facsimile over telegraph and telephone lines as a newspaper service.

However, it wasn't until 1907 that developments in amplification tube technology made the design practical.^[2] The first demonstration of the instantaneous transmission of still duotone images was by Georges Rignoux and A. Fournier in Paris in 1909, using a rotating mirror-drum as the scanner, and a matrix of 64 selenium cells as the receiver.^[3]

In 1911, Boris Rosing and his student Vladimir Kosma Zworykin created a television system that used a mechanical mirror-drum scanner to transmit, in Zworykin's words, "very crude images" over wires to the electronic Braun tube (cathode ray tube) in the receiver. Moving images were not possible because, in the scanner, "the sensitivity was not enough and the selenium cell was very laggy".

On March 25, 1925, Scottish inventor John Logie Baird gave a demonstration of televised silhouette images in motion at Selfridge's Department Store in London. But if television is defined as the transmission of live, moving, half-tone (grayscale) images — and not silhouette, duotone, or still images — Baird first achieved this privately on October 2, 1925.^[4] Then he gave the world's first public demonstration of a working television system to members of the Royal Institution and a newspaper reporter on January 26, 1926 at his laboratory in London. Unlike later electronic systems with several hundred lines of resolution, Baird's vertically scanned image, using a scanning disk embedded with a double spiral of lenses, had only 30 lines, just enough to reproduce a recognizable human face.

In 1927, Baird transmitted a signal over 438 miles of telephone line between London and Glasgow. In 1928, Baird's company (Baird Television Development Company / Cinema Television) broadcast the first transatlantic television signal, between London and New York, and the first shore-to-ship transmission. He also demonstrated an electromechanical color, infrared (dubbed "Noctovision"), and stereoscopic television, using additional lenses, disks and filters. In parallel, Baird developed a video disk recording system dubbed "Phonovision"; a number of the Phonovision recordings, dating back to 1927, still exist.^[5] In 1929, he became involved in the first experimental electromechanical television service in Germany. In November 1929, Baird and Bernard Natan of Pathe established France's first television company, Télévision-Baird-Natan. In 1931, he made the first live transmission, of the Epsom Derby. In 1932, he demonstrated ultra-short wave television. Baird's electromechanical system reached a peak of 240 lines of resolution on BBC television broadcasts in 1936, before being discontinued in favor of a 405-line all-electronic system developed by Marconi-EMI.

In the U.S., Charles Francis Jenkins was able to demonstrate on June 13, 1925, the transmission of the silhouette image of a toy windmill in motion from a naval radio station to his laboratory in Washington, using a lensed disk scanner with 48 lines per picture,^[6] 16 pictures per second. AT&T's Bell Telephone Laboratories transmitted half-tone images of transparencies in May 1925.

Meanwhile in Soviet Russia, Léon Theremin had been developing a mirror drum-based television, starting with 16 lines resolution in 1925, then 32 lines and eventually 64 using interlacing in 1926, and as part of his thesis on June 7, 1926 he electrically transmitted and then projected near-simultaneous moving images on a five foot square screen.^[6] By 1927 he achieved an image of 100 lines, a resolution that was not surpassed until 1931 by RCA, with 120 lines.

However, Herbert E. Ives of Bell Labs gave the most dramatic demonstration of television yet on April 7, 1927, when he field tested reflected-light television systems using small-scale (2 by 2.5 inches) and large-scale (24 by 30 inches) viewing screens over a wire link from Washington to New York City, and over-the-air broadcast from Whippany, New Jersey. The subjects, who included Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, were illuminated by a flying-spot scanner beam that was scanned by a 50-aperture disk at 16 pictures per minute.

[edit] Electronic television

In 1911, engineer Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton gave a speech in London, reported in The Times, describing in great detail how distant electric vision could be achieved by using cathode ray tubes at both the transmitting and receiving ends. The speech, which expanded on a letter he wrote to the journal Nature in 1908, was the first iteration of the electronic television method that is still used today. Others had already experimented with using a cathode ray tube as a receiver, but the concept of using one as a transmitter was novel.^[7] By the late 1920s, when electromechanical television was still being introduced, inventors Philo Farnsworth and Vladimir Zworykin were already working separately on versions of all-electronic transmitting tubes.

The decisive solution—television operating on the basis of continuous electron emission with accumulation and storage of released secondary electrons during the entire scan cycle—was first described by the Hungarian inventor Kálmán Tihanyi in 1926, with further refined versions in 1928.^[8]

On September 7, 1927, Philo Farnsworth's Image Dissector camera tube transmitted its first image, a simple straight line, at his laboratory at 202 Green Street in San Francisco. [1] By 1928, Farnsworth had developed the system sufficiently to hold a demonstration for the press, televising a motion picture film. In 1929, the system was further improved by elimination of a motor generator, so that his television system now had no mechanical moving parts. That year, Farnsworth transmitted the first live human images by his television system, including a three and a half-inch image of his wife Pem with her eyes closed (possibly due to the bright lighting required).

Farnsworth gave the world's first public demonstration of a complete all-electronic television system on 25 August 1934 at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Other inventors had previously demonstrated components of such a system, or had shown an electronic system using still images or motion picture film.^[9] But Farnsworth was the first to coordinate both electronically scanned television cameras and electronically scanned television receivers, and present live, moving, half-tone (grayscale) images with them. Unfortunately, his cameras needed too much light, so his work came to a stop.

Vladimir Zworykin was also experimenting with the cathode ray tube to create and show images. While at Westinghouse in 1923, he developed an electronic camera tube. But in a 1925 demonstration, the image was dim, had low contrast and poor definition, and was stationary.^[10] The tube never got beyond the laboratory stage, but RCA (which had acquired the Westinghouse patent) believed the patent on Farnsworth's 1927 image dissector was written so broadly that it would exclude any other electronic formation of an image. And so RCA, armed with Zworykin's 1923 patent application, filed a patent interference suit against Farnsworth. The U.S. Patent Office examiner disagreed in a 1935 decision, finding priority of invention for Farnsworth against Zworykin.^[11] In October 1939, after losing an appeal in the courts and wishing to go forward with the commercial manufacturing of television equipment, RCA agreed to pay Farnsworth US$1 million (the equivalent of $13.8 million in 2006) over a ten-year period, in addition to license payments, to use Farnsworth's patents.^[12]

Zworykin designed an improved electronic camera tube at RCA in 1931, which he called the iconoscope. It became the primary type of camera tube used in American television broadcasting from 1936 until 1946, when it was replaced by the image orthicon tube.

In Britain Isaac Shoenburg used Zworykin's idea to develop Marconi-EMI's own Emitron tube, which formed the heart of the cameras they designed for the BBC. Using this, on November 2, 1936 a 405 line service was started from studios at Alexandra Palace, and transmitted from a specially-built mast atop one of the Victorian building's towers; it alternated for a short time with Baird's mechanical system in adjoining studios, but was more reliable and visibly superior. So began the world's first high-definition regular service. The mast is still in use today.

[edit] Mechanical color television

Most television researchers appreciated the value of color image transmission, with an early patent application in Russia in 1889 for a mechanically-scanned color system showing how early the importance of color was realized. John Logie Baird demonstrated the world's first color transmission on July 3, 1928, using scanning discs at the transmitting and receiving ends with three spirals of apertures, each spiral with filters of a different primary color; and three light sources at the receiving end, with a commutator to alternate their illumination.^[13] Baird also made the world's first color broadcast on February 4, 1938, sending a mechanically scanned 120-line image from Baird's Crystal Palace studios to a projection screen at London's Dominion Theatre.^[14]

[edit] Electronic color television

In 1938 the shadow mask color television was patented by Werner Flechsig in Germany, and was demonstrated at the International radio exhibition Berlin in 1939. The analog color televisions we use today are based on this technology. On August 16, 1944, Baird gave the first demonstration of a fully electronic color television display. His 600-line color system used triple interlacing, using six scans to build each picture.^[15][16]

[edit] Color television in North America

[edit] United States

Color television in the United States had a protracted history due to conflicting technical systems vying for approval by the Federal Communications Commission for commercial use. Mechanically scanned color television was demonstrated by Bell Laboratories in June 1929 using three complete systems of photoelectric cells, amplifiers, glow-tubes, and color filters, with a series of mirrors to superimpose the red, green, and blue images into one full color image.

In the electronically scanned era, the first color television demonstration was on February 5, 1940, when RCA privately showed to members of the FCC at the RCA plant in Camden, New Jersey, a television receiver producing color images by optically combining the images from two picture tubes onto a single rear-projection screen.^[17] CBS began experimental color field tests using film as early as August 28, 1940, and live cameras by November 12.^[18] The CBS field-sequential color system was partly mechanical, with a disc made of red, blue, and green filters spinning inside the television camera at 1,200 rpm, and a similar disc spinning in synchronization in front of the cathode ray tube inside the receiver set.^[19] RCA's later "dot sequential" color system had no moving parts, using a series of dichroic mirrors to separate and direct red, green, and blue light from the subject through three separate lenses into three scanning tubes, and electronic switching that allowed the tubes to send their signals in rotation, dot by dot. These signals were sorted by a second switching device in the receiver set and sent to red, green, and blue picture tubes, and combined by a second set of dichroic mirrors into a full color image.

NBC (owned by RCA) made its first field test of color television on February 20, 1941. CBS began daily color field tests on June 1, 1941.^[20] These color systems were not compatible with existing black and white television sets, and as no color television sets were available to the public at this time, viewership of the color field tests was limited to RCA and CBS engineers and the invited press. The War Production Board halted the manufacture of television and radio equipment for civilian use from April 22, 1942 to August 20, 1945, limiting any opportunity to introduce color television to the general public.^[21]

The post-war development of color television was dominated by three systems competing for approval by the FCC as the U.S. color broadcasting standard: CBS's field-sequential color system, which was incompatible with existing black and white sets without an adapter; RCA's dot sequential system, which in 1949 became compatible with existing black and white sets; and CTI's system (also incompatible with existing black and white sets), which used three camera lenses, behind which were color filters that produced red, green, and blue images side by side on a single scanning tube, and a receiver set that used lenses in front of the picture tube (which had sectors treated with different phosphorescent compounds to glow in red, green, or blue) to project these three side by side images into one combined picture on the viewing screen.^[22]

During its campaign for FCC approval, CBS gave the first demonstrations of color television to the American general public, showing an hour of color programs daily Mondays through Saturdays, beginning January 12, 1950, and running for the remainder of the month, over WOIC in Washington, D.C., where they could be viewed on eight 16-inch color receivers in a public building.^[23] Due to high public demand, the broadcasts were resumed February 13–21, with several evening programs added.^[24] CBS initiated a limited schedule of color broadcasts from its New York station WCBS-TV Mondays to Saturdays beginning November 14, 1950, making ten color receivers available for the viewing public.^[25][26] All were broadcast using the single color camera that CBS owned.^[27] The New York broadcasts were extended by coaxial cable to Philadelphia's WCAU-TV beginning December 13.^[28]

After a series of hearings beginning in September 1949, the FCC found the RCA and CTI systems fraught with technical problems, inaccurate color reproduction, and expensive equipment, and so formally approved the CBS system as the U.S. color broadcasting standard on October 11, 1950. An unsuccessful lawsuit by RCA delayed the world's first network color broadcast until June 25, 1951, when a musical variety special titled simply Premiere was shown over a network of five east coast CBS affiliates.^[29] Viewership was again extremely limited: the program could not be seen on black and white sets, and Variety estimated that only thirty prototype color receivers were available in the New York area.^[30] Regular color broadcasts began that same week with the daytime series The World Is Yours and Modern Homemakers.

While the CBS color broadcasting schedule gradually expanded to twelve hours per week (but never into prime time), and the color network expanded to eleven affiliates as far west as Chicago, its commercial success was doomed by the lack of color receivers necessary to watch the programs, the refusal of television manufacturers to create adapter mechanisms for their existing black and white sets,^[31] and the unwillingness of advertisers to sponsor broadcasts seen by almost no one. CBS had bought a television manufacturer in April,^[32] and in September 1951, production began on the first and only CBS-Columbia color television model.^[33] But it was too little, too late. Only 200 sets had been shipped, and only 100 sold, when CBS pulled the plug on its color television system on October 20, 1951, ostensibly by request of the National Production Authority for the duration of the Korean conflict, and bought back all the CBS color sets it could to prevent lawsuits by disappointed customers.^[34]

Starting before CBS color even got on the air, the U.S. television industry, represented by the National Television System Committee, worked in 1950–1953 to develop a color system that was compatible with existing black and white sets and would pass FCC quality standards, with RCA developing the hardware elements. RCA first made publicly announced field tests of the dot sequential color system over its New York station WNBT in July 1951.^[35] When CBS testified before Congress in March 1953 that it had no further plans for its own color system,^[36] the National Production Authority dropped its ban on the manufacture of color television receivers,^[37] and the path was open for the NTSC to submit its petition for FCC approval in July 1953, which was granted on December 17.^[38] The first publicly announced network broadcast of a program using the NTSC "compatible color" system was an episode of NBC's Kukla, Fran and Ollie on August 30, 1953.^[39]

NBC made the first coast-to-coast color broadcast when it telecast Gian Carlo Menotti's Christmas opera Amahl and the Night Visitors for the fourth time, on December 20, 1953. ^[40] Only a few weeks later, it covered the Tournament of Roses Parade on January 1, 1954, with public demonstrations given across the United States on prototype color receivers by manufacturers RCA, General Electric, Philco, Raytheon, Hallicrafters, Hoffman, Pacific Mercury and others.^[41] A color model from Westinghouse ($1,295, or $9,934 in 2007 dollars) became available in the New York area on February 28 and is generally agreed to be the first production receiver using NTSC color offered to the public;^[42] a less expensive color model from RCA reached dealers in April.^[43] Television's first prime time network color series was The Marriage, a situation comedy broadcast live by NBC in the summer of 1954.^[44] NBC's anthology series Ford Theatre became the first color filmed series that October.

Several syndicated shows had episodes filmed in color during the 1950s, including The Cisco Kid, The Lone Ranger, and Adventures of Superman. These were carried by some stations equipped for color telecasts well before NBC began its regular weekly color dramas in 1959, beginning with the Western series Bonanza.

NBC was naturally at the forefront of color programming because its parent company RCA manufactured the most successful line of color sets in the 1950s, and by 1959 RCA was the only remaining major manufacturer of color sets.^[45] CBS and ABC, which were not affiliated with set manufacturers, and were not eager to promote their competitor's product, dragged their feet into color.^[46] CBS ceased all regular color programming between 1960 and 1965, while ABC delayed its first color series until 1962.^[47] The DuMont network, although it did have a television-manufacturing parent company, was in financial decline by 1954 and was dissolved two years later.^[48] Thus the relatively small amount of network color programming, combined with the high cost of color television sets, meant that as late as 1964 only 3.1 percent of television households in the U.S. had a color set. NBC provided the catalyst for rapid color expansion by announcing that its prime time schedule for fall 1965 would be almost entirely in color.^[49] All three broadcast networks were airing full color prime time schedules by the 1966–67 broadcast season, and ABC aired its last new black and white daytime programming in December 1967.^[50] But the number of color television sets sold in the U.S. did not exceed black and white sales until 1972, which was also the first year that more than fifty percent of television households in the U.S. had a color set.^[51] This was also the year that "in color" notices before color television programs ended, due to the rise in color television set sales.

[edit] Cuba

Cuba in 1958 became the second country in the world to introduce color television broadcasting, with Havana's Channel 12 using the NTSC standard and RCA equipment. But the color transmissions ended when broadcasting stations were seized in the Cuban Revolution in 1959, and did not return until 1975, using equipment acquired from Japan's NEC Corporation, and SECAM equipment from the Soviet Union, adapted for the NTSC standard.^[52]

[edit] Mexico

In Mexico, Guillermo González Camarena (1917–1965), invented an early color television transmission system. He received patents for color television systems in 1942 (U.S. Patent 2,296,019), 1960 and 1962. The 1942 patent (filed in Mexico on August 19, 1940) was for a synchronized color filter wheel adapter for monochrome television, similar to the field sequential color receiver demonstrated by Baird in England in July 1939^[53] and by CBS in the United States in August 1940.

On August 31, 1946 González Camarena sent his first color transmission from his lab in the offices of The Mexican League of Radio Experiments at Lucerna St. #1, in Mexico City. The video signal was transmitted at a frequency of 115 MHz. and the audio in the 40 metre band. He obtained authorization to make the first publicly announced color broadcast in Mexico, on February 8, 1963, of the program Paraíso Infantil on Mexico City's XHGC-TV.

[edit] Canada

Color television became available in Canada soon after regular color broadcasting began in the neighboring United States. Canadian stations began their own color broadcasts in 1966.

[edit] European color television

European color television was developed somewhat later and was hindered by a continuing division on technical standards. Having decided to adopt a higher-definition 625-line system for monochrome transmissions, with a lower frame rate but with a higher overall bandwidth, Europeans could not directly adopt the U.S. color standard. This was widely perceived as inadequate anyway because of its hue error problems, which became particularly acute with the introduction of videotape recorders in the late 1950s. There was also less urgency, since there were fewer commercial motivations, European television broadcasters being predominantly state-owned at the time.

As a consequence, although work on various color encoding systems started already in the 1950s, with the first SECAM patent being registered in 1956, many years had passed when the first broadcasts actually started in 1967. Unsatisfied with the performance of NTSC and of initial SECAM implementations, the Germans unveiled PAL (phase alternating line) in 1963, technically similar to NTSC but borrowing some ideas from SECAM. The French continued with SECAM, notably involving Russians in the development.

The first full-specification PAL receivers ("PAL-D") relied on a precision ultrasonic glass delay line, which in the early days was estimated would make up about a third of the cost of the receiver. Other color encoding systems had already been proposed which would overcome the tint problems of NTSC using such a delay line, but PAL was unique in that an economy receiver (known as "PAL-S" for "simple PAL") could also be built without using a delay line, with a performance no worse than, and in most cases better than an equivalent NTSC model.

SECAM did not require such precision for its delay line, and could use much cheaper magnetostrictive metal types. Ironically, by the time PAL broadcasts commenced in 1967, advances in glassmaking techniques had dropped the cost of precision PAL delay lines so much that hardly any simple-PAL receivers were built commercially, and virtually all SECAM receivers used the same type of delay line as PAL receivers. By the end of the 20th century, glass delay lines had been completely replaced by all-electronic equivalents.

The first regular color broadcasts in Europe were by BBC2 beginning on July 1, 1967 (PAL). West Germany's first broadcast occurred in August (PAL), followed by the French in October (SECAM).

The PAL system spread through most of Western Europe and on into the territories of the old British, Portuguese, Belgian, Dutch, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Chinese Empires.

In Italy there were debates to adopt a national color television system, the ISA, developed by Indesit, but that idea was scrapped. As a result, Italy was one of the last European countries to officially adopt the PAL system in 1977, after long technical experimentation. ^[54]

France, Luxembourg, and the Soviet Union along with their overseas territories opted for SECAM. SECAM was a popular choice in countries with a lot of hilly terrain, and technologically backward countries with a very large installed base of monochrome equipment, since the greater ruggedness of the SECAM signal could cope much better with poorly maintained equipment.

The only real drawback of SECAM is that, unlike PAL or NTSC, post-production of an encoded SECAM is not really possible without a severe drop in quality.

The first regular color broadcasts in SECAM were started on October 1, 1967, on France's Second Channel (ORTF 2e chaîne). In France and the UK color broadcasts were made on UHF frequencies, the VHF being band used for legacy black and white, 405 lines in UK or 819 lines in France, till the beginning of the eighties. Countries elsewhere that were already broadcasting 625-line monochrome on VHF and UHF, simply transmitted color programs on the same channels.

It should be noted that some British television programmes, particularly those made by or for ITC Entertainment, were shot on color film before the introduction of color television to the UK, for the purpose of sales to US networks. The first British show to be made in color was the drama series The Adventures of Sir Lancelot (1956-57), which was initially made in black and white but later shot in color for sale to the NBC network in the United States. Other British color television programmes include Stingray (1964-1965), which was the first British TV show to filmed entirely in color, Thunderbirds (1965-1966) and Captain Scarlet (1967-1968).

[edit] Asia Pacific color television

Alaska and Hawaii adopted color television after they became U.S. states in 1959. In Japan, NHK introduced color television, using a variation of the NTSC system (called NTSC-J), on September 10, 1960. By 1966, the Philippines became the second country in Asia to broadcast color television images in the NTSC standard. Other countries in the region did not follow suit until much later, and instead used the PAL system, such as Singapore (1973), New Zealand (1973) and Australia (1975), with India not introducing it until 1982. South Korea did not introduce color (using NTSC) until 1980, although it was already manufacturing color television sets for export.

[edit] Middle East color television

Nearly all of the countries in the Middle East use PAL, except for Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia which are part of the Commonwealth of Independent States. The first country in the Middle East to introduce color television was Iraq in 1967. The United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar followed in the mid-1970s, but Israel, Lebanon and Cyprus continued to broadcast in black and white until the early 1980s.

[edit] African color television

The first color television service in Africa was introduced on the Tanzanian island of Zanzibar, in 1973, using PAL. At the time, South Africa did not have a television service at all, owing to opposition from the apartheid regime, but in 1976, one was finally launched. Nigeria adopted PAL for color transmissions in the mid-1970s, but countries such as Ghana and Zimbabwe continued with black and white until the late 1980s.

[edit] South American color television

In 1967, Peru became the first South American country to receive color TV, using NTSC. In contrast to most other countries in the Americas, which had adopted NTSC, Brazil began broadcasting in color on PAL-M. Its first transmission was on February 19, 1972. Some countries in South America, including Argentina, Colombia, Uruguay, and Venezuela, continued to broadcast in black and white until the late 1970s.

[edit] Broadcast television

Further information: Timeline of the introduction of television in countries

[edit] United States and Canada

Below is a list showing when U.S. states and Canadian provinces established their first commercially licensed television stations.

Alabama (1949) Alberta (1954) Territory of Alaska (1953) American Samoa (1964) Arizona (1949) Arkansas (1953) British Columbia (1953) California (1947) Colorado (1952) Connecticut (1948) Delaware (1949) Florida (1949) Georgia (1948) Guam (1956) Territory of Hawaii (1952) Idaho (1953) Illinois (1943) Indiana (1949) Iowa (1949)

Kansas (1953) Kentucky (1948) Louisiana (1948) Maine (1953) Manitoba (1954) Maryland (1947) Massachusetts (1947) Michigan (1947) Minnesota (1948) Mississippi (1953) Missouri (1947) Montana (1953) Nebraska (1949) Nevada (1953) New Brunswick (1954) New Hampshire (1954) New Jersey (1948) New Mexico (1948) New York (1941)

Newfoundland (1955) North Carolina (1949) North Dakota (1953) Northwest Territories (1972) Nova Scotia (1954) Ohio (1943) Oklahoma (1949) Ontario (1952) Oregon (1952) Pennsylvania (1941) Prince Edward Island (1955) Puerto Rico (1954) Quebec (1952) Rhode Island (1949) Saskatchewan (1954) South Carolina (1953) South Dakota (1953)

Tennessee (1948) Texas (1948) Utah (1948) Vermont (1954) Virginia (1947) U.S Virgin Islands (1961) Washington (1948) Washington D.C (1945) West Virginia (1949) Wisconsin (1947) Wyoming (1954) Yukon (1972)

[edit] United States

The first regularly scheduled television service in the United States began on July 2, 1928. The Federal Radio Commission authorized C.F. Jenkins to broadcast from experimental station W3XK in Wheaton, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. But for at least the first eighteen months, only silhouette images from motion picture film were broadcast.

Hugo Gernsback's New York City radio station began a regular, if limited, schedule of live television broadcasts on August 14, 1928, using 48-line images. Simultaneously, Gernsback published Television, the world's first magazine about the medium.

General Electric's experimental station in Schenectady, New York, on the air sporadically since January 13, 1928, was able to broadcast reflected-light, 48-line images via shortwave as far as Los Angeles, and by September was making four television broadcasts weekly.

General Broadcasting System's WGBS and W2XCR aired their regular broadcasting debut in New York City on April 26, 1931, with a special demonstration set up in Aeolian Hall at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street. Thousands waited to catch a glimpse of the Broadway stars who appeared on the twelve inch screens, in an evening event to publicize a weekday programming schedule offering films and live entertainers during the four-hour daily broadcasts. Appearing were boxer Primo Carnera, actor Lionel Atwill, WHN announcer Nils Granlund, the Forman Sisters, and a host of others.^[55]

CBS's New York City station W2XAB began broadcasting their first regular seven days a week television schedule on July 21, 1931, with a 60-line electromechanical system. The first broadcast included Mayor Jimmy Walker, the Boswell Sisters, Kate Smith, and George Gershwin. The service ended in February 1933. Don Lee Broadcasting's station W6XAO in Los Angeles went on the air in December 1931. Using the UHF spectrum, it broadcast a regular schedule of filmed images every day except Sundays and holidays for several years.

By 1935, low-definition electromechanical television broadcasting had ceased in the United States except for a handful of stations run by public universities that continued to 1939. The Federal Communications Commission saw television in the continual flux of development with no consistent technical standards, hence all such stations in the U.S. were granted only experimental and not commercial licenses, hampering television's economic development. Just as importantly, Philo Farnsworth's August 1934 demonstration of an all-electronic system at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia pointed out the direction of television's future.

On June 15, 1936, Don Lee Broadcasting began a month-long demonstration of high definition (240+ line) television in Los Angeles on W6XAO (later KTSL) with a 300-line image from motion picture film. By October, W6XAO was making daily television broadcasts of films. RCA demonstrated in New York City a 343-line electronic television broadcast, with live and film segments, to its licensees on July 7, 1936, and made its first public demonstration to the press on November 6. NBC began regularly scheduled broadcasts in New York on April 30, 1939 with a broadcast of the opening of the 1939 New York World's Fair. By June 1939, regularly scheduled 441-line electronic television broadcasts were available in New York City and Los Angeles, and by November on General Electric's station in Schenectady. From May through December 1939, the New York City NBC station (W2XBS) of General Electric broadcast twenty to fifty-eight hours of programming per month, Wednesday through Sunday of each week. The programming was 33% news, 29% drama, and 17% educational programming, with an estimated 2,000 receiving sets by the end of the year, and an estimated audience of five to eight thousand. A remote truck could cover outdoor events from up to 10 miles away from the transmitter, which was located atop the Empire State Building. Coaxial cable was used to cover events at Madison Square Garden. The coverage area for reliable reception was a radius of 40 to 50 miles from the Empire State Building, an area populated by more than 10,000,000 people (Lohr, 1940).

The FCC adopted NTSC television engineering standards on May 2, 1941, calling for 525 lines of horizontal resolution, 30 frames per second with interlaced scanning, and sound carried by frequency modulation. Sets sold since 1939 which were built for slightly lower resolution could still be adjusted to receive the new standard. (Dunlap, p31). The FCC saw television ready for commercial licensing, and the first such licenses were issued to NBC and CBS owned stations in New York on July 1, 1941, followed by Philco's station in Philadelphia. After the U.S. entry into World War II, the FCC reduced the required minimum air time for commercial television stations from 15 hours per week to 4 hours. Most TV stations suspended broadcasting. On the few that remained, programs included entertainment such as boxing and plays, events at Madison Square Garden, and illustrated war news as well as training for air raid wardens and first aid providers. In 1942, there were 5,000 sets in operation, but production of new TVs, radios, and other broadcasting equipment for civilian purposes was suspended from April 1942 to August 1945 (Dunlap).

[edit] Canada

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) adopted the American NTSC 525-line B/W 60 field per second system as its broadcast standard. It began television broadcasting in Canada in September 1952. The first broadcast was on September 6, 1952 from its Montreal, Quebec station CBFT. The premiere broadcast was bilingual, spoken in English and French. Two days later, on September 8, 1952, the Toronto, Ontario station CBLT went on the air. This became the English-speaking flagship station for the country. The CBC’s first privately owned affiliate television station, CKSO in Sudbury, Ontario, launched in October 1953 (at the time, all private stations were expected to affiliate with the CBC, a condition that was relaxed in 1960–61).

[edit] France

In November 1929, Bernard Natan established France's first television company, Télévision-Baird-Natan. On April 14, 1931, was the first transmission with a thirty-line standard by René Barthélemy. On December 6, 1931, Henri de France created the Compagnie Générale de Télévision (CGT). In December 1932, Bathélemy carried out an experimental program in black and white (definition: 60 lines) one hour per week, "Paris Télévision", which gradually became daily from early 1933.

The first official channel of French television appeared on February 13, 1935, date of the official inauguration of television in France which was broadcast in 60 lines from 8:15 to 8:30 pm. The program was of the actress Béatrice Bretty from the studio of Radio-PTT Vision at 103 rue de Grenelle in Paris. The broadcast had a range of 100 km (62 miles). On November 10, George Mandel, Minister of PTT, inaugurated the first broadcast in 180 lines from the transmitter of the Eiffel tower. On the 18th, Susy Wincker, first announcer since June, carried out a demonstration for the press from 5:30 to 7:30 pm. Broadcasts became regular from January 4, 1937 from 11:00 to 11:30 am and 8:00 to 8:30 pm during the week, and from 5:30 to 7:30 pm on Sundays. In July 1938, a decree defined for three years a standard of 455 lines VHF (whereas three standards are used for the experiments: 441 lines for Gramont, 450 lines for the Compagnie des Compteurs and 455 for Thomson). In 1939, there were about only 200 to 300 individual television sets, some of which were also available in a few public places.

With the entry of France into World War II the same year, broadcasts ceased and the transmitter of the Eiffel tower was sabotaged. On September 3, 1940, French television was seized by the German occupation forces. A technical agreement was signed by the Compagnie des Compteurs and Telefunken, and a financing agreement for the resuming of the service is signed by German Ministry of Post and Radiodiffusion Nationale (Vichy's radio). On May 7, 1943 at 3:00 evening broadcasts. The first broadcast of Fernsehsender Paris (Paris Télévision) was transmitted from rue Cognac-Jay. These regular broadcasts (5 1/4 hours a day) lasted until August 16, 1944. One thousand 441-line sets, most of which were installed in soldiers' hospitals, picked up the broadcasts.

In 1944, René Barthélemy developed an 819-line television standard. During the years of occupation, Barthélemy reached 1015 and even 1042 lines. On October 1, 1944, television service resumed after the liberation of Paris. The broadcasts were transmitted from the Cognacq-Jay studios. In October 1945, after repairs, the transmitter of the Eiffel Tower was back in service. On November 20, 1948, Mitterrand decreed a broadcast standard of 819 lines; broadcasting begins at the end of 1949 in this definition. France is the only European country to adopt it (others will choose 625 lines).

[edit] Germany

Electromechanical broadcasts began in Germany in 1929, but were without sound until 1934. Network electronic service started on March 22, 1935, on 180 lines using telecine transmission of film, intermediate film system, or cameras using the Nipkow Disk. Transmissions using cameras based on the iconoscope began on January 15, 1936. The Berlin Summer Olympic Games were televised, using both fully electronic iconoscope-based cameras and intermediate film cameras, to Berlin and Hamburg in August 1936. Twenty-eight public television rooms were opened for anybody who did not own a television set. The Germans had a 441-line system on the air in February 1937, and during World War II brought it to France, where they broadcast off the Eiffel Tower. The American Armed Forces Radio Network at the end of World War II, wishing to provide US TV programming to the occupation forces in Germany, used US TV receivers made to operate at 525 lines and 60 fields. US broadcast equipment was modified; they changed the vertical frequency to 50 Hz to avoid power line wiggles, changed the horizontal frequency from 15,750 Hz to 15,625 Hz a 0.5 microsecond change in the length of a line. With this signal, US TV receivers with only an adjustment to the vertical hold control had a 625 line, 50 field scan, which became the German standard.

[edit] United Kingdom

The first British television broadcast was made by Baird Television's electromechanical system over the BBC radio transmitter in September 1929. Baird provided a limited amount of programming five days a week by 1930. On August 22, 1932, BBC launched its own regular service using Baird's 30-line electromechanical system, continuing until September 11, 1935. On November 2, 1936 the BBC began broadcasting a dual-system service, alternating between Marconi-EMI's 405-line standard and Baird's improved 240-line standard, from Alexandra Palace in London, making the BBC Television Service (now BBC One) the world's first regular high-definition television service. The government, on advice from a special advisory committee, decided that Marconi-EMI's electronic system gave the superior picture, and the Baird system was dropped in February 1937. TV broadcasts in London were on the air an average of four hours daily from 1936 to 1939. There were 12,000 to 15,000 receivers. Some sets in restaurants or bars might have 100 viewers for sport events (Dunlap, p56).The outbreak of the Second World War caused the BBC service to be suspended on September 1, 1939, resuming from Alexandra Palace on June 7, 1946.

The first live broadcast from the European continent was made on 27 August 1950. The first live signal to Britain from the United States was broadcast via the Telstar satellite on 23 July 1962.

[edit] Soviet Union (USSR)

The Soviet Union began offering 30-line electromechanical test broadcasts in Moscow on October 31, 1931, and a commercially manufactured television set in 1932. The first experimental transmissions of electronic television took place in Moscow on March 9, 1937, using equipment manufactured and installed by RCA. Regular broadcasting began on December 31, 1938.

[edit] Later development

The first regular television transmissions in Canada began in 1952 when the CBC put two stations on the air, one in Montreal, Quebec on September 6, and another in Toronto, Ontario two days later.

[edit] Technological innovations

The first live transcontinental television broadcast took place in San Francisco, California with U.S. President Harry Truman's speech at the Japanese Peace Treaty Conference on September 4, 1951, using AT&T's transcontinental cable and microwave radio relay system.^[56][57][58] The first live coast-to-coast commercial television broadcast in the U.S. took place on November 18, 1951 on the premiere of See It Now, which showed a split screen view of the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City and the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. In 1958, the CBC completed the longest television network in the world, from Sydney, Nova Scotia to Victoria, British Columbia. Reportedly, the first continuous live broadcast of a breaking news story in the world was conducted by the CBC during the Springhill Mining Disaster which began on October 23 of that year.

Programming is broadcast on television stations (sometimes called channels). At first, terrestrial broadcasting was the only way television could be distributed. Because bandwidth was limited, government regulation was normal.

In the U.S., the Federal Communications Commission in 1941 allowed stations to broadcast advertisements, but insisted on public service programming commitments as a requirement for a license. By contrast, the United Kingdom chose a different route, imposing a television licence fee on owners of television reception equipment, to fund the BBC, which had public service as part of its Royal Charter.

The development of cable and satellite means of distribution in the 1970s pushed businessmen to target channels towards a certain audience, and enabled the rise of subscription-based television channels, such as HBO and Sky.

[edit] Overview

Practically every country in the world now has developed at least one television channel. Television has grown up all over the world, enabling every country to share aspects of their culture and society with others.

[edit] Television sets

In television's electromechanical era, commercially made television sets were sold from 1928 to 1934 in the United Kingdom,^[59] United States, and Russia.^[60] The earliest commercially made sets sold by Baird in the UK in 1928 were radios with the addition of a television device consisting of a neon tube behind a mechanically spinning disk (the Nipkow disk) with a spiral of apertures that produced a red postage-stamp size image, enlarged to twice that size by a magnifying glass. The Baird "Televisor" was also available without the radio. The Televisor sold in 1930–1933 is considered the first mass-produced set, selling about a thousand units.^[61]

The first commercially made electronic television sets with cathode ray tubes were manufactured by Telefunken in Germany in 1934,^[62][63] followed by other makers in France (1936),^[64] Britain (1936),^[65] and America (1938).^[66][67] The cheapest of the pre-World War II factory-made American sets, a 1938 image-only model with a 3-inch (8 cm) screen, cost US$125, the equivalent of US$1,863 in 2007. The cheapest model with a 12-inch (30 cm) screen was $445 ($6,633).^[68]

An estimated 19,000 electronic television sets were manufactured in Britain, and about 1,600 in Germany, before World War II. About 7,000–8,000 electronic sets were made in the U.S.^[69] before the War Production Board halted manufacture in April 1942, production resuming in August 1945.

Television usage in the United States skyrocketed after World War II with the lifting of the manufacturing freeze, war-related technological advances, the gradual expansion of the television networks westward, the drop in set prices caused by mass production, increased leisure time, and additional disposable income. While only 0.5% of U.S. households had a television set in 1946, 55.7% had one in 1954, and 90% by 1962.^[70] In Britain, there were 15,000 television households in 1947, 1.4 million in 1952, and 15.1 million by 1968.

For many years different countries used different technical standards. France initially adopted the German 441-line standard but later upgraded to 819 lines, which gave the highest picture definition of any analogue TV system, approximately double the resolution of the British 405-line system. However this is not without a cost, in that the cameras need to produce four times the pixel rate (thus quadrupling the bandwidth), from pixels one-quarter the size, reducing the sensitivity by an equal amount. In practice the 819-line cameras never achieved anything like the resolution that could theoretically be transmitted by the 819 line system, and for color, France reverted to the same 625 lines as the European CCIR system.

Eventually most of Europe switched to the 625-line PAL standard, once more following Germany's example. France adopting SECAM. Meanwhile in North America the original NTSC 525-line standard from 1941 was retained, although analog television will be totally replaced for broadcast purposes by a 1080 line digital picture/sound system in February of 2009.

[edit] Television inventors/pioneers

Important people in the development of TV technology in the 19th or 20th centuries.

John Logie Baird Guillermo González Camarena Alan Blumlein Walter Bruch (PAL television) Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton Allen B. DuMont Philo Taylor Farnsworth Boris Grabovsky Charles Francis Jenkins

Earl Muntz Paul Gottlieb Nipkow Constantin Perskyi Boris Rosing David Sarnoff Kenjiro Takayanagi Kálmán Tihanyi Vladimir Zworykin

[edit] Television museums

• Early Television Museum
• Museum of Television and Radio
• Museum of Broadcast Communications
• National Media Museum
• Nation Australia Film and Acrhives Museum

[edit] See also

• Golden Age of Television, c1949–1960 in the US
• History of radio
• Television
• Television Hall of Fame
• Archive of American Television
• Dunlap, Orrin E. "The Future of Television". New York and London: Harper Brothers, 1942.
• Lohr, Lenox, "Television Broadcasting". New York: McGraw Hill, 1940.
• Video monitor timeline
• Oldest television station
• List of experimental television stations
• Timeline of the introduction of television in countries
• Timeline of the introduction of color television in countries
• Geographical usage of television
• NTSC
• PAL
• SECAM

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

• Abramson, Albert. The History of Television, 1880 to 1941. (1987). Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. ISBN 0-89950-284-9.
• Abramson, Albert. The History of Television, 1942 to 2000. (2003). Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. ISBN 0-78641-220-8.
• Burns, R. W. Television: An international history of the formative years. (1998). IEE History of Technology Series, 22. London: IEE. ISBN 0-85296-914-7.
• Fisher, David E. and Marshall Jon Fisher. Tube: the Invention of Television. (1996). Washington: Counterpoint. ISBN 1887178171.
• Shiers, George. Early Television: A Bibliographic Guide to 1940. (1997). Garland Reference Library of Social Science. ISBN 0-82407-782-2.

[edit] External links

Links related to the development or history of television

• History of television - Includes an anthology of early texts on "seeing at a distance by electricity"
• Television history — inventors including a timeline
• Who Invented Television - Reconciling The Historical Origins of Electronic Video
• Photos of early TV receivers
• Article describing development of the television
• Early television museum (extensive online presence)
• Ed Reitan's Color Television History
• Detailed timeline of communications media (including the TV)
• The history of Australian television
• Video Active: Creating Access to Television History
• A Visit to Our Studios: a television program exploring the studios at Johns Hopkins University in 1951
• Archive of American Television (information and links to videotaped oral history interviews with TV legends and pioneers)

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