As you sit there flipping through hundreds of channels on your TV, it’s hard to believe that only a few decades ago there were no home televisions at all. Board a train and you’ll likely find yourself next to someone who remembers when not even a single house in the street had a TV set, let alone the luxury of enjoying television while having a bath.
As far back as the 1850s inventors were working on the concept of TV, with the first breakthrough coming in 1873. However, it wasn’t until 1926 that the Scotsman John Logie Baird demonstrated the first working mechanical system, and in in 1927 he transmitted a signal from London to Glasgow.
You can check the below documentary about the history of TV which can be found in different websites related to TV or you can easily find it in YouTube:
The BBC made its first public TV broadcast on November 2, 1936, using technology developed by both Logie Baird and Marconi.
Taking the Tube:
The idea of an electronic set was first voiced in 1908 by Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton, when he wrote about the potential for using a cathode ray tube. The tube had been invented earlier, in 1897, by Karl Braun but was unusable for TV at the time. Later it would become the most important device in television for the next century.
It remains the subject of much debate as to who really invented the television. Many people credit it to Germany’s Paul Nipkow, who patented technology known as the Nipkow disc in 1884. It was in 1929 that American inventor Philo Farnsworth transmitted the first living human images on a TV with no mechanical parts.
The first black-and-white television sets boasting cathode ray tubes were made for the commercial market in 1934 by Germany’s Telefunken company, although electromechanical sets were sold in the US, Soviet Union, and the UK as early as 1928.
Logie Baird’s Televisor set, which used the Nipkow disk, is regarded as the first mass-produced television, selling around 1,000 between 1930 and 1933. Between 1936 and 1939, TV in London was aired to between 12,000 and 15,000 receivers. By the end of 1947, there were 54,000 licensed receivers. The boom had begun and by 1947 there were 15,000 homes in Britain with TVs, a figure which had risen to 1.4 million by 1952 and 15.1 million by 1968.
In Britain, the BBC made its first color broadcast in 1967, on BBC 2, but it was only in the 1980s that color sets became common. The first LCD TVs started to be available to ordinary people in 1983.
The Advances March On:
TV has come a long way since then. The last decade has seen everything from rear projection and digital light-processing sets to plasma display panels, liquid crystal display, and light-emitting diode TVs entering homes. The organic light-emitting diode (OLED) TV is seen as a must-have at the moment, offering displays that don’t need backlights to work.
High-definition picture quality has become a buzz phrase in electrical shops across the world, but the future undoubtedly lies with 3D technology. There are TVs already in development that will let you watch a 3D set as you would any other TV, but many people are sitting down today for a three-dimensional experience wearing a pair of battery-powered glasses.
It won’t be long either before flexible screens mean that viewers will be able to roll them up and put them away. The fast-paced evolution of the TV is certainly not over yet.
