The television was one of the most influential and important inventions of the 20th century. Up until the 1960’s the newspaper was the best way to mold public opinion. By 1965 the most trusted source of media was the television and almost every American owned one. The impact this had on America was profound, as shown in the 1960 Presidential elections and the Vietnam war.
A Brief History of the Television
The Early Days of Television
- In 1884 Paul Gottlieb Nipkow, a 23-year-old German college student, patented the first electromechanical television system which employed a scanning disk, which was later named a Nipkow disk, based off his last name
- In 1925, a Scottish inventor called John Logie Baird, using a Nipkow disk, succeeded in demonstrating the transmission of moving silhouette images in London. This demonstration is considered to be the worlds first ever demonstration of a television. His television produced an image of 30 lines of resolution, which is just enough to make out a face
- On the 1st of September, 1927, an American inventor named Philo Farnsworth made the worlds first working television system with electronic scanning of both the pickup and display devices
The Early Days of Broadcasting
- The worlds oldest television station is considered to be WRGB, tracing its roots to an experimental station founded on January 13, 1928. They would broadcast from the General Electric Factory in Schenectady, New York
- Although WRGB did start broadcasting in 1928, they only had a few minutes of broadcasting a day. Therefore the BBC claims the title of the birthplace of television broadcasting; on the 2nd of November 1936 they began transmitting the world's first public, regular, high-definition service from the Victorian Alexandra Palace in London