Lucy Beevor - The Invention of the Television

Charlie Chaplin was one of the first movie stars. He appeared in many famous silent movies, including The Kid (1921) and The Circus (1928).

Charlie Chaplin was a star of the silent-movie era.

The mechanical television was an early idea for sending moving pictures over long distances. In London, England, in 1926, John Logie Baird of Scotland showed the mechanical television hed invented. It used a spinning disk that copied a picture line by line. Then each line was sent to another disk. That disk put the image back together.

John Logie Baird in his workshop

In 1927, Baird formed the Baird Television Development Company (BTDC). In 1928 the BTDC became the first company to send televised pictures across the Atlantic Ocean between London and New York. The first mechanical TVs went on sale later that year.

The was changing rapidly, and someone needed to find a way to make clearer, faster pictures.

People soon realized that if picture quality was going to improve, televisions would need to be electronic. Philo T. Farnsworth and Vladimir Zworykin were two early inventors of the electronic television. Their work led to the televisions we watch today.

Philo T. Farnsworth was an American electrical . The signals could be sent from one place to another using electricity. Then the lines could be put back together to form a picture.

In 1927, Farnsworth filed a all-electronic television system.

Farnsworth holds his image dissector while standing next to his television. He received a patent for the image dissector in 1930.

Vladimir Zworykin was an electrical engineer from Russia. He moved to the United States in 1919. Zworykin was working on his own version of an all-electronic television system around the same time as Farnsworth. Zworykin called his system the iconoscope, and he applied for a patent for it in 1923. Similar to Farnsworths image dissector, the iconoscope could also change a picture into a radio signal. But Zworykin struggled to make the iconoscope work. Finally, in 1933, he was able to send a picture with the iconoscope. Zworykin received a patent for it in 1938.

Vladimir Zworykin holds an iconoscope.

DID YOU KNOW?

Early inventors used different names for the television. Some of these names were radiovision, radiovisor, and televisor.

While he worked on the radio signals. It changed the radio signals back into pictures.

Today, a monument showing Zworykin and his television is on display in Moscow, Russia.

LEGAL PROBLEMS

All of these inventions led to the creation of television as we know it today. But the race to make the first working system led to legal problems for Zworykin and Farnsworth. Zworykin worked for the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). RCA offered Farnsworth $100,000 for the patent to the image dissector, but Farnsworth refused. So RCA took Farnsworth to court. RCA tried to say that because Zworykin filed his patent first, Farnsworths shouldnt be legal. When the legal battles ended in 1939, the court ruled that RCA could sell electronic TVs for home use. But RCA had to pay Farnsworth $1 million for the rights to make the necessary television parts hed invented.

Farnsworth shows one of his early televisions. The small square at the top is where the picture was shown.

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