Who Invented The First Television?
by Donna Warren

Who invented the first televison? That should be such an easy question to answer. However, it is anything but easy. Ever since the invention of radio, several inventors discussed and even wrote about the idea of transmitting picture compnents over wires. But, exactly who invented the first television is not that easy to determine.

Inventor George Carey wrote a paper about sending picture components over multiple wires. He is credited with the conceiving the idea of using parallel transmission methods. Apparantely he never actually built a device capable of doing it. Inventor W. E. Sawyer suggested the possibility of sending the image over a single wire by scanning parts of the picture in succession and transmitting each part separately.

So through the work of both of these men, the theoretical concepts needed for the electronic transmission of pictures was firmly established. Other engineers such as Jenkins, Ives, Alananderson and Baird built devices that used spinning disks and mirrors that could scan, transmit, and reassemble moving images. Their devices worked and were based on an idea proposed in the 1880s by Paul Nipkow of Germany. The pictures were extremely crude yet their devices did work.

But, it wasn’t until December 2, 1922 when Edwin Berlin, an Englishman living in Sorbonne France demonstarated a mechanical scanning device that an actual working piece of television tranmission equipment was built. Berlin holds patents for the transmission of photographs by wire, fiber optics and radar. Berlin’s device took flashes of light and directed them at a selenium element connected to a device that could produce sound waves. Then the sound waves were transmited to a receiving device and remodulated back into flashes of light on a mirror.

John Baird of Scotland used Nipkow’s disk to transmit pictures to be displayed on selenium coated screens to recreate the images. Baird demonstrated this technique in 1925 by sending the image of a face with his device. Charles Jenkins invented the movie projector. Jenkins demonstrated a 10-minute broadcast of a movie in 1925 and called it radiovision. Baird later achieved the first transatlantic broadcast and began broadcasting as the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) in 1929.

Believe it or not, the controversy had just begun. Two American inventors were working on the problem of making television a reality. One was a Russian-born American inventor named Vladimir Zworykin who worked for RCA Corporation. The other was a farm boy from Utah named Philo Farnsworth who had a private wealthy backer.

Zworykin patented an electronic image scanning device called an iconoscope in 1923. His invention was basically a primitive television camera. Farnsworth developed an electronic scanning tube and demonstrated the transmission of television signals on September 7, 1927 and received a patent for his device in 1930. Fransworth’s device created and manipulated an electron beam and didn’t use any mechanical device. As one history book puts it, “Zworykin had a patent, but Fransworth had a picture.”

In 1929, AT&T broadcast Herbert Hoover over their phone lines and then a vaudeville act over wireless. They had designed and built the first very primitive videophone. General Electric was airing TV using mechanical scanning in 1929 and broadcast dramatic plays and political speeches over the airwaves.

Mechanical television could not last because it needed such powerful lighting that actors could not stay on screen for more than a few minutes at a time because of the heat the lights generated. Electronic TV was the way to go, and Vladimir Zworykin and Philo Farnsworth were both working on that.

Such a simple question…who invented the first television…with such a complex answer. So, who invented the first television?

I honestly don’t know…you'll have to decide.

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