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History of television

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search "Experimental television" redirects here. For the production studio, see Experimental Television Center. The history of television comprises the work of numerous engineers and inventors in several countries over many decades. The earliest proposal was in 1908, in a paper by A. A. CampbellSwinton and postulated the use of cathode rays. The first practical demonstrations of television, however, were developed using electromechanical methods to scan, transmit, and reproduce an image. As electronic camera and display tubes were perfected, electromechanical television gave way to all-electronic systems in nearly all applications.

Contents

1 Electromechanical television 2 Electronic television 3 Color television 4 Broadcast television o 4.1 Overview o 4.2 United Kingdom o 4.3 United States o 4.4 Mexico o 4.5 Canada o 4.6 Czechoslovakia o 4.7 France o 4.8 Germany o 4.9 Soviet Union (USSR) o 4.10 Japan 5 Technological innovations 6 Television sets 7 Television inventors/pioneers 8 Television museums 9 See also 10 References 11 Further reading 12 External links

Electromechanical television
Main article: Mechanical television

The Nipkow disk. This schematic shows the circular paths traced by the holes, that may also be square for greater precision. The area of the disk outlined in black shows the region scanned.

Soviet Mechanical scan TV-set (about 1931-38) The beginnings of mechanical television 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 John Logie Baird's demonstration of televised moving images in 1926. As a 23-year-old German university student, Paul Nipkow proposed and patented the first electromechanical television system in 1884.[1] Although he never built a working model of the system, variations of Nipkow's spinning-disk "image rasterizer" for television became exceedingly common, and remained in use until 1939.[2] 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.[3] However, it was not until 1907 that developments in amplification tube technology, by Lee DeForest and Arthur Korn among others, made the design practical.[4] The first demonstration of the instantaneous transmission of still silhouette 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.[5]

In 1911, Boris Rosing and his student Vladimir 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 "Braun tube" (cathode ray tube or "CRT") in the receiver. Moving images were not possible because, in the scanner, "the sensitivity was not enough and the selenium cell was very laggy".[6] On March 25, 1925, Scottish inventor John Logie Baird gave the first public demonstration of televised silhouette images in motion, at Selfridge's Department Store in London.[7] AT&T's Bell Telephone Laboratories transmitted halftone still images of transparencies in May 1925. On June 13 of that year, Charles Francis Jenkins transmitted the silhouette image of a toy windmill in motion, over a distance of five miles from a naval radio station in Maryland to his laboratory in Washington, using a lensed disk scanner with a 48-line resolution.[8][9] However, if television is defined as the live transmission of moving images with continuous tonal variation, Baird first achieved this privately on October 2, 1925. But strictly speaking, Baird had not yet achieved moving images on October 2. His scanner worked at only five images per second, below the threshold required to give the illusion of motion, usually defined as at least 12 images per second. By January, he had improved the scan rate to 12.5 images per second.[citation needed] Then on January 26, 1926 at his laboratory in London, Baird gave what is widely recognized as being the world's first demonstration of a working television system to members of the Royal Institution and a newspaper reporter.[citation needed] 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.[citation needed] In 1927, Baird transmitted a signal over 438 miles (705 km) 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.[10] In 1929, he became involved in the first experimental electromechanical television service in Germany. In November of the same year, Baird and Bernard Natan of Path established France's first television company, Tlvision-Baird-Natan. In 1931, he made the first outdoor remote broadcast, of the Epsom Derby.[11] 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 though the mechanical system did not scan the televised scene directly. Instead a 17.5mm film was shot, rapidly developed and then scanned while the film was still wet. On November 2, 1936 the BBC began transmitting the world's first public television service from the Victorian Alexandra Palace in north London[12] following alternate daily test broadcasts of the Baird and Marconi systems to the Radio Show at Olympia at the end of August. It therefore claims to be the birthplace of television broadcasting as we know it today. The intermediate film

system was discontinued within three months in favour of a 405-line all-electronic system developed by Marconi-EMI.[13] Herbert E. Ives and Frank Gray of Bell Telephone Laboratories gave a dramatic demonstration of mechanical television on April 7, 1927. The reflected-light television system included both small and large viewing screens. The small receiver had a two-inch-wide by 2.5-inch-high screen. The large receiver had a screen 24 inches wide by 30 inches high. Both sets were capable of reproducing reasonably accurate, monochromatic moving images. Along with the pictures, the sets also received synchronized sound. The system transmitted images over two paths: first, a copper wire link from Washington to New York City, then a radio link from Whippany, New Jersey. Comparing the two transmission methods, viewers noted no difference in quality. Subjects of the telecast included Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover. A flying-spot scanner beam illuminated these subjects. The scanner that produced the beam had a 50-aperture disk. The disc revolved at a rate of 18 frames per second, capturing one frame about every 56 milliseconds. (Today's systems typically transmit 30 or 60 frames per second, or one frame every 33.3 or 16.7 milliseconds respectively.) Television historian Albert Abramson underscored the significance of the Bell Labs demonstration: "It was in fact the best demonstration of a mechanical television system ever made to this time. It would be several years before any other system could even begin to compare with it in picture quality."[14] Meanwhile in the Soviet Union, Lon 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 May 7, 1926 he electrically transmitted and then projected near-simultaneous moving images on a five foot square screen.[9] By 1927 he achieved an image of 100 lines, a resolution that was not surpassed until 1931 by RCA, with 120 lines.[citation needed] On December 25, 1925, Kenjiro Takayanagi demonstrated a television system with a 40-line resolution that employed a Nipkow disk scanner and CRT display at Hamamatsu Industrial High School in Japan. This prototype is still on display at the Takayanagi Memorial Museum in Shizuoka University, Hamamatsu Campus. His research in creating a production model was halted by the US after Japan lost World War II.[15] Mechanical scanning systems, though obsolete for the more familiar television systems, nevertheless survive in long wave infrared cameras because there is no suitable all-electronic pickup device.[citation needed]

Electronic television
Main article: Video camera tube In 1908 Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton, fellow of the Royal Society (UK), published a letter in the scientific journal Nature in which he described how "distant electric vision" could be achieved by using a cathode ray tube (or "Braun" tube, after its inventor, Karl Braun) as both a transmitting and receiving device,[16][17] apparently the first iteration of the electronic television method that would dominate the field until recently. He expanded on his vision in a speech given

in London in 1911 and reported in The Times[18] and the Journal of the Rntgen Society.[19][20] In a letter to Nature published in October 1926, Campbell-Swinton also announced the results of some "not very successful experiments" he had conducted with G. M. Minchin and J. C. M. Stanton. They had attempted to generate an electrical signal by projecting an image onto a selenium-coated metal plate that was simultaneously scanned by a cathode ray beam.[21][22] These experiments were conducted before March 1914, when Minchin died,[23] but they were later repeated by two different teams in 1937, by H. Miller and J. W. Strange from EMI,[24] and by H. Iams and A. Rose from RCA.[25] Both teams succeeded in transmitting "very faint" images with the original Campbell-Swinton's selenium-coated plate. Although others had experimented with using a cathode ray tube as a receiver, the concept of using one as a transmitter was novel.[26] By the late 1920s, when electromechanical television was still being introduced, several inventors were already working separately on versions of all-electronic transmitting tubes, including Philo Farnsworth and Vladimir Zworykin in the United States, and Klmn Tihanyi in Hungary. On September 7, 1927, Farnsworth's Image Dissector camera tube transmitted its first image, a simple straight line, at his laboratory at 202 Green Street in San Francisco.[27][28] By September 3, 1928, Farnsworth had developed the system sufficiently to hold a demonstration for the press.[28] In 1929, the system was further improved by elimination of a motor generator, so that his television system now had no mechanical parts.[29] That year, Farnsworth transmitted the first live human images with his system, including a three and a half-inch image of his wife Elma ("Pem") with her eyes closed (possibly due to the bright lighting required).[30] Meanwhile, Vladimir Zworykin was also experimenting with the cathode ray tube to create and show images. While working for Westinghouse Electric Corporation in 1923, he began to develop an electronic camera tube. But in a 1925 demonstration, the image was dim, had low contrast and poor definition, and was stationary.[31] Zworykin's imaging tube never got beyond the laboratory stage. But RCA, which acquired the Westinghouse patent, asserted that the patent for Farnsworth's 1927 image dissector was written so broadly that it would exclude any other electronic imaging device. Thus RCA, on the basis of 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. Farnsworth claimed that Zworykin's 1923 system would be unable to produce an electrical image of the type to challenge his patent. Zworykin received a patent in 1928 for a color transmission version of his 1923 patent application,[32] he also divided his original application in 1931.[33] Zworykin was unable or unwilling to introduce evidence of a working model of his tube that was based on his 1923 patent application. In September 1939, after losing an appeal in the courts and determined 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.[34][35] The problem of low sensitivity to light resulting in low electrical output from transmitting or "camera" tubes would be solved by Tihanyi beginning in 1924.[36] His solution was a camera tube that accumulated and stored electrical charges ("photoelectrons") within the tube throughout each scanning cycle. The device was first described in a patent application he filed in Hungary in March 1926 for a television system he dubbed "Radioskop".[37] After further refinements included in a 1928 patent application,[36] Tihanyi's patent was declared void in Great Britain in

1930,[38] and so he applied for patents in the United States. Although his breakthrough would be incorporated into the design of RCA's "iconoscope" in 1931, the U.S. patent for Tihanyi's transmitting tube would not be granted until May 1939. The patent for his receiving tube had been granted the previous October. Both patents had been purchased by RCA prior to their approval.[39][40] Charge storage remains a basic principle in the design of imaging devices for television to the present day.[41] Development continued around the world. At the Berlin Radio Show in August 1931, Manfred von Ardenne gave a public demonstration of a television system using a CRT for both transmission and reception. However, Ardenne had not developed a camera tube, using the CRT instead as a flying-spot scanner to scan slides and film.[42] Philo Farnsworth gave the world's first public demonstration of an all-electronic television system, using a live camera, at the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia on August 25, 1934, and for ten days afterwards.[43][44] In 1933 RCA introduced an improved camera tube that relied on Tihanyi's charge storage principle.[45] Dubbed the Iconoscope by Zworykin, the new tube had a light sensitivity of about 75,000 lux, and thus was claimed to be much more sensitive than Farnsworth's image dissector.[citation needed] However, Farnsworth had overcome his power problems with his Image Dissector through the invention of a completely unique "multipactor" device that he began work on in 1930, and demonstrated in 1931.[46][47] This small tube could amplify a signal reportedly to the 60th power or better[48] and showed great promise in all fields of electronics. A problem with the multipactor, unfortunately, was that it wore out at an unsatisfactory rate.[49] In Britain the EMI engineering team led by Isaac Shoenberg applied in 1932 for a patent for a new device they dubbed "the Emitron",[50][51] which formed the heart of the cameras they designed for the BBC. On November 2, 1936, a 405-line broadcasting service employing the Emitron began at studios in 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. This was the world's first regular high-definition television service.[52] The original American iconoscope was noisy, had a high ratio of interference to signal, and ultimately gave disappointing results, especially when compared to the high definition mechanical scanning systems then becoming available.[53][54] The EMI team under the supervision of Isaac Shoenberg analyzed how the iconoscope (or Emitron) produces an electronic signal and concluded that its real efficiency was only about 5% of the theoretical maximum.[55][56] They solved this problem by developing and patenting in 1934 two new camera tubes dubbed super-Emitron and CPS Emitron.[57][58][59] The super-Emitron was between ten and fifteen times more sensitive than the original Emitron and iconoscope tubes and, in some cases, this ratio was considerably greater.[55] It was used for an outside broadcasting by the BBC, for the first time, on Armistice Day 1937, when the general public could watch in a television set how the King lay a wreath at the Cenotaph.[60] This was the first time that anyone could broadcast a live street scene from cameras installed on the roof of neighbor buildings, because neither Farnsworth nor RCA could do the same before the 1939 New York World's Fair.

Television antenna on a rooftop On the other hand, in 1934, Zworykin shared some patent rights with the German licensee company Telefunken.[61] The "image iconoscope" ("Superikonoskop" in Germany) was produced as a result of the collaboration. This tube is essentially identical to the super-Emitron.[citation needed] The production and commercialization of the super-Emitron and image iconoscope in Europe were not affected by the patent war between Zworykin and Farnsworth, because Dieckmann and Hell had priority in Germany for the invention of the image dissector, having submitted a patent application for their Lichtelektrische Bildzerlegerrhre fr Fernseher (Photoelectric Image Dissector Tube for Television) in Germany in 1925,[62] two years before Farnsworth did the same in the United States.[63] The image iconoscope (Superikonoskop) became the industrial standard for public broadcasting in Europe from 1936 until 1960, when it was replaced by the vidicon and plumbicon tubes. Indeed it was the representative of the European tradition in electronic tubes competing against the American tradition represented by the image orthicon.[64][65] The German company Heimann produced the Superikonoskop for the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games,[66][67] later Heimann also produced and commercialized it from 1940 to 1955,[68] finally the Dutch company Philips produced and commercialized the image iconoscope and multicon from 1952 to 1958.[65][69] American television broadcasting at the time consisted of a variety of markets in a wide range of sizes, each competing for programming and dominance with separate technology, until deals were made and standards agreed upon in 1941.[70] RCA, for example, used only Iconoscopes in the New York area, but Farnsworth Image Dissectors in Philadelphia and San Francisco.[71] In September 1939, RCA agreed to pay the Farnsworth Television and Radio Corporation royalties over the next ten years for access to Farnsworth's patents.[72] With this historic agreement in place, RCA integrated much of what was best about the Farnsworth Technology into their systems.[71]

In 1941, the United States implemented 525-line television.[73][74] The world's first 625-line television standard was designed in the Soviet Union in 1944, and became a national standard in 1946.[75] The first broadcast in 625-line standard occurred in 1948 in Moscow.[76] The concept of 625 lines per frame was subsequently implemented in the European CCIR standard.[77]

Color television
Main article: Color television

Broadcast television
Further information: Timeline of the introduction of television in countries

Overview
Programming is broadcast by television stations, sometimes called "channels", as stations are licensed by their governments to broadcast only over assigned channels in the television band. At first, terrestrial broadcasting was the only way television could be widely distributed, and because bandwidth was limited, i.e., there were only a small number of channels available, government regulation was the norm. In the U.S., the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) allowed stations to broadcast advertisements beginning in July 1941, but required public service programming commitments as a requirement for a license. By contrast, the United Kingdom chose a different route, imposing a television license fee on owners of television reception equipment to fund the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), which had public service as part of its Royal Charter.

Technological innovations
The first national live television broadcast in the U.S. took place on September 4, 1951 when President Harry Truman's speech at the Japanese Peace Treaty Conference in San Francisco, California was transmitted over AT&T's transcontinental cable and microwave radio relay system to broadcast stations in local markets.[101][102][103] The first live coast-to-coast commercial television broadcast in the U.S. took place on November 18, 1951 during the premiere of CBS's 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. The development of cable and satellite television in the 1970s allowed for more channels and encouraged businessmen to target programming toward specific audiences. It also enabled the

rise of subscription television channels, such as Home Box Office (HBO) and Showtime in the U.S., and Sky Television in the U.K.

Television sets
Main articles: Television set and analog television

With his 1884 patent of the Nipkow disc, German technician Paul Nipkow is regarded as the inventor of the TV set. In television's electromechanical era, commercially made television sets were sold from 1928 to 1934 in the United Kingdom,[104] United States, and the Soviet Union.[105] 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 19301933 is considered the first mass-produced set, selling about a thousand units.[106] The first commercially made electronic television sets with cathode ray tubes were manufactured by Telefunken in Germany in 1934,[107][108] followed by other makers in France (1936),[109] Britain (1936),[110] and America (1938).[111][112] The cheapest of the pre-World War II factorymade 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).[113] An estimated 19,000 electronic television sets were manufactured in Britain, and about 1,600 in Germany, before World War II. About 7,0008,000 electronic sets were made in the U.S.[114] before the War Production Board halted manufacture in April 1942, production resuming in August 1945.

RCA 630-TS, the first mass-produced television set, which sold in 19461947

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. In 1947, Motorola introduced the VT-71 television for $189.95, the first television set to be sold for under $200, finally making television affordable for millions of Americans. While only 0.5% of U.S. households had a television set in 1946, 55.7% had one in 1954, and 90% by 1962.[115] In Britain, there were 15,000 television households in 1947, 1.4 million in 1952, and 15.1 million by 1968.

Typical 1950s United States television set

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 405line 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 625-line CCIR system used by most European countries. With advent of color television most Western European countries adopted PAL standard. France, Soviet Union and most Eastern European countries adopted SECAM. In North America the original NTSC 525-line standard was augmented to include color transmission with slight slowing down of frame rate. Throughout the 1960s, television sets used exclusively vacuum tube electronics. This resulted in relatively heavy and unreliable TVs. In addition, vacuum tubes were poorly suited to color television, as it required a large amount of tubes which caused further reliability problems. Because vacuum tubes only allowed for very simple NTSC/PAL filtering, the picture quality of early color sets was rather poor. The tint control that is still found on NTSC televisions originally was meant to correct the color burst phase's drifting when channels were changed. In addition, the large number of vacuum tubes required for color prevented the use of it in portable TVs.

By the early 1970s, solid-state electronics appeared and quickly displaced vacuum tubes in color TVs (black and white sets generally continued to be tube-based). This allowed for significantly more reliable TVs and better picture quality. 1971 was the first year that sales of color TVs in the US exceeded B&W ones. In other countries, color was slower to arrive and did not become common in Western Europe until the '80s. By 1965, the FCC began requiring UHF tuners in all TVs sold in the United States. In 1971, there were 170 UHF stations in the country, mostly low-power ones that carried local programming. Previously, UHF support from TV manufacturers was sporadic. Most sets did not come factory-equipped with them, and often merely included an empty slot in the cabinet where an optional UHF tuner could be installed. During the 1970s, electronic tuners began appearing in high-end TVs in place of traditional dials, and they would gradually become standard along with remote controls. Remotes had first appeared in the 1950s with Zenith's Space Command Control, but these were mechanical devices that emitted a high-pitched audio frequency that the TV detected. The first electronic remote controls did not appear until the 1980s. 1980s TV developments mainly centered on the above-mentioned features. Electronic television tuners also went hand-in-hand with the rise of cable television. Analog comb filters, first introduced in the '70s on high-end sets, gradually became more common. Black-and-white TVs virtually disappeared from the American market except for 5-inch, battery-powered models. 1983 marked the widespread commercial availability of the first LCD TV sets: the Seiko wristwatch TV (the receiver was in a separate unit, connected by a thin cable that ran down the wearer's sleeve)[116] and the pocket-size Casio TV-10. Both were black-and-white receivers with low-resolution displays that suffered from poor contrast and serious pixel lag problems. Improved pocket-size units, including the first color sets, soon followed.[117] Hitachi has been credited with the first trade-shown prototype, exhibited in Berlin in 1977.[118] In the 1990s, three-line digital comb filters appeared on high-end TVs. In addition, composite video and S-video inputs began appearing to support devices like video games and VCRs. Analog broadcast television in the United States ended on June 12, 2009 in favor of Digital terrestrial television (DTV) or digital-only broadcasting.

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