Television
Julius Plücker - 1859
Sir William Crooks
Crooks tube
Beam pulled up by magnet
Karl Braun - 1897
Braun’s cathode ray tube
G. R. Carey – 1875
Shelford Bidwell – 1881
Maurice leBlanc
Paul Nipkow – 1884
Mechanical TV - 1884
Boris Rosing

First to use a cathode
ray tube as a receiver
for a mechanically
scanned image
Archibald Campbell-Swinton

First to suggest using
cathode ray tubes for
both sending and
receiving images
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1911 – A. Sinding-Larsen suggested using radio
instead of wires as a carrier of picture signals
We now have all the concepts for what we think
of as “modern television”
And then World War I happened
Charles Francis Jenkins
John Baird / first TV face
Vladimir Zworykin
Icononscope – the camera
Kinescope – the receiver
Cathode ray tube
Philo Farnsworth
Farnsworth won the lawsuit
against Zworykin and RCA over
who invented the kinescope and
the iconoscope. Thus, he’s
known as
“the father of television.”

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RCA now had to pay Farnsworth royalties to
license his patents
Sarnoff said of RCA that it was determined “to
collect patent royalties, not pay them.”

Date of demonstration
 1930
 1931
 1933
 1936
 1939
 1941
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No. of picture lines
 60 lines
 120 lines
 240 lines
 343 lines
 441 lines
 525 lines
Felix the Cat image – 1929, 1937
FDR opening 1939 World’s Fair
 Television
started broadcasting in
1939
 World War II
brought everything to a halt
Post-war

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RCA 630 set
RCA gave the plans to
other companies
Set sales skyrocketed:
 In 1946 – 6,000
 In 1952 – 21,782,000
Began broadcasting again in 1946
as basically “radio with pictures”
Radio with pictures
TV essentially stole radio’s
programming –
dramas, comedies, variety shows,
talk shows, game shows, sports,
news.
All programming was done live.
The Ruggles / Mama/ Mr. Peepers
Milton Berle
Sid Caesar
Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz
The death of live shows
CBS’ field sequential color wheel
CRT action
RCA color TV – 1954
Shut up!