The Innovative Development of the Television
The television was an innovative achievement that allowed images to be transmitted through radio waves. This invention developed to become the primary medium for broadcasting and influencing the public opinion around the world.
In the early 1920’s various experimentations of the moving images had surged but it was the invention of 21 year-old, Philo T. Farnsworth that became the first ancestor of the modern television. He was able to achieve this by using a beam of electrons to create an image on the screen. (Vlku)
The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) invested $50 million dollars on Farnsworth invention. In 1939, RCA televised a speech by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was the first president to appear on television, during the opening of New York’s world fair. After this, they started broadcasting regular programs and even CBS, their biggest competitor, televised two 15-minute news segments a day in New York. (Stephens)
The first production of the TV was quite rudimentary. The first sets sold we 5 by 12 in (12.7 by 25.4 cm) picture tubes. “All the action at that first televised baseball game had to be captured by a single camera, and the limitations of early cameras forced actors in dramas to work under impossibly hot lights, wearing black lipstick and green makeup (the cameras had trouble with the color white).” (Stephens) The quality of the image and the size of the TV made it quite difficult to make out the people and when WWII began RCA, like many other companies, turned its attention to military production.
In August 16, 1944; Scottish engineer, John L. Baird introduced the first demonstration of a colored TV system, but due to his untimely death in 1946, this development came to an end. After considerable research, the National Television Systems Committee approved an all-electronic Compatible color system developed by RCA, which encoded the color information separately from the brightness information and greatly reduced the resolution of the color information in order to conserve bandwidth. This led to the introduction of colored TV in market place in 1953, but its high value and the scarcity of color programming slowed its acceptance. It wasn’t until the mid 1960’s that colored television started to sell in high numbers because most of the prime time programming was all color.(Stephens) A couple of years later the rest of the daytime programming was converted to full color as well.
The next reinvention of the TV was made possible by the feasibility of the digital television signal, which would be suited for many more improvements like the HDTV. This brought upon higher resolution on newer screen developments like the Liquid Crystal Display (LCD). The birth of digital TV led the way for innovations regarding 3D technology and integrated Internet and web 2.0 features which turned digital TV’s into Smart TV’s. These would not only broadcast digital signals through the web, but would also be used as a network between devices also connected to the Internet. Although the first patent for this invention was filed in 1994, it would not be until the late 2010, that these new technology hit the market, due to further developments needed in the Internet and network connections available worldwide. (Stephens)
The development of television followed different patterns is countries all over the world. In some cases, governments took control over the major networks, not privately owned corporations. Organizations like Great Britain’s BBC, which dominated the radio broadcast and took over and retained television as well, was praised worldwide for its reputation on its programming quality. However, as the rise of cable and