Television

• 1. Introduction

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  In 2013-79% of the world's households owned a television set. This was a medium that began as a spinning disk with holes punched into it, a contraption that could barely render a human face. To get any image at all, an early inventor pointed his camera at a ventriloquist's dummy named Stooky Bill, because a real face lacked the contrast to register. From that crude beginning to compressed digital signals streaming over the Internet, television became the primary medium for influencing public opinion. How did a telecommunication medium for moving images and sound travel from a 30-line silhouette to 4K and 8K resolution? Who fought over the patents, and who won? And why did a Russian scientist coin the word in French at a Paris world's fair before anyone could build the thing he named?

• 2. Naming The Future

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  The first documented usage of the term television dates to 1900, when the Russian scientist Constantin Perskyi presented it in a paper read in French at the first International Congress of Electricity. That congress ran from the 18th to the 25th of August 1900, during the International World Fair in Paris. Perskyi's paper reviewed the existing electromechanical technologies, mentioning the work of Nipkow and others.

  Before the word settled, rivals competed for the name of a then-hypothetical technology. Proposals for sending pictures over distance included telephote, suggested in 1880, and televista, suggested in 1904. The anglicized version of television is first attested in 1907, when it still described a theoretical system to transmit moving images over telegraph or telephone wires.

  The abbreviation TV dates from 1948, but the slang accumulated over decades. The term to mean a television set dates from 1941, while the term to mean television as a medium dates from 1927. The slang term the tube derives from the bulky cathode-ray tube used on most sets until flat screens arrived. In the UK, the word telly is more common, and a less flattering nickname, the idiot box, followed the medium wherever it went.

• 3. The Spinning Disk

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  As a 23-year-old German university student, Paul Julius Gottlieb Nipkow proposed and patented the Nipkow disk in 1884 in Berlin. It was a spinning disk with a spiral pattern of holes, so each hole scanned a single line of the image. Nipkow never built a working model, yet variations of his image rasterizer became exceedingly common.

  In 1909, Georges Rignoux and A. Fournier gave the first demonstration of the live transmission of images in Paris. A matrix of 64 selenium cells served as an electronic retina, wired individually to a mechanical commutator. The 8x8 pixel resolution was just enough to transmit individual letters of the alphabet, with an updated image sent several times each second.

  Scottish inventor John Logie Baird carried the mechanical approach furthest. On the 25th of March 1925, Baird gave the first public demonstration of televised silhouette images in motion at Selfridges department store in London. His system could not show human faces, which lacked contrast, so he televised Stooky Bill, a ventriloquist's dummy whose painted face registered. By the 26th of January 1926, he demonstrated a face in motion before members of the Royal Institution, widely regarded as the world's first true public television demonstration.

  Baird's disk had only 30 holes, producing an image of 30 scan lines, just enough to recognize a human face. In 1927, he transmitted a signal over 438 miles of telephone line between London and Glasgow. In 1928, his company broadcast the first transatlantic television signal between London and New York, along with the first shore-to-ship transmission. His mechanical system reached a peak of 240 lines on BBC telecasts in 1936, though it did not scan the scene directly. Instead, a 17.5 mm film was shot, rapidly developed, and scanned while still wet.

  Other pioneers pushed the disk in parallel. In the United States, Charles Francis Jenkins transmitted the silhouette of a toy windmill over 5 miles in 1925, from a naval radio station in Maryland to his Washington, D.C. laboratory, using a 48-line lensed disk scanner. The same year, on the 25th of December 1926, Kenjiro Takayanagi demonstrated a 40-line system at Hamamatsu Industrial High School in Japan, a prototype still on display at the Takayanagi Memorial Museum. The last mechanical telecasts in the United States, run by public universities, ended in 1939.

• 4. The All-Electronic Race

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  On the 7th of September 1927, Philo Farnsworth's image dissector camera tube transmitted its first image, a simple straight line, at his laboratory at 202 Green Street in San Francisco. By the 3rd of September 1928, he had developed the system enough to hold a demonstration for the press, widely regarded as the first electronic television demonstration. In 1929, Farnsworth transmitted the first live human images, including a three and a half inch image of his wife Elma, nicknamed Pem, with her eyes closed against the bright lighting.

  Vladimir Zworykin pursued the same goal from inside large corporations. While working for Westinghouse Electric in 1923, he began developing an electronic camera tube, but a 1925 demonstration produced an image that was dim, low in contrast, and stationary. RCA, which acquired the Westinghouse patent, filed a patent interference suit against Farnsworth based on Zworykin's 1923 application. A U.S. Patent Office examiner disagreed in a 1935 decision, finding priority of invention for Farnsworth.

  The charge-storage idea that made cameras sensitive enough came from a Hungarian engineer. Kálmán Tihanyi designed a fully electronic system in 1926, employing the principle of charge storage within the camera tube, first described in a patent application he filed in Hungary in March 1926 for a system he called Radioskop. His breakthrough was incorporated into RCA's iconoscope in 1931, though his U.S. patent for the transmitting tube was not granted until May 1939. Both his patents had been purchased by RCA prior to approval.

  The legal war ended with money. In September 1939, after losing an appeal and wanting to manufacture television equipment commercially, RCA agreed to pay Farnsworth one million U.S. dollars over ten years, in addition to license payments, to use his patents. With the agreement in place, RCA integrated much of the Farnsworth technology into its systems.

• 5. Cameras And Standards

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  On the 7th of April 1927, Herbert E. Ives and Frank Gray of Bell Telephone Laboratories gave a dramatic demonstration of mechanical television. Their large receiver had a screen 24 inches wide by 30 inches high, and the subjects of the telecast included Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover. The system carried images over a copper wire link from Washington to New York City, then a radio link from Whippany, New Jersey, and viewers noted no difference in quality between the two paths. Television historian Albert Abramson called it the best demonstration of a mechanical television system ever made to that time.

  In Britain, the EMI engineering team led by Isaac Shoenberg applied in 1932 for a patent on a device they called the Emitron. On the 2nd of November 1936, a 405-line broadcasting service using the Emitron began at studios in Alexandra Palace, transmitted from a specially built mast atop one of the Victorian building's towers. This was the world's first regular high-definition television service.

  Shoenberg's team kept improving the camera tube. They concluded the iconoscope's real efficiency was only about 5% of the theoretical maximum, and in 1934 they patented two new tubes, the super-Emitron and the CPS Emitron. The super-Emitron was between ten and fifteen times more sensitive than the original. The BBC used it for outside broadcasting for the first time on Armistice Day 1937, when the public could watch the King lay a wreath at the Cenotaph, the first live street scene broadcast from cameras on neighboring rooftops.

  National standards crystallized in the same period. In 1941, the United States implemented 525-line television. The world's first 625-line standard was designed in the Soviet Union in 1944 and became a national standard in 1946, with the first broadcast in that standard occurring in Moscow in 1948. The 625-line concept was later implemented in the European CCIR standard.

• 6. Bringing In Color

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  On the 3rd of July 1928, John Logie Baird demonstrated the world's first color transmission, using scanning discs with three spirals of apertures, each spiral carrying filters of a different primary color. He went further on the 4th of February 1938, sending a mechanically scanned 120-line color image from his Crystal Palace studios to a projection screen at London's Dominion Theatre. As early as 1940 Baird began a fully electronic system he called Telechrome, and a demonstration on the 16th of August 1944 was the first example of a practical color television system. His death in 1946 ended the Telechrome work.

  In the United States, a competing field-sequential system came from CBS. In 1939, Hungarian engineer Peter Carl Goldmark introduced an electro-mechanical system there, with a disc of red, blue, and green filters spinning inside the camera at 1,200 rpm and a matching disc spinning in front of the cathode-ray tube in the receiver. It was first demonstrated to the Federal Communications Commission on the 29th of August 1940. These systems were not compatible with existing black-and-white sets, and the War Production Board halted manufacture of television and radio equipment for civilian use from the 22nd of April 1942 to the 20th of August 1945.

  The lasting American standard solved the compatibility problem. The National Television Systems Committee approved an all-electronic system developed by RCA, which encoded color information separately from brightness and reduced the color resolution to conserve bandwidth. Because black-and-white sets could receive the same transmission and show it in monochrome, the system was backwards compatible. Compatible Color, used in RCA advertisements of the period, is even mentioned in the song America from West Side Story in 1957.

  Adoption was slow at first. The first color broadcast, the first episode of the live program The Marriage, occurred on the 8th of July 1954, yet for the following ten years most network broadcasts stayed black-and-white. The shift came with the color transition of 1965, when it was announced that over half of network prime-time programming would be in color that fall. The first all-color prime-time season arrived a year later, and in 1972 sales of color sets finally surpassed sales of black-and-white sets.

• 7. Going Digital

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  Digital television transmits audio and video by digitally processed and multiplexed signals, and through data compression it can support more than one program on the same channel bandwidth. The obstacle for years was sheer data volume. Uncompressed digital video needed around 200 Mbit/s for a standard-definition signal and over 1 Gbit/s for high-definition, so digital television was not practically possible until the adoption of DCT video compression in the early 1990s.

  A single demonstration redirected the entire effort. Until June 1990, the Japanese MUSE standard, an analog system, was the front-runner among more than 23 technical concepts under consideration. Then the U.S. company General Instrument demonstrated the possibility of a digital television signal. The FCC was persuaded to delay its decision until a digitally-based standard could be developed.

  The regulators then set demanding terms. In March 1990, the FCC declared the new advanced television standard must provide a genuine HDTV signal with at least twice the resolution of existing images. To protect viewers who did not want to buy a new set, it required that the new standard be capable of being simulcast on different channels.

  A fight over scanning shaped the final rules. The consumer electronics industry and broadcasters favored interlaced scanning, which scans even-numbered lines first, then odd-numbered ones, and which they argued was the only way to transmit the highest quality pictures of 1,080 lines and 1,920 pixels per line. The computer industry, joined by the film industry, favored progressive scanning, which paints every line in sequence and does not flicker on newer displays. William F. Schreiber, director of the Advanced Television Research Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1983 until 1990, thought the defense of interlaced equipment came from companies trying to recover their investments in it. The final standards did not require a single scanning format, leaving the dispute unresolved in the rules themselves.

• 8. Wires, Dishes, And Streams

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  Cable television traces its origins to 1948, when over-the-air reception in some areas was limited by distance from transmitters or by mountainous terrain. Large community antennas were constructed, and cable was run from them to individual homes, which is why the abbreviation CATV originally stood for Community Antenna Television. With cable's widespread adoption across the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, terrestrial broadcasts declined, and in 2013 only about 7% of U.S. households used an antenna.

  Satellite delivery began as science fiction before it became infrastructure. In 1945, British writer Arthur C. Clarke proposed a worldwide communications system using three satellites equally spaced in Earth orbit, published in the October 1945 issue of Wireless World, which later won him the Franklin Institute's Stuart Ballantine Medal in 1963. The first satellite television signals from Europe to North America were relayed via the Telstar satellite over the Atlantic on the 23rd of July 1962, watched by over 100 million people. The world's first commercial communications satellite, Intelsat I, nicknamed Early Bird, was launched into geosynchronous orbit on the 6th of April 1965.

  The Internet became the newest carrier. Internet television is the digital distribution of television content via the Internet, as opposed to terrestrial, cable, and satellite systems. In 2013, the video-on-demand service Netflix earned the first Primetime Emmy Award nominations for original streaming television at the 65th Primetime Emmy Awards, with House of Cards, Arrested Development, and Hemlock Grove all earning nominations. By 2018, Netflix was described as the world's largest streaming TV network with 117 million paid subscribers. As of 2017-28% of U.S. adults cited streaming services as their main means of watching television, rising to 61% among those ages 18 to 29.