television

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The Television

The topic for discussion today is the television.

Philo Farnsworth, a small farm boy from Utah, helped make one of the key components for the television. When Philo as fourteen, he had the idea to turn pictures into lines. Those lines would be turned into radio signals that could be sent from one place to another and be put back together in the form of a picture. He put his idea to the test in 1927. That’s when he invented the vacuum tube, which could turn a picture into a radio signal. Philo sent the first television picture with it. Vladimir Zworikin, an electrical engineer from Russia, came to the US in 1919. In 1923, he tried to patent his Iconoscope, but failed in the process. He struggled to make the invention work. Finally, in the mid 1930’s, he was able to send a picture. He received his patent in 1938. While working on his Iconoscope, Zworikin invented the Kinescope. It converted radio signals back into pictures. However, Philo Farnsworth received most of the credit for the invention of the Iconoscope/Vacuum Tube. Each time someone wanted to make a TV, Philo was paid due to the fact that he owned the patent to these important television components. Many people saw TV’s for the first time at the New York World’s Fair in 1939. The first TV’s sold for approximately $200-$600. By the early 1940’s, people could buy black and white TV’s, which was around the same time that the first television stations were formed. In 1941, NBC, the National Broadcasting Company, began broadcasting the opening day the first World’s Fair. In the same year, NBC became the first network to show a baseball game on TV. Color televisions went on the market in 1953, and wireless remotes were up for grabs in 1956.

Works Cited Nobleman, Marc Tyler. __The Television (Fact Finders)__. New YOrk: Fact Finders, 2004.