Music In Time: The Television

The television has become almost a standard piece of furniture in living rooms around the world, but not even 100 years ago most people didn’t know what a television was.

In the early 20th century there were some very early forms of televisions. There had been numerous patents submitted with different variations at the turn of the century, but mostly the mechanics involved a machine manually scanning images and projecting them onto a screen. The standard resolution was about 18 lines of resolution, and one patent called it an “electric telescope.”

Then in the 1920s the first Electronic Television was invented. It was invented by a 21-year-old by the name of Philo Taylor Farnsworth. He had grown up in a house that didn’t have electricity until he was 14 years old!

During high school he began to think about a system that could capture a moving image and stream it onto a screen. He based his principles on the mechanics of a camera (with an image dissector), and in 1927 he successfully demonstrated his product. His television is now considered to be the first electronic television demonstration. A couple of years later, he had improved the hardware so that no mechanic parts were involved anymore, and he transmitted the first live human images, including a photo of his wife. Electronic televisions soon replaced all mechanical televisions by the mid-1930s.

In the 30s, televisions were still extremely expensive with the cheapest 12-inch television starting at $445 (approx. $8000 today.) WWII significantly halted the manufacturing and production of television sets, however after the war, sales skyrocketed. In 1946, 0.5% of homes in the USA had a television and by 1962 90% of homes did. Similarly, in the UK there were 15,000 televisions in households in 1947 compared to 15.1 million televisions in homes by 1968.